Welcome back - Fall 2016

Hello

The people in IS&T would like to welcome everyone to the beginning of the new school year - yes it really has started as we can see from the increase in activity around campus.

Who is New?

IS&T has welcomed some new people over the summer. You may well come in contact with them and see them around. Please say hello and welcome to them when you have a chance.

Beverly Rose

Beverly is the Assistant to the CIO. Beverly had been retired for sometime. Before her temporary retirement, Beverly Directed the Media Center. She is located in Admin 200E.

Bryan Davis

Bryan Davis has joined Client Support & Consulting.  He comes to us with nearly 8 years of IT support experience and COMPTIA certification. You may well talk with Bryan when you call the Help Desk on extn 4440.

Jonathan James

Jonathan has past experience with KATV in Little Rock and Young Avenue Sound in Memphis where he installed analog and digital mixing suites for the Delta Music Institute in Cleveland Mississippi.  His most recent job was with Quality Office Inc serving on the technical repair staff. 

Jonathan welcomes the opportunity to serve you to make your productions and presentations work flawlessly!

Emellia Cline

Emellia is working in the Public Services department, overseeing the Interlibrary Loan services.  Emellia came to us from working at the Crystal Bridges Museum library.

Dr Diana Tepe

Diana has a Doctor of Education in Instructional Design from the University of Memphis. She has taken the role of Lead Instructional Designer. She has worked for a number of years developing and delivering on-ground, online and computer-based instruction courses. She has also taught for five years at the University of Memphis.

Pokemon Go

Yes, it is happening on campus. There are Pokestops and Pokemon Gyms around the campus. No doubt you will see many (students, faculty and staff) walking around with phones out and stopping occasionally to capture a Pokemon or stock up their supplies at Pokestops.

I predicted that this would inspire some to find a way to use the Pokemon concept for an educational use. Here is one such example that I was shown: Pokemon Go and Geography Lessons

Who knows, by the time the Technology Showcase comes around, there may be lures set up at the showcase venues!

Pipeline

The redesigned and rebuilt Pipeline is now LIVE! We have received a lot of helpful feedback. Thank you all who sent feedback. It is appreciated. We are working through that feedback and will address what we can as soon as we can.

A couple of things to note:

• There is a video that highlights some of the features and operation of the new Pipeline - Pipeline Video
• It is very mobile friendly
• There is a Favorites option. This is useful for you to bookmark the options you use most often.
• When you open up a bar eg Academic, Administrative, Personal etc you will see a list of options (they are in alphabetical order). After you click on a menu option you will see a star at the top right of that option. Click on that star at it will be saved as one of your favorites.
• The Favorites can be accessed by clicking on Favorites, right above the menu bars:

Summer Highlights

Summer is always a very busy time for many in IS&T. Here are some of the highlights of what has been happening in IS&T:

• Replaced 760 PCs. This meant setting up new machines, delivering the new machines, retrieving the old machines, cleaning the hard drives and, packing and shipping them back to the leasing company.
• Conducted numerous training programs, including at our campuses in Memphis and Rogers.
• Selected Ritter to provide our phone trunks. These should be up and running by mid-September. Ritter brought a number of benefits with the phone trunks including local and long distance calling. This means after the trunks are installed, we will not need PAC codes and will not be billed for local or long distance calls. HOWEVER, international calls will still require a code and will be billed separately.
• Check out the Libguide to see what is new in the Brackett Library - What's New in the Library
• Public labs and the classrooms have been re-imaged and Windows PCs are now running Windows 10 and Apple PCs running El Capitan
• In addition to normal operations, provided support to: Special Olympics, Home School Graduation, Arkansas Youth Conference, National Youth Conference, Christian Academy Conference, Stampede 1, 2, and 3, Impact, McNair Scholar's Research Presentations, Day of Caring..
• Verizon began the implementation of a Distributed Antenna System on-campus. It is not live as yet, but they are making good progress.
• Kept up with the IT infrastructure side of all the construction projects

Changes to Email

We have been working on making our email safer and more secure. We are introducing these features slowly so not to cause any drastic changes.

The features being implemented will make it much harder for anyone to 'spoof' our harding.edu emails. It will make no difference when we send and receive emails that are directly from or to our harding.edu email address.

However, if someone sends or receives an email from a source other than harding.edu, but makes it look like it is from harding.edu, that mail will come under more scrutiny.

Overall that is a good thing but there maybe some cases where doing this is ok. We have tried to catch those, but if you have emails that you are wanting to send from another source such as a bulk email company, but have it look like it is from harding.edu, please contact John Nunnally (jnunnally@harding.edu) and he can help set you up so your emails will work. Please make sure that there is a legitimate business reason for doing this. The aim of this action is to help keep us more safe and secure in our email system. Thanks.

Sunday Morning Fiber Repair Update

The crew working on repairing the fiber cut have completed doing what is needed to the ends of the fiber in the fiber room. (We ran new fiber rather than have two splices) They will be back Sunday morning to do the splice in a tunnel out the back of the Admin Building.

Once the splice is completed, IS&T will test all the strands of fiber and patch them back into our campus network.

We are still on track to be back up by or before Monday morning.

Fiber splicing is a tedious and time consuming activity.

We also heard that Starbucks cards and the Starbucks app are not working at the moment! Once the fiber is repaired, they will work again! I know that it is serious business when people cannot get their coffee :-)

February 2016 Fiber Cut.

As you have probably heard, some fiber cable was cut on Friday. It was cut by a contractor helping us complete repairs following the fire in the mechanical building behind the Health Sciences buildings late last year. The cut fiber took out internet and VoIP services to the following locations:

• Thornton
• American Studies
• Kendall Dorm
• Searcy Hall
• Sears Hall
• Women's Laundry
• Honors/International House
• Sears/Searcy Mechanical building
• Transportation Office in the house that was previously the Nurse's Office
• ARAMark's Ritter connection - their cable runs from Heritage, through Thornton to Admin and out on our Ritter presence there.
• The Bookstore
• All phones in the various buildings because they had been moved to VoIP.
• All CATV in these buildings since we distribute the signal over fiber to the building machine rooms.
• Some security cameras

That is quite a list!

Of course, people from IS&T and the contractor are working over the weekend to restore services. It is a big job.

It is estimated that the fiber will be repaired on Monday, hopefully by Monday morning.

It would have been possible to move all of these connections to our redundant routes and test to assure the new routes worked. This option may have restored services a bit earlier, but not too much. 

Given this was the first weekend of Spring Break, we decided to push ahead with the repairs and not re-route to the redundant loops. We apologize for the inconvenience. We understand that some students did not get access to Canvas in order to complete some work before going on Spring Break. Thanks to those faculty who accommodated this.

We will let you know when the repair has been completed.

An Olio...

This post is a collection of somewhat unrelated items. However, we think you will discover some useful information.

Millennials Have Come of Age.

Each year at the beginning of the Fall we read the report from Beloit College that tells us the mindset of incoming freshman. You can read that report here: Beloit Mindset List.

Recently someone shared an infographic prepared by Goldman Sachs that contained some interesting information about the group of people we have labelled millennials. Millennials are now hitting their prime spending years! Apart from being a very good infographic, rich in content, it tells us something about our world today.

Check it out here: Millennials Infographic

Worst Passwords for 2015

No doubt some of you have read the recent report that tells us what the most popular passwords used! How do they even know that? (They do tell us the method used to find out this information in the article). The most used password is 123456. Second is the actual word itself, password. Are you amazed that people are still content to protect their valuable information with such weak and predictable passwords?

Have a look at the full article here: World's Worst Passwords for 2015

Digital Disruption

Worlds largest taxi company does not own any cars!

Worlds largest movie house does not own any theaters!

These are two of the interesting things to contemplate from a recent article from IBM. You can read more about it here: Digital Disruption - IBM

Here is a the graphic from the article:

It is also good for us to contemplate how the digital disruption has and will occur in higher education. It will happen! Are we ready?

Google Mail Add-ons

If you want to add more features to your web based Google Mail then have a look at these top 10 add-ons. I use several of these. Find the list here: Top 10 Google Mail Add-ons

BitTorrent is being disabled!

After reading the title, many of you will probably skip reading this! Well that is fine, because if the title is foreign to you, then you will not be concerned about the service being disabled. However, you may still want to read the article to have an idea why. A number of students will miss not have BitTorrent available and you may hear some of their concerns. Knowing the reason why may help inform any conversation you have with these students.

Universities are increasingly becoming targets for criminals who want to steal personally identifiable information. This allows them to access all sorts of things about people such as: SSN, bank information, loan information, vehicle tags and even information about relatives and friends of the person. We take our custodian role of your data very seriously.

Additionally, media outlets and law firms are aggressively pursuing people who are illegally downloading their copyrighted material. We receive 2 or 3 notices a day about Digital Millennial Rights Copyright Act (DMCA) breaches. These notices come with some hefty fines.

Taking this and other factors into account we have decided to disable the BitTorrent service (and other similar services) on Harding's campus. We will do this over the Thanksgiving break.

Why? One of the most prolific channels for illegal downloading and other security concerns is through BitTorrent. We have researched this for some time and have looked into how other universities have dealt with these issues. It seems that we will be joining many other universities who have found no other way to stop these illegal and dangerous activities other than by blocking BitTorrent.

We are aware that BitTorrent can be used for legitimate purposes. However, we have reached a time where the non-legitimate uses far outweigh the legitimate uses.  If you have been using BitTorrent for legitimate uses and it is difficult for you to find alternative ways of getting the material you are after, please contact our Client Support on extension 4440 or itshelp@harding.edu for help with this.

Thank you for your understanding as we do our best to keep Harding IT environment secure and legal.

Be Cyber Savvy

“My account has been hacked!”  

We hear this regularly, but in almost every case that is not an entirely true statement. 

Hacking involves a person using technical methods to find a way around the security of systems and expose data that was supposedly secure.  Yes, such security breaches happen and when they do they make headline news.  But when a single personal account is compromised, “hacking” is usually not the reason.  In almost all cases of individual account compromises, we are simply fooled into giving away our private data or account credentials to a scammer.  It isn’t very high tech.

Protect yourself.  

• Take the time to learn about “Phishing” and “Spear Phishing”.  This is something that anyone using technology should be doing. It is like being a pedestrian and learning how to safely cross the street, we just have to do it. Check out the “Valparaiso University Phishing Awareness” video at YouTube.  It is a VERY good video done by a Google Apps school.
• Avoid randomly clicking on unfamiliar web links that pop up in a search result or in an advertisement. 
• Don’t use a single password for all of your accounts. When you do, one mistake compromises ALL of your accounts!  

New security threats.

• Nearly all of us are carrying a smart phone now which is, in essence, a small computer.  And like all computers these phones can be infected with malware.  We need to be using the same security techniques with our phones as we do with our computers:  
• keep the software on your phone updated 
• install software to help protect from malware.  There are some decent options out there for free.  One unfortunate employee recently had spam spewing from their e-mail account and it appears the source of the problem was malware on their Apple iPhone.
•  As we all become more inclined to use the internet for shopping we have to remember to never use our Harding passwords for our other online accounts (Amazon, WalMart, etc.)  We know it's a bother to keep up with more than one password but please reserve your Harding password strictly for Harding use. Consider using tools like LastPass to manage your passwords.

Please ensure that your Harding password is different from other passwords you may use for your personal accounts.

What's new in office computing?

New update service

We are slowly implementing a new service that installs updates to a wide array of software on Windows computers.  Languard is scheduled to work overnight, as are most anti-virus scans, so you will want to leave you computer on overnight to avoid the having these things run during the day while you are trying to work.  We plan to evaluate the Apple version of the same product soon.

Secure Off Campus Connections

Harding now has a solution which will help protect your data when you must use your Harding laptop from an off-campus network.  Fortinet creates a secure connection to the campus network which not only protects any sensitive data you might need to access, but also gives you access to your M: drive and other departmental storage. Over the next few months we plan to install it on all Harding laptops.

New software

New software from Microsoft and Apple is being tested to make sure it works will with our campus tools.  Soon we will be looking for volunteers to help us test Windows 10, Mac OS 10.11 (El Capitan), and Office 2016 for Macs.  Once these are determined to be safe we will begin offering upgrades and training for those who would like to upgrade.  FYI Office 2016 is now available for iOS devices and it's free!

The material for this entry was written by Jim Baird and John Nunnally. Thank you Jim and John.

Are we ready? Are we ever...

Hello

It has been a year since we started this blog. We started it with a run down of what IS&T had been up to over the summer. So, this year we are going to do the same thing. Here are some of what has happened in IS&T over the summer.

Brackett Library

Brackett Library made some exciting changes over the summer.  First, the English Department's Writing Center has moved to the library and is located on the first floor.  More information about services offered and scheduling appointments can  be found on the Writing Center's website.

There is also a vending machine now located in the library on the first floor by the stairway. The Harding University Bookstore will be maintaining and stocking the items which includes note cards, flash drives, and highlighters. Students can purchase items with a simple swipe of a credit card.

Faculty and students will also notice several new resources this year.  If you have been wanting to learn a new language or just get a refresher course, Pronunicator is a language database that offers programs in over 80 languages. Other new resources include the Rehabilitation Reference Center, the Nursing Reference Center, SciFinder and several new eBooks. 

You can go to the library's "What's New" page for details and information about the other changes such as Brackett Library opening  at an earlier time on Sunday afternoons and the new rolling white boards.  

Network Services

Our internet bandwidth has doubled! Yes doubled. Right now our internet speeds are pretty good. Check out these results from Speedtest.net:

Now this result will change once the students arrive of course, Never-the-less, we believe we are in good shape with our internet bandwidth - for at least 6 months!

As it easily seen there has been/is quite a bit of construction happening around campus. This means there is network cable and equipment, wireless access points, phone and so forth that has to be installed, tested and commissioned. Our crew has completed work in; Legacy phase III, 2nd floor student center remodel, Ezell building remodel and even planned for wireless coverage for the First Ladies Garden.

This week, a new VoIP phone system was installed at the Harding School of Theology in Memphis.

Center for Learning with Technology

We recorded and produced video tutorials for our Quality Matters (QM) workshops. 

We have finalized our faculty training schedule for the year and are excited about our offerings of hands-on sessions for QM training. We are building a large portion of our training around effective course design and QM aligned syllabus. A new addition will be training teachers in creating an interactive, digitized syllabus. 

We designed course content for EDT 620 (QM aligned), a graduate course in the College of Education. 

We reviewed courses from the Nursing and the College of Education departments. 

We presented at the Teaching with Technology Symposium at UAMS. Presentation Topics:  Give Me a Voice, Allow Me to Create and Invite Me to Learn (VoiceThread and ShadowPuppet) and Enhance Your Learning with Web 2.0 Tools 

Set up spaces in the wiki (Kenobi) for a Policy Portal and Academic Planning and Program Review.  Centralizing information for both are in answer to accreditation needs but also good things for the university to do.

Applications Development & Enhancement

With the Harding website mostly behind us now, we have moved onto the major redesign of  Pipeline. We will follow a similar process to the website redesign, but we will do the work in house this time. Over the summer preliminary investigations have been going on. We will be making Pipeline mobile friendly and completely reorganizing it. It has grown a lot during its life. It currently has a lot of content that can be difficult to find.

We have met and talked with some people around campus already, people such as Dan Stockstill and Frank McCowen about Faculty views on what's working and what's not in the current Pipeline. We have talked with the Provost office about Faculty info and how to separate it into meaningful groups. We are planning similar meetings with Staff about the Administrative side of Pipeline.

Additionally we are assembling another group to guide, evaluate and provide relevant input to our efforts for the redesign of Pipeline. That group will start meeting very soon.

If all goes as planned we should see a redesigned Pipeline during the first quarter of 2016.

We are also transitioning the Harding Academy website over the new design. It will be branded as Harding Academy, but have a similar look and feel to the University website. Here is a peek at the Academy home page:

There is still some work to do with this site, but it is well underway.

Client Support

Replaced

 - 435 Windows desktops
 - 100 Windows laptops
 - 100 Macs
Trips to install in Memphis, Rogers, and NLR
Multiple classes each week for those upgrading, including taking the lab to Memphis to train there.
Survived:
 - 3 people taking honeymoons (no dedication)
 - 1 broken leg (some people will do anything to get out of work)
 - 1 resignation (already married and not enough guts to break his leg)
Erased and returned 500 computers to leasing company
Erased and liquidated 80 computers

Business Intelligence

A major update and move of work to new version of Dashboards. They are more modern, but need a lot of work to convert.

Engaged a consultant from Birst to carry out a 'health checkup' on the work we have done so far. We don't want to walk far down the wrong track so had this checkup performed. We are quite healthy it seems!

Also, preparing dashboards to show our enrollment numbers. This is crucial at anytime, but especially this time of the year.

Student Communications

Quite a bit of work getting ready for the Fall and preparing ways to provide training in the use of the phones and voicemail. Look forward to having some videos available to help us all use our phone system effectively.

Dormnet is a large part of the this departments responsibilities. There are 17 Dormnet assistants. They will be here next week to participate in a full week of training and be ready to deal with the students that start arriving on Thursday (well quite a few will be here before that). Specifically the Dormnet Online Training (DOT) has been developed and implemented. This means that the Dormnet training can start during the summer.

Systems and Database Admin

Installed a new Storage Area Network (SAN) Disk Storage Array which now contains all of Harding's critical data, including the Banner database.  This SAN Array is made up of mostly conventional (spinning) disk drives, but 5 Terabytes of its 50 Terabyte total capacity is comprised of extremely fast Solid State Drives (SSDs).

Construction was completed on a new Disaster Recovery Data Center (DRDC) at Harding's Professional Center in Rogers, Arkansas.  Computer equipment will be moved into the DRDC this fall that will maintain continuously-updated copies of all of Harding's mission-critical servers and data.  These copies will have the ability to become our live production servers and data within just a few hours if our Searcy Data Center is rendered inoperable for any reason.

Conducted a complete shutdown and startup of the Searcy Data Center so some major maintenance could be performed on our main Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS).  The UPS maintenance required the power to be completely disconnected from the Data Center for about 6 hours.  This was a great test of our ability to properly shut down and start up all of the software and hardware in the Data Center in the correct order so that everything would work when it came back up.  This involved many of our experts within IS&T, and the process was accomplished brilliantly!

Classroom Technology

All classroom and lab computers were upgraded to Windows 8.1 (still have a few left to do).  This is a big change but should make for a smoother transition to Windows 10 when the time comes.

The computer lab in the Ezell building has moved to room 209 and has expanded to 41 computers.  This is now the second largest computer lab on campus next to Mabee 108.