Multidivisional and Office of the CIO
ImageNow upgraded
In June, Enterprise Applications and Infrastructure & Operations teams successfully completed the upgrade of Perceptive Content, also known as ImageNow. This software is a key component of ITS systems for delivering document management for ConnectCarolina and other enterprise applications. This was an important project to modernize support and improve security. It was a large effort requiring many individuals across ITS. Teams worked on prerequisite projects as well as the major project for more than a year.
Remedy decommissioning advances
In May, ITS transitioned Ram Shop Invoice/Administration in Remedy to ServiceNow, thanks to David Eckert and the ServiceNow team, as part of continuing effort toward decommissioning Remedy. Having fewer platforms to run means less time, money and energy spent on running and maintaining multiple platforms. This will enable the Service management team members to focus on providing better value to their customers within ServiceNow, while also being better steward of the money and time spent on IT resources at the University.
ITS’ers tagged for Employee Forum
ITS now has four delegates on the Employee Forum: David Bragg, Sharron Bouquin, Michael Williams and Theresa Silsby. Bragg and Bouquin were elected as new delegates for two-year terms. Williams was picked to serve another year. Silsby, meanwhile, wasn’t on the spring ballot — she still has another year on her term. The four delegates from ITS ranks among the most from that department in roughly 25 years.
User Support & Engagement
Service Desk enables chatbot
In April, the ITS Service Desk launched Virtual Agent chatbot with four conversations — the bot scripts that help customers solve an issue. The conversations are for the most common issues: setting up or troubleshooting VPN and eduroam, Microsoft Office installation and password reset instructions. Since then, the Service Desk has seen a 58% reduction in chats that make their way to a live agent. That has given the Service Desk breathing room to alleviate some of the increased demand for customer support during the pandemic. The Service Desk has experienced a 160% increase in chat contacts over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic at the same time it has been operating with fewer staff members. By implementing Virtual Agent, the Service Desk has been able to provide the level of service that customers expect without adding a bunch of staff. In fact, the Service Desk has brought itself back to pre-pandemic — and manageable — levels of live-person chats by using Virtual Agent to support some of the most routine issues.
Conference draws 300
A June 10 virtual conference that the Digital Accessibility Office organized with Wake Forest University and Davidson-Davie Community College drew 304 attendees, with an average of 195 people per session. The inaugural Getting Started with Digital Accessibility Conference was deemed a success based on attendance, event offerings and attendees’ level of interest and insights. Planning committee members saw a real progression in the information shared by speakers and the types of questions attendees asked. Attendees took the information to heart and worked to understand how to apply it into their daily work.
People
Matthew Mauzy participated in an EDUCAUSE 2021 CG Virtual ITSM Community Day “May ITIL 4 be with you” panel discussion on Planning and Communicating IT Changes and Outages.
Information Security & Identity Management
Virtual event draws 100 attendees
The Information Security Office’s half-day virtual event on March 26 drew about 100 campus members. Data@Rest: Bits n’ Bytes featured a variety of speakers from Carolina’s IT community in a TED Talk style format. Charlie Mewshaw and Michael Williams organized the event.
Simulated phishing campaign conducted
The Information Security Office conducted a simulated phishing campaign targeting campus IT professionals. The ISO wanted to determine if phishing awareness messaging is working, how much more education is needed to keep everyone safe, and if people understand the process for reporting phish. If campus units want a simulated phishing campaign conducted with their end users, the Security Office will provide the service at no cost.
LastPass Enterprise pilot launches
The Information Security Office and a few other groups began piloting LastPass Enterprise in advance of the ISO rolling out LastPass Enterprise for free to University departments for business use.
Infrastructure & Operations
Team migrates CloudApps
The Carolina CloudApps team updated its underlying software, Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform, from version 3 to version 4 in April. The team migrated 1,613 projects with minimal downtime and minimal issues. Numerous high visibility and mission critical applications reside on the Carolina CloudApps platform. The migration was completed via automated processing over four days with only a single mission critical application being down more than two hours.
Patching automated for two key University platforms
For the first time, ITS automated vendor quarterly patching for two of the platforms that run core critical business applications for the University. This significant achievement expedites performing security updates and fixes and saves considerable staff time. In May and June, Infrastructure & Operations fully rolled out this automated patching for the Oracle databases and PeopleSoft WebLogic middleware servers. Oracle databases and middleware are the foundational platforms for running the core critical business applications that support the University’s administrative processes such as student registration, finance and human resources processes, and academic initiatives such as Research Computing and NC TraCS.
Skype for Business decommissioned
To enable a more predictable, orderly transition, ITS decommissioned Skype for Business in May in advance of Microsoft’s own retiring of the platform in July. Microsoft replaced it with Microsoft Teams.
Communication Technologies
Phone migration project advances
During the quarter, the Voice Services team, with help from ITS Project Manager Brenda Carpen, worked on multiple fronts to advance the New and Enhanced Phone Services project. The move to AT&T hosted-cloud service from Verizon Business will take two to three years. Carolina uses an existing legacy system that Verizon is eliminating. In May, the team began moving phone lines, by building, in batches of a few thousand. Meanwhile, Voice Services continued working with the vendors and customers who are preparing to migrate and produced tutorials and communication templates.
Complying with a complex federal requirement
In April, Communication Technologies’ Project Manager Danny Nguyen chronicled the work he and ITS conducted from September through the end of 2020 as part of a campus-wide effort to comply with a new federal government requirement — the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2019. The government had provided little guidance, the deadline had already come and gone, and the University was busy grappling with the global pandemic. In an article for ITS News, Nguyen walked readers through the complex project that succeeded through collaboration among many contributors.
Research Computing
Sharing Longleaf as a good neighbor
Research Computing’s supercomputer Longleaf is now benefiting outside researchers in addition to those at UNC-Chapel Hill. Two UNC-Greensboro researchers with high computational needs are availing themselves of this powerful platform that is not common outside of a flagship university like Carolina. Research Computing wants to be a good neighbor to sister universities within the UNC System, as computing capacity allows. The UNCG researchers are Louis-Marie Jean Fabrice Bobay, who has been using Longleaf for two years to study the evolution of microbial genomes and populations, and Prashanti Manda, who began using Longleaf in May for her research conducting natural language processing on scientific literature at scale. Bobay uses Longleaf and his own dedicated computing space he bought to connect to Longleaf, called a patron node. Patron nodes have gained in popularity among researchers with grant money. Last year, researchers from several UNC-Chapel Hill schools and departments purchased patron nodes.
Enterprise Applications
Improved background check process
In May, Enterprise Applications launched a new background check process that is more streamlined and intuitive. It also significantly reduces the administrative burden. Users can request and monitor background checks and review final background check results in ConnectCarolina.
Completed second phase of financial aid improvements
Enterprise Applications finished implementing additional job stream efficiencies as the second of three phases of improvements to the financial aid process.
People
Becky Arnold has become the new Enterprise Applications’ liaison to ITS Communications.
Educational Technologies
EdTech migrates Warpwire content
Educational Technologies rolled out Panopto to faculty, staff and students last year as a centrally supported video storage and management system. At that time and with reminders since then, EdTech informed campus that Panopto would replace the old Warpwire streaming tool by June 30. Over all these months, EdTech team members have been doing much to prepare campus for the migration. They moved several gigs of video content from Warpwire into Panopto. They’ve communicated with content owners to access their videos in the new tool. In addition, the EdTech team has created resources for instructors to replace their course video content.
EdTech helps facilitate event
Staff from Educational Technologies assisted with the CFE Faculty Showcase that was held April 22-23 for UNC instructors and staff with instructional support roles. Suzanne Cadwell of Educational Technologies facilitated the “Instructional Tech Toolkit at Work” session at which instructors shared the tech tools they use to support course learning goals. Thao Nghi Tu and Bob Henshaw served on the planning committee.
Enterprise Reporting & Departmental Systems
Making multiple upgrades
Enterprise Reporting & Departmental Systems actively participated in these system upgrades: SAS and Red Hat, PHP and Apache on InfoPorte, and Tableau.