Vice President for Information Technology Status and Activity Report for December 2020 Prepared by Timothy M. Chester, Vice President for Information Technology (VPIT) 1. Key Items for Faculty and Staff Meetings •
Spring network maintenance scheduled for March 6: EITS plans to conduct a network maintenance on March 6, 2021. Network maintenances are necessary to continue to support the network, allowing EITS to provide ample bandwidth and Internet capacity to the University in the future. We typically conduct large network maintenances twice a year, during which campus Internet and campus information systems are usually inaccessible. For questions, contact Jeff Farese at jeffrey.farese@uga.edu.
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Zoom Best Practices for virtual special events: In order to help decrease the risk of Zoom bombing, UGA faculty, staff and students are strongly encouraged to set up the following measures for any virtual special events, especially those which include individuals outside the university: o Ensure the Meeting ID is automatically generated, and that the meeting has a password. o Do not publicly post the Meeting ID and password. This includes posting to the UGA Master Calendar, which is public. o Use the waiting room function to control when participants can join the meeting. Beginning November 30, the waiting room function is required for any participants who do not have a UGA MyID. o Designate multiple hosts who will help manage the waiting room and eject participants who disrupt the meeting. o Disable the “join before host” feature and limit screen sharing to the host. o Consider requiring MyID authentication for the meeting, so only those with UGA MyID accounts can attend. Additional details, including a short video on how to set up these measures, are available at zoom.uga.edu.
2. Services for Students •
Fall network maintenance improves network flexibility, resiliency: On October 24, the EITS networking team completed their fall network maintenance. During this maintenance, staff updated device configurations, upgraded device software, improved the data center network architecture, and conducted several test failure scenarios and network performance tests. As a result of this maintenance, UGA network devices are now compliant with our configuration standards, device software is on par with our upgrade schedule and the data center network is more flexible and highly resilient. The improvements made to the data center architecture allow EITS to be flexible with how we direct traffic and more resilient in the event of a disaster scenario. EITS typically conducts network maintenances twice a year. For more information, contact Jeff Farese at jeffrey.farese@uga.edu.
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Spring semester prep, updates to Banner and reporting tools: EITS has worked closely with Student Administrative offices to prepare for the spring semester. Updates include increasing the time between classes from 15 to 20 minutes, and other student system upgrades to accommodate processing of Student Financial Aid and Accounts receivable.
VPIT Status and Activity Report for December 2020
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