Vice President for Information Technology Status and Activity Report for December 2022 Prepared by Timothy M. Chester, Vice President for Information Technology (VPIT) 1. Key Items for Faculty and Staff Meetings •
State of Technology address highlights progress on strategic goals: Progress is being made on the University of Georgia’s IT strategic goals, and there are even bigger IT initiatives on the horizon to grow the university’s research enterprise, improve tools for teaching and learning, and introduce new technologies to improve business processes, Timothy M. Chester said during his annual State of Technology address on November 16. Chester spoke about the progress his team has made on some of the key IT strategic goals, including improvements in classroom technology to support teaching and learning, investments in the university’s research enterprise and support for enrollment management efforts to predict student success. Chester also spoke about the perception of IT services by students, faculty and staff at UGA. According to the annual TechQual survey, satisfaction with campus IT services has continued to increase since 2020, when university students, faculty and staff were forced to pivot to online and hybrid learning and working environments due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Services that ranked high in satisfaction for students, faculty and staff included Zoom, UGAMail and the EITS Help Desk. For more details on the State of IT, visit https://eits.uga.edu/stories/state_of_it_2022/.
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Bi-annual Network Maintenance Updates: EITS conducts two network maintenances per year, once in the spring and then another in the fall. The work accomplished is critical to ensuring the security and reliability of the UGA network, while also implementing performance enhancements. In our most recent network maintenance on October 23, 2022, the EITS Network Engineering team performed maintenance activities on over 100 critical core network devices. The in-scope hardware provides campus firewalls, network load balancers, campus wireless, VoIP telephone and internet connectivity. The 2023 Network Maintenances are scheduled for March 5 and October 1, 2023. For more information about the bi-annual network maintenances, please contact Rayid Tartir at rayid@uga.edu.
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Duo prompt for Office 365, UGAMail to change in January 2023: To enhance the security of UGA’s information assets, the login process for Microsoft Office 365 applications, including UGAMail, will change for UGA students, faculty and staff, effective January 19, 2023. Duo, the vendor behind UGA’s ArchPass two-step login solution, is updating the look and feel of their universal authentication prompt, and the process for the second step of two-step authentication will change. This change to the Duo prompt will be rolled out to all UGA applications in the coming year, and UGAMail and Office 365 will be the first applications to switch over. After January 19, 2023, when a user logs into UGAMail, the new Duo Universal Prompt will automatically pick the most secure option for authentication. The authentication option chosen will depend on what devices the user has enrolled in Duo. Users can stop the automatic selection, and pick a new default option for future authentication prompts the first time they log into UGAMail after January 19. In addition, the option to remember your Duo credentials for 30 days will change. Instead of “Remember Me,” users will see “Trust this browser?” Select Yes, trust browser to remember your Duo credentials. This change to the Duo prompt will not affect any students, faculty or staff using the Outlook desktop or Outlook mobile applications, and it will not affect any users accessing UGAMail while on the campus network. Two-step
VPIT Status and Activity Report for December 2022
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