Vice President for Information Technology Status and Activity Report for January 2022 Prepared by Timothy M. Chester, Vice President for Information Technology (VPIT) 1. Key Items for Faculty and Staff Meetings •
2021 EITS efforts improve technology services for UGA community: In 2021, EITS continued to support the University’s missions of teaching, learning and research through improvements campus technology systems and processes. The 255 projects completed over the year ranged wide, including improvements to administrative and student systems, continued support for collaborative tools and UGA’s COVID-19 response, an expansion of our research computing resources and major upgrades to the campus network. The focus for many of these projects was streamlining older, outdated processes and finding ways to improve existing services to better serve students, faculty, researchers and staff. Projects scheduled for 2022 will build on this progress. Some of the planned efforts include continued improvements to the UGA Mobile App, continued Banner and Athena enhancements, upgrades to our identity management system and UGA Single Sign-On, data literary programs and initiatives, continued improvements to campus wireless, a ransomware tabletop exercise, a Zoom phone pilot and more.
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Changes coming to Google Workspace storage offerings: Google has announced the unlimited storage we’ve enjoyed in Google Workspace for Education is being discontinued. New storage limits for Google Workspace for Education, formerly known as G Suite for Education, are being imposed for academic customers. These limits will take effect for all UGA students, faculty and staff in March 2022 and will allow EITS to manage costs while continuing to offer Google Workspace services to the university community. Under these limits, students, faculty and staff will have access to 3GB of storage in their UGA Google Workspace accounts. Currently, only about 400 users are over this limit. For those needing more storage, UGA also offers OneDrive for Business, free to all UGA students, faculty and staff. OneDrive includes 5TB of storage. For more questions about these changes, contact Ashley Henry at ashenry@uga.edu.
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Plan for outages during March 5-6 spring network maintenance: EITS will conduct a network maintenance on March 5-6. Unlike previous planned network maintenances where outages were intermittent, this maintenance will result in a complete outage of service access. The network maintenance will result in complete outages of campus Internet access and campus information systems on Saturday, March 5 from 6:00 a.m. until noon on Sunday, March 6. 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. EITS will also conduct the second planned maintenance of the calendar year on October 22, 2022. Additional details regarding the October 22 maintenance will be shared in late spring 2022. For questions, contact Chris Baines at cbaines@uga.edu.
2. Services for Students •
$3 million in Student Technology Fee One-Time Funds awarded to units who advance learning spaces, student digital life: In December, the Student Technology Fee Committee awarded approximately $3 million in one-time STF funding to units across UGA to advance next generation learning spaces and improve student digital life. Advancing virtual and physical learning spaces and improving the availability of personalized digital
VPIT Status and Activity Report for January 2022
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