Vice President for Information Technology Status and Activity Report for January 2023 Prepared by Timothy M. Chester, Vice President for Information Technology (VPIT) 1. Key Items for Faculty and Staff Meetings •
IT accomplishments for 2022, upcoming initiatives for 2023: Through 2022, EITS continued its work to support teaching, learning, research and student life through campus technology. Our staff completed more than 200 projects, including upgrading Banner and DegreeWorks to improve security; purchasing and deploying 107 computing nodes in our high performance computing cluster, serving the research needs of more than 840 students, post-docs and faculty members; introducing push notifications to the UGA Mobile App; improving the employee MyID provisioning process; adding 88 new MacBooks to our Tech Lending program; expanding our wireless coverage in campus outdoor areas, and more. More initiatives to improve technology on campus are planned for 2023, including automating the student MyID clean-up process; rolling out the new Duo Universal prompt; replacing the Lustre storage system in the Georgia Advanced Computing Resource Center; implementing a responsive dashboard in DegreeWorks and more. To learn more about upcoming technology improvements and changes, subscribe to our monthly newsletter, Technology News at UGA here: https://eits.uga.edu/about/tech_news/.
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Prepare for Spring network maintenance: The 2023 spring network maintenance will be held on Sunday, March 5; students, faculty and staff should plan for intermittent outages through the day. 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 1, 2023. Additional details regarding the October 1 maintenance will be shared in late spring 2023. For questions, 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 authentication is only required for students, faculty and staff accessing UGAMail andOffice 365 while off-campus via a web browser or the UGA Mobile App. More information, including screenshots and troubleshooting steps, will be available on the
VPIT Status and Activity Report for January 2023
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