Vice President for Information Technology Status and Activity Report for November 2023 Prepared by Timothy M. Chester, Vice President for Information Technology (VPIT) 1. Key Items for Faculty and Staff Meetings •
State of Technology to be held November 15: Dr. Timothy M. Chester’s annual State of Technology at UGA address will be held on Wednesday, November 15 at 1:30 p.m. This year, the event will be hybrid. It will be held in-person in the Memorial Hall Ballroom and will also be held virtually via a Zoom webinar. Participants can register to join the Zoom webinar at 2023 State of Information Technology Registration. For more information, reach out to Allyssa Robinson, allyssa.robinson@uga.edu or Stacy Boyles, stacy.boyles@uga.edu.
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Microsoft Office 365 Upgrade Scheduled for December 1-3: Starting at 7 p.m. on December 1, 2023, EITS personnel will migrate active student and employee Microsoft Office 365 licenses from their current licensing level, known as A3, to an upgraded version, known as A5. Work is scheduled to conclude by 10 p.m. on December 3, 2023. Moving to this new license level will provide more collaboration tools to students and employees, such as Power BI Pro. This upgrade will also allow EITS to eventually migrate UGA’s existing telephone system to Teams Phone, which will serve as the next generation telephone system for UGA. More information about the Teams Phone transition will be shared in early 2024. For more information about this upgrade, please contact Justin Sackett at justin.sackett@uga.edu.
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New policy for deleted emails in UGAMail: Effective February 1, 2024 a new 30-day deletion policy will go into effect for emails placed in your Deleted Items folder in UGAMail. Items put in this folder will be automatically deleted after 30 days, and then will be held in a Recoverable Items folder for 14 days before being permanently deleted. This policy is retroactive, so on February 1, any items in your Deleted items folder that are more than 30 days old will be affected. This new policy is part of EITS’ efforts to be good stewards of the university’s financial resources and control operating costs. Emails in the Deleted Items folder account for about 25 percent of all email storage across the university. Regularly clearing your Deleted Items folder can help you maximize storage for your individual UGAMail account, as well as increase the amount of storage available to everyone at UGA. For more information, contact Justin Sackett at justin.sackett@uga.edu.
2. Services for Students •
EITS working to improve housing wireless: In October, degraded wireless performance was reported in several university residence halls. EITS understands the importance of fast and reliable internet for online course work, research, and leisure activities such as gaming and streaming entertainment. The software that manages the load balancing to distribute users and devices across the residence hall wireless infrastructure failed. EITS personnel worked aggressively with the vendor to resolve the issue and return performance to an acceptable level. Additional hardware was added to offset the software issue, in addition to extensive optimizations as an additional mitigation action. EITS is anticipating a soon-to-be released bug fix that will address wireless access point radio resets. For questions, please contact Ashley Henry at ashenry@uga.edu.
VPIT Status and Activity Report for November 2023
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