Kudos & Congratulations - University Information Technology

Congratulations to Wim Cardoen from the Center for High Performance Computing! His name was drawn from the last Node 4 kudos and he won a Red Butte Garden VIP pass.

UIT staff recognized for their excellent work

Thanks to Dan Thornley for stepping into the project management role for both the PeopleSoft Split and the Exadata hardware upgrade. Both CIS and USS teams worked so hard on this. Special thanks to the staff who worked through the night — Shay Frank, Beth Farmer, Jeramy Berry, Camille Wintch, Rob Birkenshaw, Matt Latham, Dusty Argyle, Thanh Nguyen, Rhay Natividad. And finally, to Jason Moeller who helped in so many ways - especially working so hard to get students registered on Orientation Day.

Thanks to Suzanne Wayment, Pat Burton, and the USS team - Cindy Devine, Brad Grow, Allan Hill, Camille Wintch, Marc Thompson, Rosalia Villegas, and Kelsey Loizos - for their efforts adding new functionality to CIS that allows students, faculty, and staff to enroll in the Campus Alert text/SMS program. We also want to thank Stuart Moffatt from Environmental Health and Safety for his help as a sponsor of the project.

Val Olds really stepped up to get the FAR transition moving along successfully. Special thanks to his team for getting the FAR 2015 enhancements in before the transition -- and on schedule! — Reza Sarijlou, Jon Morris, Paul Richardson and Ben Thurlow.

~ Debbie Rakhsha, University Support Services

Thanks to a ton of work in GIS under Ken Pink with us in our hosting area, we were able to collaborate with University Marketing & Communications to host map.utah.edu as an internally provided service. This is a great example of cross-campus collaboration to solve a long-time problem. Special thanks to Thanh Nguyen, David Hoisve, Dave Rasmussen, Robert Yeo, Florian Stellet, and Levi Conner for dropping everything to get it up and running by the due date.

~ Mike Ekstrom & LaRon Taggart, Common Infrastructure Services

Infoblox go-live is an invisible win to our customers but represents the final step in a long project. It provides a much more robust network address management platform across campus, and provides the groundwork for protected internal DNS management vs. external. From a security perspective, this is big. Special thanks to Florian Stellet, Levi Conner, Alex Miller, and the Network Team for making this project a success.

~ Mike Ekstrom & Trevor Long, Common Infrastructure Services

Thank you to everyone who pulled the new Student Life Center building together for the successful opening day.

Thanks to many of the CIS groups in UIT and some specific individuals, Student Life Center’s opening day was successful. There were some bumps along the way, but the building opened and was being inundated with students wanting to utilize the new facilities.

The cable team came through to pull extra cable into some very creative spaces. Nick Pringle and Dennis Johnson were extremely helpful in making sure we got new data jacks in areas which had not been identified as part of the initial installs. They had to come back several times to do more wire pulls as more areas were identified during computer installations.

Networking worked for many days getting vlans, installing switches, and configuring ports. Matthew Klekas made sure the correct ports were not only patched in, but were on the proper networks for each area. He worked with UCCS (UIT Campus Computer Support), the cable team, and other entities in the building for making sure networking was configured and working properly.

UCCS worked with networking, Campus Recreation, Food Services, third party vendors, USS, and others to get all the computers in place and functional for the grand opening. Matt Munro and Beth Sallay spent days getting machines transported, installed, configured and tested.

Dave Parkin from USS was onsite to make sure the program, written by a third party and combined with PeopleSoft data, was functioning properly and was connected with turnstiles to allow students and members into the facility.

Dave Hoisve came to the rescue when a VM for the Campus Recreation website became overloaded. He was able to diagnose the issue, allocate more resources for the VMs and get the functionality back up on opening day.

The Campus Recreation Administration were a pleasure to work with and for. They were very open to suggestions and creative solutions. They also assisted in process of testing, identifying needs, and allowing time and space for all our UIT departments to get our work completed without hampering our efforts.

~ Stacey Wood, Campus Computer Support

Both the recent UIT All Hands meeting and the UIT Holiday Party & movie screening at the Post Theater were the culmination of several weeks of careful planning, budgeting, communication, and friendly collaboration. With Strategic Communication’s Emily Rushton leading the event planning, assisted by Scott Sherman, both events went smoothly and were enjoyed by those who attended. Congratulations and thanks to them both.

~ Cassandra Van Buren, Office of the CIO

Want to nominate someone?

Anyone can submit an item for Kudos & Congrats. Email praise for your UIT colleagues to emily.rushton@utah.edu. The people you recognize will be put into a drawing to win gift cards, event tickets, merchandise and more. Those who submit entries will also be put in a separate drawing for more prizes. (Directors and associate/assistant directors not eligible for prizes.) A special thank you to some exceptional campus organizations that donated tickets, merchandise, and gift cards to help recognize UIT employees: Athletics, Auxiliary Services, Dining Services, Kingsbury Hall, Pioneer Theatre Company, Red Butte Garden, UIT Leadership, and Utah Museum of Fine Art.