Kudos & Congratulations

Congratulations to Cody Exon (UIT Help Desk) for winning the March 2017 prize drawing!

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UIT staff recognized for their excellent work

I want to thank Syndi Haywood and Vijay Kammili for their tremendous help with a research project. They made it possible for us to gather important data for research underway at the College of Nursing. Vijay’s help made the tasks of this project 100 times easier. Thank you so very much for your time and effort!

~ Shelley Gabriel, research program manager, College of Nursing

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At the March 21 Strategic IT Committee meeting, USS’s Marv Hawkins presented on two topics – the CIS portal redesign and the PeopleSoft Financial system upgrade. Marv’s presentations were engaging, inspiring, and well-organized, and he is clearly passionate about the work he and his group are doing. With someone like Marv representing USS and UIT to the broader campus community, I feel confident that we’re on the right path in serving the U’s students, faculty, and staff.

~ Lisa Kuhn, UIT Chief Financial Officer

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Thank you to Thanh Nguyen for always being so dependable and addressing issues at any time of day. One of the many examples is his recent work on addressing a Kronos clock issue in the early morning hours. Not only did he work on the issue on short notice, he just recently took over as one of the system admins for this system. In addition, he has been assigned the lead for the Web Hosting Services team. Thanh took these over without any hesitation. He is truly an ASSET to this organization.

Thank you to Matt Leatham for doing the last walk through of our team's Komas area. He not only showed up in the early morning hours to perform a walk through but also removed remaining items for our area. Matt is one of those employees you know you can always count on. THANK YOU!!!!

~ Kim Tanner, Software Platform Services

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I want to take a quick minute and acknowledge Nate Eldredge (Network and Communications Infrastructure). During the last two or three projects that he's been involved with as the "network engineer-in-charge," things have gone really well from the network side of the project. He provides well thought out solutions, has been very engaged in his role with each project, and is doing an awesome job. A huge thanks!

~ Don Landies, Information Technology Services

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The upgrade to 40Gig fiber links between the Downtown Data Center and campus/hospital were completed Saturday night (4/1). Through good planning, orchestration, execution, and testing, the upgrade went just as intended. All links were thoroughly tested for failover as the upgrade was completed. Thanks to Tim Urban and Chris Livingston for their exceptional efforts in planning and executing the upgrade Saturday night. They were aided in the upgrade by Christian Johnson, Tyler Sauer and Florian Stellet.

~ Ray Carsey, Network and Communications Infrastructure

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Dennis Werthman is new to campus and comes to us with strong experience in IT security. He has already taken on the task of getting the campus Qualys scan reports addressed in a more effective fashion, he was instrumental in developing a media sanitation procedure and led the effort in disk wiping (DOD short) ~500 hard drives for repurposing used equipment, along with many other security focused tasks. Dennis is a wonderful addition to CHPC and the campus community and we couldn’t be happier with our new hire.

We were also able to hire Luan Truong from Elliot Fenech’s student program where he worked in the Information Security Office (ISO). Luan has already made significant progress developing an ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana), a software stack for monitoring and reporting which he recently showed to staff. This platform will be able to extend, improve, and visualize our logs and other data, delivering actionable insights in real time from almost any type of structured and unstructured data source. Luan is also learning to deploy VMs and we feel so lucky to have snatched him up from Elliot before anyone else did!

~ Julia Harrison, Center for High Performance Computing

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Kudos to:

Tom Howa and his team for completing with HR the URS (Utah Retirement System) dashboards.

Jill Brinton and the entire PMO team for completing the Prosci change management training and certification.

Cassandra Van Buren for completing the Prosci change management training.

Marv Hawkins for the great job he did presenting the new student portal to governance.

~ Ken Pink, Deputy CIO

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Kudos to Jayci Minjares for her work to fast-track the critical ACC project.

~ Jill Brinton, Project Management Office

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Dominic Mathison has been a great employee to have at the NOC! Dominic is one of our student employees and has proven to be a lifesaver with many of the tasks that we have here at the NOC. In the past month alone, Dominic has received 2 customer satisfaction surveys for the work that he has done. It really is something when one of our customers takes the time to fill out a survey with nice words about how a ticket was performed. Excellent work to Dom! I am happy to have you around and thankful for your hard work!

~ Tyler Sauer, Network and Commnunications Infrastructure

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I'd like to personally thank Marc Thompson and Ben Kulbertis for working into the evening earlier this month to help a customer resolve a problem. The customer was receiving an error when attempting to create a new storefront in UMarket; however there was an issue with the application that was preventing the customer from doing so. Instead of waiting until the next day to try and figure out what was happening, both Marc and Ben worked into the evening hours until they discovered what the problem was. They both went above and beyond to work on a resolution. I haven't had the opportunity to work with Ben much, as he's fairly new, but what I can say about Ben is that he's very dedicated to his job and to the customers he serves. Working outside of normal working hours is not unusual for Marc; more often than not he will work beyond 5:00 p.m. or very early in the morning to resolve a problem or work on a new and more efficient way of accomplishing a task or process.

~ Jan Lovett, University Support Services

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We would like to recognize and give a big thank you to Dave Adams for all of his hard work in support of the Account Executives. He has worked tirelessly to streamline processes critical to our daily duties, improve interagency communication, and define the AE role in UIT projects. We greatly appreciate the effort he has made to continuously improve our daily work lives as well as his positive encouragement and many accolades that we receive from him weekly.

~ Amy Talbot, Lisa Osborne, and Clarke Headlee, Network and Communications Infrastructure

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Senior Developer/Automation Justin Evans works hard to keep things running smoothly in our department and is responsible for lowering our ticket load at the same time as raising the ticket thought-put of our team via self service tools like https://webtools.umail.utah.edu website and others. Justin has opened up a new world of big data to help us answer questions in minutes, vs. the hours/days it use to take with standard shell commands. He is also always keeping an eye on the cloud services our group provides and writes tools to facilitate the hybrid configs we work with to make sure prem/cloud services are as seamless an experience as possible.

~ Dave Packham, Network and Communications Infrastructure

 

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