UIT preparations promote successful start of spring 2017

Welcome back, students and faculty! UIT has been hard at work to ensure a smooth start to the spring 2017 semester.

Jason Moeller, associate director of engineering for University Support Services, attributes much of the success to the start of school planning committee UIT has assembled every semester for the past few years.

“We bring in key players from each area to help manage some of the risk and plan appropriately,” said Moeller. “Getting the right people from the right areas to manage these things helps us get a handle on the inherent risks and get out in front of things early. It also gives us an opportunity to communicate better.”

In an effort to closely monitor performance of the network on campus, UIT staff personally visited select campus locations (e.g. Heritage Center, Lassonde Studios, the Campus Store) on Monday (1/9) and Tuesday (1/10) to test service performance in those areas.

A 24/7 open phone bridge was also available for key UIT staff members to collaborate quickly to resolve issues, but thanks to how smoothly the first week went, this service was rarely needed.

“I do think it’s a good idea to have, to keep people in the loop and be able to react more quickly to situations that arise,” said Moeller.

Lastly, a vacation moratorium was put in place for key technical staff, and those staff members were required to be on-site the first day of the semester (in the event of any unanticipated issues).

Thankfully, there were no major issues the first week of school.

“There was some pretty detailed planning that went on, even to the extent of anticipating potential weather impacts on staff availability,” said Moeller.

Moeller had a long list of groups to thank for ensuring such a smooth start to the new semester: University Support Services, Network and Communications Infrastructure (formerly Unified Communications and Common Infrastructure Services), the Identity and Access Management team, Software and Hardware Platform Services, UIT Strategic Communication, the UIT Help Desk, and Teaching & Learning Technologies.

Thanks to the hard work and dedication of the groups listed above, the first week of Spring 2017 sailed by with flying colors.

“There’s a lot of investment in getting ready for these start-of-school semesters,” said Moeller. “You can see we’ve had some pretty good success over the last couple of years.”

 

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