UIT preplanning avoids start of semester ‘fires’

To compel Philadelphians in 1736 to take fire prevention seriously, Benjamin Franklin popularized the saying, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Today, “putting out fires” is a figurative way to describe what happens when you react to crisis after crisis instead of planning to avoid issues. The problem with “firefighting” in organizations is it can lead to a volatile, disorganized, and counterproductive work environment.

Before each new semester, UIT teams and their IT counterparts across campus and University of Utah Health practice a proactive form of “fire prevention” that involves planning IT changes, maintaining software licenses, and leveraging cloud-based resources.

“Our goal is to make the start of school seamless through risk mitigation,” said Jeff Shuckra, associate director for the UIT Strategic Planning and Process (SPP) team in the Deputy Chief Information Officer (DCIO) organization and this fall’s UIT semester start task force lead. “We assume a student-centric approach with efforts like positioning support staff in dorms to work directly with students as they move in. This fall, we have the largest student body in the university’s history, so that level of support was especially important.”

In terms of IT help desk support, Josh Gross, manager for the Campus Help Desk and Operators team in the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) organization’s Service Management group, said calls to the UIT Help Desk were up slightly on August 19, the first day of classes — 516 compared to 453 in fall 2023. Like the year before, the most common questions concerned Duo two-factor authentication and passwords.

Jason Moeller, director for Engineering in University Support Services (USS), said unique logins to student web applications peaked at 5,720 on the first day, which is typical. Over the past five years, peak logins on the first day of fall semester have fluctuated between 4,000 and 7,000.

Here’s a high-level look at IT initiatives and changes that preceded fall semester.

Unified Communications

Syndi Haywood, associate director for UIT Voice Systems and Business Administration, said her team’s primary focus in 2024 was “completely updating the university’s Avaya infrastructure.” The Avaya core system upgrade improved several systems and components, including:

• Application Enablement Service
• Callback Assist
• Communications Manager
• Control Manager
• Experience Portal
• IP desktop phones
• Media Server
• Proactive Outreach
• Workplace, Workplace for Agent, and J179 (SIP) phones
• Session Manager
• Survey Assist
• System Manager

Additionally, Haywood’s team launched C1Conversations, a new contact center platform designed to improve the user and service agent experience.

Similar to C1Conversations’ hybrid model, in which features and functionalities are supported on-premises and in the cloud, the UMail & Collaboration team led by Manager Roy Schulz will increasingly rely on cloud services to “get mail flow as consistent as possible.”

Schulz said his team will gradually phase in 14 cloud-hosted servers, which will double the university’s current email server capacity with 14 on-premises email servers and 14 in the cloud. Schulz noted that his team also recently completed a cutover from NetScaler load balancers to newer F5 load balancers, widely considered the benchmark for network-based load balancing, and established a new bulk email scheduling requirement.

Other recent Unified Communications initiatives of note:

• Moved all U of U and U of U Health faculty, staff, and students to an enhanced version of Microsoft Teams
• Made Microsoft Copilot, a generative artificial intelligence chat platform approved for university use, available for free to U of U and U of U Health staff, faculty, and students

USS

• Performed a major upgrade to PeopleSoft Student Information System
• Upgraded container platforms for enterprise web applications
• Upgraded the Degree Audit Report System (DARS) with the new Transfer Bridge
• Implemented changes to Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA)
• Integrated multiple new third-party vendor applications (e.g., Campus Store)
• Enhanced the Graduate Tuition Benefit application
  

Identity & Access Management group

• Enabled Duo Security two-factor authentication (2FA) for most personas, including emeriti
• Migrated from Duo Traditional Prompt to Duo Universal Prompt
• Upgraded Microsoft login services to Microsoft Entra ID
• Continued to streamline efforts around endpoint management
• Added a layer of application control to manage and regulate the execution of software applications
• Continued to onboard BeyondTrust’s privileged access management suite
• Implemented an instance of BeyondTrust to manage cloud-specific access
• Deployed Grouper as a new group management tool

Network Services and Project Management Office

• Led a phased project to deploy a network access control cybersecurity solution
• Purchased Viavi Solutions’ Observer platform, a suite of networking performance monitoring and diagnostics software products

UIT Help Desk

• Created and enhanced ServiceNow templates and an internal knowledge base to establish support baselines, provide more consistent response times, and improve knowledge management resources
• Increased departmental outreach by holding stakeholder meetings intended to strengthen communication and coordinate issue response
• Cross-trained student agents to improve Duo 2FA and password support and improve help desk response time related to student login issues
• Reworked help desk agent workflows, schedules, and channel priorities to ensure better coverage of call volumes and business continuity

Digital Learning Technologies

• Migrated its Knowledge Base from Zendesk to ScreenSteps to improve the organization and presentation of help articles

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Standard pre-semester and first week of school efforts in UIT

• Load testing, a process during which demand is placed on an IT system to measure its response under normal and peak load conditions, was performed on core systems including PeopleSoft, Campus Information Services, and the Campus Map
• UIT’s semester start task force met regularly in the months leading up to fall semester
• A monitoring and response team was formed to escalate and resolve any IT incidents
• A dedicated Teams channel was established to quickly resolve any service issues
• Moratoriums on major and minor IT changes(login required) were put in place from August 12-23, 2024
• UIT’s Strategic Communication team emailed start of semester messages to UIT staffand IT staff on campus (login required), with a link to updated “top tech” flyers for instructors and colleges, departments, and other student-supporting organizations

As the semester unfolds, members of the U community who notice IT-related issues are urged to first check UIT’s notification systems to see if it’s a known issue:

• https://uofu.status.io/
• https://status.it.utah.edu/ (access requires a campus IP address or VPN connection)

 

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