Start of semester recap: IT readiness efforts set the U up for success

With the TRAX Red Line at Rice-Eccles Stadium repaired and broken pavement across the university replaced, a deluge of commuters and students living on campus were mostly detour-free when returning to the University of Utah for fall semester. Similarly, the uptick in people using IT infrastructure didn’t hit any traffic snarls as the first week of classes got underway on August 18, 2025.

“Before every new semester, UIT makes a concerted, coordinated effort to ensure our IT systems are tested and ready,” said Abraham Kololli, director for Core Infrastructure Services, who led UIT’s semester start task force for fall 2025. For months before the new semester, the task force met each week to discuss IT initiatives, challenges, communication, load testing, and incident monitoring and response. “We’re happy to report UIT systems did not experience any significant interruptions.”

Jason Moeller, director for Engineering, said unique logins to PeopleSoft student web applications peaked at 8,640 on the first day of fall semester, which is higher than usual. Peak logins, he said, typically fluctuate between 4,000 and 7,000.

In terms of IT help desk support, Josh Gross, manager for the Campus Help Desk and Operators team, said the UIT Help Desk received 802 contacts via phone and email (not including self-service tickets assigned directly to the UIT Help Desk) on the first day of classes. This number is up from 474 contacts for summer term and 761 contacts for the start of spring semester, and down slightly from 928 contacts at the beginning of fall semester 2024. The three most common semester start questions were about Duo two-factor authentication, passwords, and UMail.

Initiatives highlighted during task force meetings

Syndi Haywood, associate director for Voice Systems and Business Administration, said her team’s primary focus in 2025 has been replacing Centrex phone systems with modern voice over internet protocol (VoIP)-capable alternatives Microsoft Teams (for campus) and Avaya (for hospitals and clinics). A parallel project relates to replacing legacy Microsoft Exchange Server-based voicemail services with Avaya Messaging (login required).

Digital Learning Technologies recently upgraded the SpeedGrader application in Canvas and activated AI Companion for users of the U’s main campus Zoom account. The Information Security Office implemented an enhanced Duo two-factor authentication (2FA) process to access Microsoft Azure-based services, and moved UMail alias management from the NidTools application to a new “IT Security Settings” portal. Lastly, UIT and University Marketing & Communications purchased Deque Systems digital accessibility tools to help scan, monitor, and test websites and train website managers.

Standard pre-semester and first week of school efforts

Though enrollment figures for fall 2025 aren’t yet available, enrollment at the University of Utah has been growing steadily over the past five years, hitting a record high enrollment of 36,881 students in 2024.

A student body that large can put considerable strain on IT infrastructure. To keep IT systems from being overtaxed during the start of school, UIT and University of Utah Health’s Information Technology Services (ITS) take a series of standard precautions to avoid outages and interruptions:

• UIT conducts a battery of load tests, a process during which simulated demand is placed on IT systems, including PeopleSoft, Campus Information Services, the U homepage, and the Campus Map, to measure response under normal and peak load conditions.
• A monitoring and response team is formed to escalate and resolve unforeseen IT outages. Monty Kaufusi, manager for the IT Service Monitoring Group, urges IT system administrators to continually update system certificates and leverage UIT monitoring systems to proactively keep tabs on the health of their systems.
• UIT hosts daily stand-up meetings via Teams to review system status reports.
• A moratorium on major and minor IT changes (login required) is in place leading up to and during the semester start.
• UIT’s Strategic Communication team emails start of semester messages to the broader IT community and UIT staff (login required), including a link to “top tech” flyers for instructors and colleges, departments, and other student-supporting organizations.

 

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