Pre-semester IT efforts pay day one dividends

New construction is so common at the University of Utah, a landscape artist would have to repaint campus every semester to ensure an accurate depiction.

For example, two prominent buildings went live before fall semester — the new School of Medicine and Trailhead, a residence hall that houses more than 1,400 students.  

Like Trailhead, a third construction initiative — the redevelopment of Fort Douglas — ties directly to President Taylor Randall’s “College Town Magic” vision, which reimagines the U as a residential hub rather than a commuter campus. In August, the last 50 acres of Fort Douglas were ceremonially transferred from the U.S. Army Reserve to the university. This October, the U will start developing the property into more student housing, as well as research and administrative spaces.

While UIT has played and will continue to play a critical role in all three projects, many significant IT changes ahead of the new semester were less visible. These include:  

• The launch of two Google AI tools — Gemini and Gemini Notebook (previously Notebook LM), bringing the total number of AI tools approved for campus use to nine, with three more under review.
• Digital Learning Technologies updated the minimum version of the U’s instance of Zoom to 6.7.8, and on August 26, Zoom will update its user interface for the web portal at utah.zoom.us.
• Professional Education, part of Continuing Education in University Connected Learning, and UIT’s Salesforce & Customer Relationship Management Services team released a Salesforce-powered enrollment tool that tracks the student journey for hundreds of adult learners.
• New Microsoft files and Google files are now classified as “sensitive” by default. Microsoft sensitivity labels classify and protect data by applying electronic tags to M365 files, while Google classification labels are metatags that help identify the sensitivity level of information and enable policy-based controls for data protection, governance, and visibility.
• An IT security upgrade changed how some users connect to the U’s wireless network.
• Departments, colleges, and other units across the university continued to make strides in web accessibility ahead of stringent new federal requirements. A subset of this effort was recognized recently when the U of U’s homepage  ranked in WebAIM’s top 5% of the 1 million most-visited homepages on the web.

Ray Carsey, senior manager for the Network team in UIT’s Core Infrastructure Services, said  “the ideal IT change is one that causes the least disruption. When an unforeseen issue or unplanned service interruption arises, what matters most is to restore services as quickly as possible.”

“We spend a lot of time before each start of school testing the reliability and resilience of core IT systems,” Carsey said.

Carsey led UIT’s semester start task force for fall 2026, a coordinated effort between UIT staff members and their IT counterparts across campus and University of Utah Health who meet in the months ahead of every new semester to discuss IT initiatives, challenges, communication, load testing, and incident monitoring and response.

Load tests are a standard pre-semester precaution that simulate demand on IT systems — including PeopleSoft, Campus Information Services, the U homepage, and the Campus Map — and measure response under normal and peak load conditions. A student body as large as the U’s (enrollment hit an all-time high 38,261 students in 2025) puts considerable strain on IT infrastructure.

Josh Gross, manager for the Campus Help Desk and Operators team, said the UIT Help Desk received 507 phone and email contacts on August 24, the first day of classes, excluding self-service tickets routed directly to the help desk. Though the UIT Help Desk fielded 63% fewer contacts than last year, its general IT support phone line handled about 30% more contacts. Gross noted that the most common inquiries were login and access issues, primarily around Duo two-factor authentication, passwords, UMail, and UConnect. ITS Service Desk Manager Joe Bernhard, Gross’ counterpart at the University of Utah Health, reported 196 calls related to Duo access on the first day of classes.

Other measures to minimize outages and disruptions include:

• A monitoring and response team that escalates and resolves unforeseen IT outages. Monty Kaufusi, manager for the IT Service Monitoring Group, encourages IT system administrators to leverage UIT monitoring systems to proactively track system health and regularly update system certificates (please note a recent change in how university IT administrators request and manage SSL/TLS certificates).
• A moratorium on major and minor university IT changes (login required) from August 17-28, 2026.
• Semester-start communications from UIT’s Strategic Communication team to UIT staff and the broader IT community (login required), including a link to “top tech” flyers for instructors and colleges, departments, and other student-supporting organizations.
• Lastly, Paul Hess, associate director for the Office of Software Licensing, reminds faculty, students, and staff that free and discounted software — including Adobe, Microsoft, MathWorks (MATLAB), DocuSign, and Qualtrics — are available in the U’s Software Catalog (login required). 

 

Node 4 Search