August 2011
IT Connections Masthead
In This Issue
A Cool Time at the ITS Picnic
ITS Professional Development
ITS Haiti Team Weathered the Storm
Putting SU in the palm of your hands
IT Out and About
Introducing ITS Online Platforms
TD Spotlight: Data Warehouse
Student Technology Services at Whitman
Quick Links
Join Our Mailing List
Quick Notes

ITS Staff Milestones  

Randall Grimshaw, Senior IT Analyst- 20 years

David Castle, Instructional Technology Analyst - 30 years

Walley Francis, Principal Project Analyst - 35 years

 

ITS Staff News
Bonnie Dunay
Bonnie Dunay 

Bonnie Dunay
has returned to ITS as the new Service Centers Manager in Academic Applications and Service Centers.  Bonnie started her career at SU with ITS over 26 years ago.  More recently she provided project management for the JPMC Collaboration.  Bonnie is looking forward to her new focus on student technology support services. Her office is located in 1-205B CST and she can be contacted at [email protected] or x9270.


Mindi Stoffel
Mindi Stoffel
Mindi Stoffel has joined the staff of the ITS Business Office as the ITS Software Specialist/Administrative Specialist. Her primary responsibility is the management of software and hardware purchases and maintenance renewals. Mindi moves from Network and Wiring Services where she was responsible for the scheduling of daily operations, database management and the processing of departmental financials. Prior to NWS, Mindi was the Office Coordinator in Materials Distribution where she was responsible for managing campus wide storage and the processing, tracking, and billing of all outbound packages. In addition, Mindi was responsible for budget reconciliation and improvement of day to day operations and processes. She also brings many years of experience in retail inventory management. Mindi's office is located in the ITS Business Office Suite, 1-130 CST, and she can be reached at x2716 or [email protected] . 

Diane Oad
Diane Oad
Effective July 1, Diane Oad became part of the ITS Enterprise Application Systems team, an organizational change that saw her move from the ITS Administrative Computing Services (ACS) team.  Diane will continue in her role as a Senior Project Analyst supporting enterprise-wide OnBase projects and will take a lead role in ensuring OnBase-related support issues monitored within Orange Tracker are resolved as quickly as possible.  Diane is also a key liaison between the University and Hyland Software, and has been an active participant in the Higher Ed OnBase user community, most recently as the President of the Higher Ed User Group (VOGUE).  For the time being, Diane remains in her office at 621 Skytop (ECM) but you'll likely run into her almost anywhere on campus as she collaborates with our OnBase user community.  You can call Diane on x1000, or drop her a note at [email protected]

 

Chet Seidel
Chet Seidel

Please welcome Chet Seidel to the Enterprise Development group within Enterprise Application Systems in ITS. Chet comes from Columbian Mutual Life Insurance in Syracuse. He has more than 25 years of experience working in the insurance and corporate world, encompassing roles as programmer analyst, software developer, webmaster, and software test engineer. As an IT Developer/Analyst Chet will be involved with the mobile application initiative as well as the migration of department-based applications to enterprise platforms. Chet's office is in 224 Skytop Office Building and you can reach him at [email protected] or x9262.  Please welcome Chet to his new role.

 

 

Golfers at the ITS Picnic
A Cool Time at the ITS Picnic

Not as hot as last year, and more people than ever

The Big Tent at Drumlins
The Big Tent at Drumlins

 

The big tent overflowed with a record crowd at the annual ITS picnic at Drumlins Country Club on Thursday, August 4. More than 140 attendees from groups all across campus enjoyed fabulous food and beverages, and many stuck around for an afternoon of volleyball and golf.

 

A field of 28 golfers competed in the golf tournament. Taking first place with a score of four under par was a team consisting of Erik Anderson, Cheri McEntee, Wade Stringer and June Szymanski. Longest Drive honors went to Bill Keesler and Linda Saul, with Mike Wunderlich getting closest to the pin.

The Hangar One Blimp 
The Hangar One Blimp

A special surprise was a fly-by of the Hangar One Blimp, a 120' long airship completing the Concord, NH to Buffalo, NY leg of its national promotional tour.

 

Special thanks to Tina O'Mara who did a fabulous job pulling the party together!  Click here to visit Collage and see some of Steve Sartori's and Tina's pictures of the event. 

 

 

IT Professional Development
Staff on the cutting edge 

Conferences & Forums    

Peggy Brown, Mike Fudge, Michael Morrison
and Glenn Santa
attended the Blackboard World Conference 2011 July 12-14, in Las Vegas.

June Szymanski attended SANSFire 2011in Washington, DC, July 17-21, to participate in LGL523, Law of Data Security and Investigations.  This course covered the law of business, contracts, fraud, crime, IT security, IT liability and IT policy - all with a focus on electronically stored and transmitted records. The course also taught investigators how to prepare credible, defensible reports, whether for cyber, forensics, incident response, human resources or other investigations. June initiated efforts to keep the class members connected by creating the first subgroup in the SANS Alumni group in LinkedIn. 

  

Training & Education

  

Cindy Hoalcraft attended the EDUCAUSE Institute Management Program in Boulder, CO, July 18 - 22. The Management Program is tailored to higher education IT professionals who are existing managers and would like to enhance the various practical skills important to effective management, such as interpersonal communication, time management, and performance management. The program offers an invaluable opportunity to share information and experiences with peers and seasoned IT managers from campuses across the country. The intensive program engages participants in interactive sessions throughout the day and into the evening.

 

Lou Ruppert passed the Oracle Certified Professional Java Programmer (formerly Sun Certified Java Programmer) exam on January 20, 2011.

 

Colleen Van Camp obtained her FEMA Professional Development Series (PDS) certification in June. The series includes seven Emergency Management Institute (EMI) independent study courses that provide a well-rounded set of fundamentals for those in the emergency management field.

 

Publications  

 

Lee Badman lends us his irascible and irresistible insights as a blogger for Network Computing.

 

ITS Haiti Team Weathered the Storm
Team prevails despite tropical storm Emily   

 

SU's ITS Haiti Outreach team stayed safe and made progress despite the arrival of tropical storm Emily.

SU ITS Team at Inaghei, Haiti
SU's ITS Team at Inaghei, Haiti

 

A group of Syracuse University students and staff went to Haiti July 30 - August 6 to help the Universite d'Etat du Haiti (UEH) install wireless equipment on their campus a year and a half after an earthquake devastated the country. This is the first phase of a year-long collaboration between SU and UEH to develop a sustainable IT Network for UEH students, faculty, and staff.   

 

The ITS team returned home late on Saturday, August 6. Channel 9 interviewed some of the students for their Sunday 8/7/11 newscast

 

You can also follow the team blog at http://itsinhaiti.syr.edu, and check out The Post-Standard article that ran in the August 5, 2011 edition.  

 

SU Mobile App


Putting SU in the palm of your hands

Single point of contact established for all SU mobile apps 

 

The University is preparing to launch the first official SU mobile application in the Apple Store, the Android Marketplace and the Blackberry App World. A team from Advancement and External Affairs, Newhouse, and ITS has been working diligently on this project, with development and production help from WillowTree Apps, Inc.

 

A new application account has been set up with Apple for official SU and SU-related apps. Apple has made it very clear that SU should channel all their apps and requests for apps through this account. This approach will simplify the monitoring of SU-related application traffic, and enables management of apps from SU's institutional perspective with an eye toward addressing institutional concerns and opportunities that arise. We will be setting up similar official SU application accounts with the Android Marketplace and the Blackberry App World.

 

The TLC Mobile subcommittee is working on a governance model for SU and its schools, colleges and departments. The model will include the technical developer group and others, and articulate mobile apps approaches, processes and issues across all platforms.

 

In the meantime, if your organization is planning to publish a mobile app, or wishes to add content to the official SU app, please contact Jenny Gluck at [email protected] or x5772.

 

IT Out and About
Connecting with the campus and beyond 

David Harris 

David Harris, Senior Project Manager in EPS recently graduated from the 2010/2011 Board Leadership Seminar. The seminar is part of the Partnership for Nonprofit Enterprise Excellence sponsored by Excellus BlueCross BlueShield, the Central New York Community Foundation, and the United Way of Central New York. The eight month program educates nonprofit board chairs to explore governance and leadership topics. The syllabus is designed to provide the knowledge and tools to more effectively lead nonprofit board of directors.

 

David is currently the President of the Board of Directors of Liberty Resources, Inc., a local nonprofit agency providing residential and non-residential services to individuals and families. Its present array of services include Mental Health; Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities; services for individuals living with HIV/AIDS, families and youth involved in the child welfare system, domestic violence services; services to persons in recovery; and diversified case management services. Liberty Resources serves over 9,000 clients annually and employs over 500 people throughout Central New York.  

 


Online Platforms Logo (long - 300px)

 

 

 

Introducing ITS Online Platforms

New ITS group makes great strides in less than a year 


Last fall Jenny Gluck turned to Jonathan Chowdhury and asked him to develop and lead an agile, wide-ranging, collaborative team dedicated to providing online services and platforms to SU's academic community and facilitate online publishing and dissemination of content & information. Thus was formed ITS Online Platforms (OP), the newest group in ITS's Academic Applications and Service Centers department.

 

In addition to Jono, OP's Manager, the group's professional staff is comprised of James Bort, Kelly Fallon, Alison Kessler, Eric Mumpton, Jim Pease, Beth Teska, and Michael Wunderlich. OP also employs about 15 student consultants who handle web design and development, hence their title: ITS-Spiders.

 

OP is responsible for a wide array of SU's non-administrative platforms including:

  • Expressions (expressions.syr.edu) - based on WordPress, this platform offers a fast setup and flexible easy-to-use website development tool to every member of the SU community
  • Expressions Pro - also based on WordPress, this service is for the SU Department/Group/Club offering the SU visual identity in a "lite", compact, easy-to-use format
  • Collage (collage.syr.edu) - Digital asset management based on the open-source application Resource Space, offering the SU community a place to store, search for and disseminate digital images.
  • Confluence (answers.syr.edu) - a "best in class" wiki platform used for the ITS knowledgebase, Answers.syr.edu, and document collaboration.
  • Cascade - SU's primary enterprise web content management platform. All the major SU websites are hosted on this platform.
  • SharePoint 2010 - extremely flexible content collaboration platform.
  • Orange Tracker - issue tracking platform.
  • SU Mobile Platform (SUMP) - the new SU Mobile framework and platform.
  • Frevvo - Fast and easy online forms builder and server.
  • Ensemble - Video hosting and streaming server.
  • iTunesU - SU's iTunesU service.

Some of OP's notable projects include the Newhouse Tenure site (SharePoint), the new OrangeTV site (Expressions); the Imagining America site (Expressions), and the new collaboratively-built and soon-to-launch SU Mobile Platform.

 

Looking to the future, OP expects to providing support in the areas of accessibility of web content, learning intelligence and analytics, and online research and journaling platforms, to name just a few.

 

For more information about ITS Online Platforms, contact Jono at x1970 or [email protected] .

 

 

TD Spotlight: Data Warehouse

Leveraging TD at tactical and strategic levels

 

TeamDynamix logo

 

It's been almost three years since ITS embraced TeamDynamix (TD) as its primary tool to manage and prioritize work, adapt to change, nurture innovation, and meet commitments to ourselves and others. This software is proving to be a powerful portfolio management tool that consolidates and standardizes project, task, time, and resource management.  

Hugh McCabe
Hugh McCabe 

 

Hugh McCabe, Manager of the Data Warehouse, uses TD as a tool to record and manage projects in a centralized location that is available to project management teams, the ITS management team, his staff and his customers. According to Hugh, "this is a big help because it facilitates coordination of efforts and promotes awareness of project status and capacity planning."

 

Perhaps most valuable to the Data Warehouse team are TD's capabilities for uncovering diverse and necessary work and projects and keeping them visible. "TD allows me and my customers to surface work and projects that they need to have done, and make them apparent not just to me but to the ITS management team" said Hugh. "Since TD is an enterprise solution the work and projects that get entered become part of the enterprise planning process rather than only for my department."

 

TD allows project managers to create entries where Data Warehouse staff may be minor contributors to various projects. "This type of work can add up and be a problem if it's not accounted for," observes Hugh. "TD keeps this work on my radar screen and keeps surprises to a minimum."

 

In addition to strategic management and planning Hugh uses TD at a tactical, week-to-week level. Staff enters time spent on projects in TD, enabling him to get weekly reports summarizing hours spent on various projects, generated from TD extracts available through the Data Warehouse. "I use my weekly Data Warehouse TD reports for discussions in status meetings with my staff," said Hugh.

 

Opportunities exist to increase TD's utilization by the Data Warehouse. "We have been able to leverage TD by extracting and moving data from TD to the Data Warehouse. Since the Data Warehouse is a dedicated reporting and analysis platform we can further exploit TD as a management tool," said Hugh.

 

Clearly, Hugh finds TeamDynamix useful. "I have only been at SU since last December. At my previous job we used a project management application that was very difficult to use, was not accessible to my customers and had very limited reporting capability. TD is far better."

 

Whitman technology classroom 

Student Technology Services at Whitman

The Whitman School of Management takes pride in its state of the art technology for students

 

The student technology center at the Whitman School of Management was established in 2007 with Jim Vivenzio as Coordinator for Student Computing.  The center, part of Whitman's Technology Services Office and staffed by Jim and a crew of talented student computer consultants, provides a vast array of technology support to Whitman's 2,200+ students. 

Whitman student 

The center offers Whitman students support for the many applications that are used in the curriculum, and also provides no-charge student equipment loans; faxing, scanning, and copy services; software acquisition through the Microsoft Developer Network Academic Alliance (MSDNAA); videoconferencing services; video recording services; and laptop maintenance and repair.  The center maintains the school's five student computer labs and all of the printers in the building, and provides technical support for classrooms and special events.

 

Students collaborate in Whitman labTalk about busy! In the 2010-2011 academic year the center made more than 20,000 equipment loans, shot 97 video programs, supported 31 videoconferences, repaired or performed maintenance on 136 laptops, and supplied paper and toner to 12 printers with 870,000 impressions. 

 

In the summer of 2011, the center will upgrade the graduate computing lab with new computers, upgrade the mobile computer carts with new laptops, and install a storage locker system for undergraduate students.

 

For more information about Whitman's student technology center, contact Jim Vivenzio at x7365 or [email protected].

 

 

Photo - Fingerprint puzzle 

 

 

Identity Management project on target

 

New system anticipated by end of 2011

 

The next generation Identity Management (IdM) project continues to make excellent progress. Current estimates are that the new system will be ready for go-live at the end of 2011. 

 

Here's a summary of where the project stands: 

  • Integration testing of automated resource provisioning has begun. The IdM and Active Directory teams are working together with support from Human Resources and Enrollment Management to ensure an effective end-to-end test.
  • Delegated Management Console (DMC), the application that will be used by department staff to manage accounts and resources, will be incorporated into integration testing for associates (formerly known as guests) and other basic account functions. The security model, which supports distribution of access by function (what the DMC user can do) and unit (who the DMC user can update) has been developed and is being tested. The resource management component - where each user's provisioned and eligible resources can be viewed and managed -- is under design.
  • NetID Services (self-service) is in test for usability by ITS Service Center representatives. It includes features needed to support a more robust set of account security measures, such as replacement of the PIN with a temporary password, annual password changes, and an image-based self-remediation for forgotten passwords for non-employees.

Additional phases of testing will continue into Fall 2011. This includes testing of exceptions, usability, and performance tuning. Definition of operational procedures and migration planning bring the project into its homestretch at the end of the calendar year.

 

The decision about when to migrate to the new system requires thoughtful discussion among many stakeholder groups. As the migration plan is developed, the team will have a clearer picture of the process and the outage it will impose. The goals are to construct accurate digital identities and to sustain qualified access to resources, while minimizing impact on services during the cutover.

 

For more information contact Cindy Hoalcraft (x4809 or [email protected]) or Steve Leonard (x3243 or [email protected]).


 

 

IT Connections is published monthly by Information Technology and Services at Syracuse University. Please submit story ideas and news items to Chris Finkle.

  

 

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