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Contact:
The Division of Information Technology
910.521.6260 | doit@uncp.edu

January 2012

Academic Support Services Subcommittee Report

DoIT Monthly Report
January 2012

I. Client Services

• Assistant CIO Cindy Saylor:
  • Currently organizing Tech Expo 2012 for Wednesday, February 29th, 10am-2pm. Thirty vendors will be on site in the UC Annex Assembly Room providing information and demonstrations. Invitations have been sent to area IT, Media, and Library professionals at North and South Carolina universities, colleges, community colleges, and public and private school systems within a 100-mile radius to attend this free event.
  • Along with Johnathan Kerns, ResNet Analyst, have had their proposal “Helping Students Succeed Through an IT Educational Initiative” accepted for presentation at the 2012 EDUCAUSE Southeast Regional Conference, in Tampa, Florida May 30-June 1, 2012.
  • Along with Rob Hughes, met with and provided consultation/advice to School of Education faculty for grant-funded distance education/classroom technologies for the CIS Academy in Pembroke.
  • Along with Robby Gaddy, organized a demo of portable audio equipment to campus and student services areas for purchase in order to provide more autonomy in media support.
  • Met with Edward Bell, SGA representative, to discuss opportunities to engage students in DoIT’s student educational initiative in support of student success.
  • With Bob Orr, met with the AACSB initial accreditation visit team to provide a demonstration and information regarding technology support to the School of Business.
• Mike Pruitt set up and deployed a test tablet unit from Dell, the Latitude ST, with Dr. Jose D'Arruda, and so far his reaction has been quite positive. Dr. D’Arruda states that “…it works great and the students love it because I can save the problems I am doing in class and email it to them later.”  This tablet is a unique device, having much of the same form factor as the iPad, while supplying a traditional Windows 7 environment, with a few minor changes to optimize and take advantage of the non-traditional form factor.
• A number of Client Services staff provided access and support for the New Student Orientation for the spring semester.
• Daryl Burgwyn has completed the Extron controller upgrade in the UC and UC Annex. Currently new podiums are being considered for purchase to house thin clients in order to afford ease of access for those users who do not have a laptop to use during presentations.
• Jillena Locklear completed the Dell Desktop/Notebook Recertification.
• Robby Gaddy and Andrea Jacobs worked extensively with the Miss UNCP Pageant Committee to organize and record contestant interview voice overs played during the pageant.
• Johnathan Kerns assumed the RIAA copyright infringement duties, distributed required information concerning copyright infringement and begun working with Residential Life to provide educational opportunities for students to learn more about copyright infringement. John also began an initiative with students on how to set up BraveMail on their mobile devices and created training tutorial webpages to further assist students with accessing technologies.
  
  Training:
  • Wanda Hunt and Johnathan Kerns:
    • 1 - PowerPoint session: one-on-one
      
      
  Work Orders for January 2012
  
  Top 5 Requestors:

  1. Division of Information Technology (53)

  2. Biology (30)

  3.School of Education(29)

  4. Business Administration and Economics (24)

  5. Health, PE and Recreation (18)

  Client Services Areas		Closed Work Orders
  Faculty/Staff Services		186
  Helpdesk Services		308
  Labs/Classrooms		340
  BraveTechs		158
  LabTechs		90
  ClassTechs		0
  Helpdesk Blackboard Support		88
  		325

  
  VCL Reservation Statistical Information for January 2012:
  Total Reservations: 169
  Total Hours Used:  720
  "Now" Reservations: 139
  "Later" Reservations: 33
  Unavailable: 3
  Load times < 2 minutes: 70
  Load times >= 2 minutes: 47
  Total Unique Users: 16
  Unique Users of Generic Linux VMware: 6
  Unique Users of VMware Windows XP: 45 Durations:
  0 -30 minutes:  46
  30 minutes – 1 hour: 22
  1 hour – 2 hours: 46
  2 hours – 4 hours: 18
  > 4 hours: 40
  
  
  

  II. IT Planning and Budget

  Work Orders:
  
  
  Alan PreVatte
  Blackboard: 23
  Braveweb: 21
  Web Server: 12
  General Server: 3
  Bravemail: 3
  
  Charles Swayne
  Blackboard: 108
  
  Melanie Jacobs
  MS Outlook: 2
  Other Software: 2
  General PC: 1
  Blackboard: 17
  General Web 1
  
  
  
  Melanie Jacobs and Charles Swayne completed the FALL 2011 Course Archives. They are working on backing those up to DVD for OFFSITE and ONSITE storage. SafeAssign and Waypoint service packs were applied to the test server for testing. Alan Prevatte reported that the Ares Course Reserves Blackboard Building Block was put into production in time for the Spring 2012 semester, allowing more streamline access to Library Course Reserves via faculty and student Blackboard logins. The following Blackboard Building Blocks were updated in December 2011 giving users access to the latest versions: 1) Blackboard Mobile Learn - giving students and faculty access to their courses and content on a variety of devices including iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, Android, and BlackBerry smartphones; 2) McGraw-Hill Connect and Create – giving faculty who use books published by McGraw-Hill access to digital resources via Blackboard; 3) Waypoint Outcomes Connector – providing intuitive, unified grading and assessment for faculty and personalized, accessible feedback for students via Blackboard; 4) Wimba Pronto – promoting collaborative learning among Blackboard users through instant messaging; and 5) Mashup / SlideShare – used to search and add multimedia to your Blackboard courses. In addition to these updates, UNCP Blackboard users now have access to Paste from Word Mashup - which removes Microsoft Word’s mark up code which can cause text formatting and alignment issues when you paste from Microsoft Word to Blackboard’s Visual Text Box Editor (VTBE); and Grammarly – which faculty can use to proofread student assignments and send reports to their students.

         

  III. DoIT Applications and Enterprise Services

  Applications

  • Project to capture military status of students and applicants (including “child of/spouse/reservist etc.)
  • Web application to allow parents/others to add money to a student’s Brave Card
  • Replacement of the DARS degree audit system with a u.achieve, an upgraded version of DARS
  • Project to capture and track cell phone carriers to expedite communications with students
  • Working on a self-service application for transcript requests
  • Bringing English Language Institute courses and processes into Banner
  • Working on a web application for faculty and staff to purchase meal plans.

Enterprise Systems

• Online Roster Verification project completed and implemented.
• Revised HMS-Banner Interface completed and implemented.
• New Information Technology Security Officer, Don Sweezy, will begin Feb. 6, 2012.
• B & T Applications Analyst position filled
• Associate CIO accepted to present at EDUCUASE Southeast Regional Conference in May.  The presentation is entitled “OpenKM Open Source Document Management."

IV. Network Services

University Village Apartment Wireless Deployment: 
DoIT worked with Housing and Residence Life to complete the deployment of enterprise wireless network coverage throughout the six building residential apartment complex.  The project included the deployment of 65 wireless access points and includes guaranteed coverage of all indoor areas as well as outdoor gathering areas in the complex. 

Health Sciences Building
DoIT is working on network and communication provisions for the new Health Sciences Building.  This building will be technology intensive and will rely heavily on a state of the art communications infrastructure to support the teaching and learning technologies deployed within.

MCNC BTOP2 Project
UNCP is serving as a community anchor point along the expansion route of MCNC’s BTOP 2 project.  The project includes the installation of a small building on UNCP’s campus that will house high speed network technology along with multiple fiber pathways on and around campus that will ensure redundancy for the MCNC network topology as well as for UNCP’s connectivity to the NCREN network.  The building plans have been finalized and the fiber pathway has been installed on and around campus.  The project is scheduled for completion by this summer.

Telephony

• Facilitated the installation of new phone lines to enable closed captioning of live events in the Givens Performing Arts Center
• Assisting with the relocation of offices in GPAC during renovation
• Meeting with Sodexho to coordinate relocation of communication services for upcoming dining hall renovation

Outages

• Email outage from 7:30am – 8:30am, January 12 due to transaction log volume size limitation.  Problem has been resolved.

Data Center

• Lumbee Hall Secondary Data Center – new HVAC has been installed, configured, and tested.  There has been no downtime in the secondary data center since the installation of the redundant cooling unit.
• Oxendine Data Center – water was discovered under the raised floor and was associated with a condensation issue.  There was no water leak.  Two hard drives failed and were replaced in two of our mass storage arrays.  No downtime or loss of service were associated with these repairs.

System Center Configuration Manager

• The SCCM architecture was deployed and tested in several labs across campus.  Some modifications were proposed to address redundancy and performance.  These changes have been completed and the architecture is considered final and ready for large scale deployment.

Email

• Email storage restructuring project is underway.  The goal is to expand email storage to meet best practice guidelines and to enable quicker backup and restore of email messages when necessary.
• Email Statistics
  • Exchange mailboxes: 1696 – up from 1674
  • Exchange Unified Messaging Accounts:  909 – up one from 908
  • Total Inbound Spam Activity for the month of January 2012:

            Total Messages:           537,129          up from 523,161
            Good Messages:          395,887          down from 413,423
            Blocked Messages:     141,242           up from 109,738
            Good Messages:          73.70%          down from 79.02%
            Blocked Messages:     26.30%            up from 20.98%

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