Phone system prioritization and timelines
As UMBC continues remote and hybrid work for the Summer and Fall, we wanted to provide an update about the status and priorities of the campus phone system replacement project. Our legacy phone system is over 30 years old, and cannot be maintained going forward. To date we have moved over 900 users to the new system to help ensure that there is no disruption to communications as we approach the fall semester.
During the summer, DoIT will be prioritizing the transition of department numbers over to the new phone system. We would like to work closely with all departments, including those who have already transitioned, to make sure they are prepared for the return to campus. To help avoid confusion, we are proactively removing the old desk phones once people have transitioned to the new system since those older physical phones are not compatible with the new system. If people need wired or wireless headsets, a physical office phone, or have any outstanding questions around the phone system or Webex software please let us know.
As the Fall semester progresses we will shift our focus primarily to remaining individual staff numbers that have not already been migrated.
New phone system overview
Transitioning to the new phone system offers many new features and advantages besides increased reliability. A key feature during this time of remote work and telework is the ability for your computer at home or office to make and receive calls using your campus extension. This “softphone” is enabled by using the Webex app, formerly Webex Teams, which can be installed on any computer or mobile device. UMBC has adopted this softphone approach as the recommended configuration and will be providing wired and wireless headsets to the community at no departmental cost. Headsets can be picked up at Engineering 020. Please see the links below for more information on these units.
If there are locations or users that would benefit from a physical desk phone instead of this model, we can work with your department to help evaluate your needs and make sure we are installing the right kind of devices to best support you.
We appreciate your support in helping us complete this very important project.
Ray Soellner
Associate Director - DoIT
UMBC
The Student AV Student Specialist I is responsible for assisting in the day-to-day operations of the Audio-Visual infrastructure on campus. This includes all aspects of customer support including but not limited to:
Responsibilities include but are not limited to:
The DoIT Technology Support Center is looking to hire additional consultants to work during the summer semester and beyond. Please see our job description below and visit our job posting on UMBCWorks to apply. (Search for TSC Student Consultant.) The application will be open until June 17th.
We're specifically looking for students available to work during the following hours:
Technology Support Center (TSC) student consultants are the first points of technical contact for the UMBC community and those who do well often go on to work in other areas of the Division of Information Technology (DoIT). Minimally, consultants are expected to provide initial triage and support for a wide range of information technologies including accounts, hardware, instructional technologies, networking, software, telecommunications, and basic web development.
HelioCampus is a data analytics platform that provides UMBC with the next-generation decision support services. Helio integrates our enterprise data warehouse with advanced reporting and visualization tools.
With Helio, we can use information from our systems to answer key questions through analytics, data storytelling, and data science and do it easier and faster. Helio is a key component of an integrated infrastructure for academic planning, assessment, and analytics.
We’re delighted to tell you that the project and platform are starting to roll out to the campus.
We have deployed the platform and provided initial training to a first wave of approximately two dozen people who are active users of our existing data warehouse. This initial training focused on four key sets of dashboards: Admissions, Enrollment, Student Retention, and Graduation.
We will continue to conduct training sessions to additional waves of the community and provide resources for self-guided training in the use of Helio and Tableau, the platform’s visualization tool. Tableau is easy to use, and you can learn the basics in as little as 45 minutes using our curated self-training curriculum.
Access to the Helio platform can be found at analytics.umbc.edu. Request access to the platform or a Tableau license at https://analytics.umbc.edu/support/request/. Please note that there is a role-based approval process similar to that granting access to REX.
We’re grateful to our campus partners who participated in the validation and “soft launch” phase of the project.
As part of our ongoing commitment to security, the Unix Infrastructure group will be conducting its quarterly system patching on Thursday, May 27th and Saturday, June 5th. While many of the systems will be patched without any service disruption, there are some systems which require the downtime of key services. The schedule below outlines which key services will be offline and for how long.
Thursday, 5/27/2021 between 5pm and 10pm (most systems will only be down for a short period during this time):
Saturday, 6/5/2021 between 9am and 11am(most systems will only be down for a short period during this time):
Please let us know if you have any concerns or questions.
Thanks!
Tim Champ
Manager of Unix Infrastructure
UMBC DoIT
DoIT is depreciating the legacy campus phone system and needs to meet with departments to migrate their phone numbers to the new phone system. We ask that a department representative please contact me to begin these discussions.
This past year DoIT has been aggressively working with administrative and academic departments to convert individual and departmental phone numbers over to a new campus phone system. To date, we have moved more than 800 campus numbers which represents the bulk of those types of phones on campus. If you or your department has not yet started this migration with us, we strongly encourage you to reach out to us to start this conversation.
In addition to improved support and reliability, the new campus phone system offers many new features that enhance and simplify your experience including:
You will no longer need FAC codes to make long distance calls.
Using the Webex app on your computer or mobile device to natively make and receive calls using your campus extension improves mobility and hybrid work schedules.
Receive Voicemail messages delivered to your email as an audio file.
Advanced in-call features including call waiting and easy conferencing.
Ray Soellner
Assoc. Director - DoIT
The UMBC Instructional Technology Update is provided by the Division of Information Technology for students, faculty and staff. If you have questions or need help, please consult the Blackboard Help FAQs or directly at www.umbc.edu/blackboard/help. You can also contact the Technology Support Center at 410.455.3838 or submit an RT (Request Tracker) ticket via the myUMBC Help Menu or directly at my.umbc.edu/help.
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]]>The legacy Pulse VPN has suffered a hardware failure and may not be recoverable. To access campus resources remotely please use the GlobalProtect VPN. Instructions for accessing this can be found here.
In January 2020 DoIT announced the replacement of the Pulse VPN with a new product. At that time, the Pulse VPN had reached its end of life and could no longer be supported. Since that time most of the campus has adopted the GlobalProtect solution however, DoIT has tried to maintain the Pulse system to support a graceful migration.
Over the last two days the Pulse system has suffered hardware failures that have become increasingly worse. Yesterday the Network team was able to restore service to the unit after a hardware failure took it offline. Today this service experienced a more severe hardware failure and recovery may not be possible. We will continue exploring options to temporarily establish the Pulse VPN service but this will only be a short term resolution.
A link to the GlobalProtect VPN instructions are included above, we strongly urge you to begin using this service now. If you experience any challenges installing the new VPN software, please contact the Technology Support Center.
Ray Soellner
Assoc. Director / DoIT
On Monday, April 26th, DoIT applied a patch to UMBC’s single sign-on solution, WebAuth, that improves security and lays the foundation for future enhancements. As a result of this change, WebAuth now briefly shows an intermediate page before redirecting the web browser to the requested site. This page quickly shows "Loading/Saving login session information from/to the browser..." . Several users have expressed questions and concerns about this page, because it often is not on-screen long enough to read in its entirety. Rest assured that the intermediate pages are not malicious. DoIT is actively working on improving this experience and making it less intrusive. Within the next week you will see improvements to the text and look and feel of the pages. Feel free to contact us if you have further questions. Thanks for bearing with us while we work to keep our infrastructure updated.
Todd Haddaway
Senior Director, Middleware and Application Infrastructure
DoIT
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