IT Insider: More security coming to UC's digital communications

Microsoft Office 365 and Catalyst will incorporate the additional security offered by Duo Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) starting on June 1. Look for communications coming in May ahead of the event. 

Multi-factor authentication provides a second layer of protection for your account, even if your password is compromised. For example, if someone is attempting to login as you, Duo will alert you immediately.

Several UC systems currently require multi-factor authentication, including Adobe Experience Manager (web content management system), AnyConnect (VPN solution used to log into UC’s network from off-campus), and UC Flex.

If you are not already enrolled, Duo will prompt you for setup when you login to Catalyst or Microsoft Office 365 beginning Saturday, June 1.

For more information on Duo, including Frequently Asked Questions, view the Two-Factor Authentication webpage.

Before the start of Fall Semester 2019, IT@UC technicians plan to automatically move all UC Box content to Microsoft OneDrive. You will be contacted with all the details before the move so you are fully aware of the process.

For details about what OneDrive is and how to use it, please view the OneDrive KB article. In addition, the Staff Success Center is currently offering online and in-person educational opportunities, available through SuccessFactors Learning. Visit Microsoft’s OneDrive Help Center for additional details on OneDrive.

The Staff Success Center continues to offer training on OneDrive and Outlook from Office 365. Each training session is open to all UC employees (faculty, staff, and student workers) and will take place approximately once a month.

Training session details:

• OneDrive: explains the purpose and appropriate use of OneDrive at UC; demonstrates how to navigate the interface and create, manage, and share files and folders. 
• Outlook: demonstrates the new features of Outlook on the web and desktop versions; provide tips for app productivity.
• Teams: in-person training sessions offered by the Staff Success Center introducing class participants to the basics of using Microsoft Teams. NOTE: Skype will be retiring June 3; Teams is the replacement for Skype. 

Visit SuccessFactors Learning to sign up for in-person training sessions as well as view the available Office 365 educational opportunities through lynda.com. (The recommended browser for SuccessFactors is Mozilla Firefox.)

For questions or concerns, you can email the Staff Success Center at hrelearning@uc.edu or by call (513) 558-2500.

From Provost Kristi Nelson's email to all UC Staff on Thursday, May 2, 2019.

Following much consideration, and a successful pilot that included 60 faculty and nearly 3,000 students, the university will transition to Canvas to support the transformational teaching and learning needs of our faculty and students.

To support our transition from Blackboard to Canvas, IT@UC and CET&L have partnered to provide the following support for faculty and students:

• UC's Transition to Canvas Website houses learning guides, videos, and an implementation timeline.
• A Canvas Ambassador has been identified by each college to serve as a resource and helping hand during the college’s identified transition period.
• In-person trainings, workshops, and one-on-one consultations will be held this summer and throughout the transition to assist faculty in creating and reimagining course content.

Thank you for your partnership as we embark on this exciting journey.

Kaltura CaptureSpace is becoming Kaltura Capture. On June 15, Kaltura will retire Kaltura CaptureSpace and it will no longer be available.

The new Kaltura Capture will be available in Blackboard, Canvas, and the college Kaltura Media Space (KMS) beginning Thursday, May 9^th. The old Kaltura CaptureSpace will be removed from Blackboard, Canvas, and college and departmental KMSs on Saturday, June 15.

Kaltura Capture is stand-alone software used to create media and will take the place of Kaltura CaptureSpace. For more information about the new tool, including how to transfer your current files, please visit the Kaltura UC News article.

IT@UC Network and Telephone Refresh project team is upgrading the university's telephone system. To ease the transition and familiarize faculty and staff with the new system, IT@UC is providing a fully functional demo station as well as an onsite training option. Read the Phone Demo Station UC News article to discover how you can benefit from these services.

The UCFileSpace service is nearing retirement, and replacement solutions for file storage and web hosting are currently being developed. Over the summer, file storage and sharing will move to Office 365 OneDrive, and personal website hosting (homepages.uc.edu) will be relaunched as a standalone service. More information about these services, including migration instructions where applicable, will be distributed as they become available.

In order to facilitate the change, a successful round-table discussion was recently held to develop solutions for individual use case scenarios. If you work within UCFileSpace and missed the meeting, or have additional UCFileSpace needs that have not been discussed, please contact your local IT Manager. IT@UC teams will work closely with UCFileSpace users and IT Managers to keep them updated on all solutions developed.

Thanks for your support and feedback through this process in order to transition to an updated storage solution. Any questions about this process can be emailed to Russ Langford.

Several popular operating systems will reach End of Service (EOS) in the near future, including SQL Server 2008 (7/9/19), Windows 7 (1/14/20) and Windows Server 2008 (1/14/20). View a complete list of Applications and Operating Systems Reaching End of Service in 2019 and 2020. 

Please start appropriate planning to upgrade or decommission systems prior to these dates. 

University policy requires that information systems be maintained to protect against vulnerabilities. Systems that reach End of Service (EOS) will not receive security or non-security updates from the vendor, typically resulting in catastrophic vulnerabilities within a short period of time.

Please contact the UC Office of Information Security with any questions or concerns.

With the help of the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) Capabilities and Resource Integration (XCRI) staff, the University of Cincinnati is implementing its first centralized high performance computing (HPC) system that supports and accelerates computational and data-enabled research, scholarship, and education.

Centralized HPC provides a critical research infrastructure resource that emboldens UC’s strategic direction, Next Lives Here and supports all disciplines, including healthcare, sciences, engineering and social sciences/humanities, in their quest to harness big data via analytics, modeling and simulation, visualization, artificial intelligence and machine learning. The new system offers a readily accessible hybrid CPU/GPU computing cluster which will support the next generation of computational and data science researchers.

The HPC is part of UC’s Advanced Research Computing (ARC) initiative, which is a collaboration between the Office of Research, University of Cincinnati faculty, the Office of Information Technologies (IT@UC) technical and research services teams, the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences (CEAS) technical staff, Indiana University Information Technology Service’s Chief HPC Systems Architect, and XCRI HPC Systems Administration staff.

Join the Accessibility Network on June 5th for UC’s first Digital Inclusion Day. Digital Inclusion Day is an opportunity for the UC community to strengthen our capacity and further our commitment to improving equity in our electronic environment for people with disabilities.

Find out more about the event and register at the UC Inclusion Day website.

Students from Hughes High School who won first place at the ShareIT 2019: Disrupt! Pitch Session & Graduation. These young innovators pitched a product called Zensical, a wearable that has the capacity to predict an incoming anxiety attack by monitoring the vitals of a user. Students were judged by professionals from 1819 Innovation Hub and the Venture Lab and awarded a cash prize for their winning entry.

Is your Inbox is cluttered with too many messages? Try using Conversation Clean Up in Outlook.

Clean Up will reduce the amount of messages by automatically moving redundant, read messages. 

How does this work?
Conversation Clean Up evaluates the contents of each message in a Conversation (or email thread). If a message is completely contained within one of the replies, the previous message is deleted. Conversation Clean Up is most useful on Conversations with many responses back and forth, especially with many recipients.

For more information about this useful tool, visit the Use Conversation Clean Up to delete redundant messages Microsoft online help article.

That's it for this month. Thanks for reading!