OIT has completed several project initiatives over the past few months. We appreciate the continued partnership and support of the campus community during these implementations. We’d like to share a few examples of the changes and innovations that have taken place thanks to your ideas and cooperation.
Cox School of Business Infrastructure consolidation is now complete. This project included not only unifying networking and security appliances, wireless, VPN, and Active Directory, but also unifying about 200 websites and 200 domain names. This consolidation will allow for more consistent and timely support and management across all systems and services within the Cox School.
The conversion of Inside.SMU to Sharepoint in the Cloud continues this winter with the migration of Dedman Law, Cox, Athletics, Business & Finance, President’s Office and student pages starting December 9. This project paves the way for improved service reliability along with all of the new features of Sharepoint.
All Campus Voicemail systems have been upgraded. SMU employees will now receive missed call notifications and voice mail recordings and transcriptions. However, you still have the option to check voicemail on your phone through your handset or mobile phone. This is just one of multiple projects that will modernize SMU’s telephony services.
To support various academic initiatives more rapidly, a VMWare cluster for the Academic Zone has been created. This provides a robust framework to meet the growing needs of academic departments for testing and research environments.
Our security team continuously works to keep our campus secure. This includes constant monitoring of SMU’s systems for any possible threats to critical data. OIT deployed an enterprise Vulnerability Assessment Tool that regularly scans all servers. We have successfully remediated several critical system vulnerabilities, making it even harder for malicious groups to infiltrate our network.
Forecasting technology funding and looking for financial efficiencies is essential to making sure that students, faculty, and staff have the tools they need to excel. Complete and accurate data on IT assets is important to making these decisions. The inventory verification project is paving the way for improved knowledge of existing hardware lifecycles and future technology needs.
As part of OIT’s work with departments across campus to streamline tedious and/or paper-based processes, a new workflow for the creation of new ORG numbers is now in development using Gideon Taylor software. Gideon Taylor has already been integral in making several processes on campus easier, including payroll authorization and several accounting tasks.
To review all of our active projects, log into our project portal at www.smu.edu/OIT/Projects
