IT Connect in 2024: A Year in Review

2024 has been a busy year for us at IT Connect, with our team writing 123 articles for the SMU community—a full two-fifths of them by Zach Peterson alone. Over the past year, we had almost 58,000 visitors to our blog, averaging over 1,500 views per week.

The most popular posts for this past year dealt with NetID, AI, and provided a few tech tips.

1. Microsoft Outlook & Teams: Exploring the Pros and Cons of New Features – To Stay or Go?
2. SMU Moves to Entra ID for Accessing Services
3. NetID is Coming!
4. The Zoom App is Now Zoom Workplace
5. NetID Becomes Standard on December 26
6. The Hidden Dangers of Web Browser Extensions: What You Need to Know
7. NetID is Now Required
8. Faculty Technology Workshops — FTW! Back-to-School Bootcamp Starts August 13
9. Using Generative AI Meeting Summary Technologies at SMU: Some Do’s and Don’ts
10. Curious About Copilot? Check out these LinkedIn Learning Courses!

With over a million views and over 1,200 posts, we have been a good repository for information and support—even from other universities. If we wanted to look at our all-time highlights for the blog, the majority of our most popular posts dealt with support topics.

1. 4 easy steps to keep the leading zero in Excel!
2. Using Zoom to Create Quick and Easy Screen Recordings
3. Let Your Mouse Do the Walking: Internal Employee Directory Now Online
4. How to Download and Install Older Versions of Adobe Applications
5. Microsoft Outlook & Teams: Exploring the Pros and Cons of New Features – To Stay or Go?
6. What to Do When PowerPoint’s Presenter View Won’t Play Nice
7. SMU Moves to Entra ID for Accessing Services
8. NetID is Coming!
9. Focused Inboxes To Be Disabled by Default in Outlook and How to Enable
10. The Zoom App is Now Zoom Workplace

We have found that some good stories are still good after all these years. The “leading zero” is still as much of an issue today as it was in 2014 when Laurene Klassen wrote it as a response to a student’s question during a training session that fall term.

Our move to Entra ID for SSO and the requirement of NetID with that change to how we authenticate had two articles break into our all-time top 10. With our sending out over a hundred thousand emails to the SMU community, including alumni, retirees, and authorized payers, related to that change, linking to those posts might have helped.

We hope that in 2025, you will continue to find IT Connect a helpful resource, and look forward to continuing to update you in the new year.