During November’s Marketing Fundamentals, Digital Marketing and Brand Guidelines meeting, DEA discussed search engine optimization (SEO) and SMU’s goal to improve performance for all sections of SMU web presence. One way we can improve how our listings show up in search results is to reduce the length of our page descriptions so they are not truncated. To assist in this effort, the OIT Web Team will be changing the character limit to 150 characters for the meta description field in Sitecore on May 22, 2025.
Since the current character limit is 300 characters Continue reading New Requirements for Meta Description in Sitecore
Since SMU implemented Single Sign-On (SSO) in 2012, accessing SMU services has become more efficient by reducing the need to sign in repeatedly to every service. This is thanks to the Shibboleth identity provider (IdP), which receives the SSO authentication request, verifies your identity, and grants access without requiring you to provide an additional login during that session. Over the past twelve years since turning on SSO, many improvements have been made with authentication technology, such as biometric authentication, passkeys, and passwordless authentication. In addition, Microsoft has introduced new services that are very relevant to SMU, some of which require a change to our SSO service. OIT plans to stay ahead of these advancements and to introduce 
Last week, OIT enabled Safe Links to emails inbound to campus. This security features has been in use for some time in Microsoft Teams. We’ve now extended the service to protect SMU email accounts, adding an additional layer of security to inspect embedded URLs in emails for possible phishing/malware sites in real-time. 
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.
This term will be the last for Turnitin. After many years as our go-to for plagiarism detection, the University is moving to a new advanced plagiarism detection tool designed to ensure the originality of academic work. Maintaining academic integrity is crucial, and Copyleaks will provide us the technology to help uphold these standards with ease and accuracy.