New Requirements for Meta Description in Sitecore

icon of a web browser with a puzzle piece on it.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

Moving to Entra ID: A NetID Success Story

Microsoft Entra ID logoSince 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 Continue reading Moving to Entra ID: A NetID Success Story

Safe Links Add Enhanced Security to Your Email

Checked Email iconLast 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. Continue reading Safe Links Add Enhanced Security to Your Email

IT Connect in 2024: A Year in Review

IT Connect logo2024 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 Continue reading IT Connect in 2024: A Year in Review

Copyleaks To Replace TurnitIn for Plagiarism Detection

CopyleaksThis 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.

Leveraging cutting-edge AI technology, Copyleaks can easily Continue reading Copyleaks To Replace TurnitIn for Plagiarism Detection