2022 brought forth OIT’s new Strategic Plan for serving the SMU community through 2025 and beyond. This comprehensive plan provides a framework of goals and aspirations that will lead us toward future success and innovation in SMU’s journey to R1 status. We would like to update you on the progress already made in our primary areas of planning: Research, Teaching and Learning, Excellence, and Innovation. Continue reading OIT’s ’22-’25 Strategic Plan Status Update
Category: Projects
Focused Inboxes To Be Disabled by Default in Outlook and How to Enable
One of the benefits of our move to the cloud in the Mailbox Migration project will be to provide easier configuration options for email clients, better security, and more mailbox storage capacity. To get there, we need to change some current configurations and security settings. Some of these, have already been completed, but come next Monday, January 23, 2023, we will set the Focus Inbox feature to off by default as another step in this project. Continue reading Focused Inboxes To Be Disabled by Default in Outlook and How to Enable
A New Chapter of Identity Management on The Hilltop
Article compiled by OIT staffers Tommy & Pery Doan.
The Office of Information Technology has embarked on an exciting multi-year, multi-project journey to modernize Identity and Access Management (IAM) services at SMU. One of the primary objectives is to replace our in-house developed Account Maintenance Automation (AMA) system, which since 2010 has managed most default services required by faculty, staff, students, and sponsored users. Replacing AMA will be a significant step toward increasing the maturity level of our IAM program. Doing so will involve implementing several new open-source applications that will replace AMA and introduce new features and capabilities.
During the second half of 2022, the IAM team successfully completed Continue reading A New Chapter of Identity Management on The Hilltop
Faculty/Staff Email Accounts to Move to the Cloud
While SMU student email accounts were moved to our Microsoft 365 cloud service back in 2015, it is now time to finally move the rest of our accounts to the cloud. This will simplify mailbox management and reduce the hardware and energy costs of self-hosted email servers. Since this migration is a huge undertaking, we would like to outline what to expect in the coming months.
Continue reading Faculty/Staff Email Accounts to Move to the Cloud
DUO: A Substantial Expansion
Six years ago, SMU implemented DUO to protect our data proactively. Since introducing two-factor authentication (2FA), we have seen quite an expansion throughout our services.
We first implemented DUO in 2016 to protect access to my.SMU and later webmail for our faculty and staff as passwords can often be stolen, guessed, and hacked, and we needed a solution to secure our data better. Once our faculty and staff gained familiarity with DUO, it was introduced to students on April 1, 2019, through our “Security is No Joke” campaign. Continue reading DUO: A Substantial Expansion
