Projects – Page 4 – IT Connect

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

Phone Replacement Project Update: May 2020

With the recent impact of COVID-19, the phone deployment schedule had to be adjusted temporarily. However, phone deployments on campus have resumed. Prior to phones being deployed, users will receive a communication indicating the date that their phone will be deployed. They are also alerted that a five–minute outage of service could impact those users who are utilizing Remote Desktop services. Users will have the option to request that their phones be deployed before 8 a.m. in order to avoid service disruption. To date, over 47% of physical phones on campus have been deployed.

Continue reading Phone Replacement Project Update: May 2020

ID Photos to Appear Soon in Skype for Business

Skype Window with ID Photos On January 13, OIT will upload photos for all SMU employees to make them visible in Skype for Business as part of the upcoming project to deploy a new University phone system. The source for these employee photos will be the same photos that are used on SMU ID cards printed by the ID Card Services office. This means as an SMU employee, your SMU ID card photo will become visible in Skype for Business as well as in certain other Microsoft applications such as Outlook and SharePoint.

You can update your photo at any time! There are two ways to do so: Continue reading ID Photos to Appear Soon in Skype for Business