All faculty and staff got an email from CIO Jerry DeSanto this morning, and I thought it might be helpful to try to pull out and discuss what’s specifically relevant to faculty. Here’s my take, though IR staff and administration are welcome to comment or clarify.
Jerry mentioned that IR has three priority projects:
1. “Converting the platform on which our enterprise resource planning system (Banner) runs on from VMS to Linux.” This change doesn’t have much of a direct impact on faculty, other than that it’s a major upgrade to the University’s infrastructure.
2. “Implementing phase one of an Identity Access and Management (IAM) system.” The main impact of this change on faculty will be that we’ll soon be asked to use our R numbers as our user IDs. We’ve discussed this previously on the TAG site, but as a quick reminder, the main reason IR gave us as to why this change is coming is so that each user will have a unique, immutable ID. And this needs to happen before we can move to Microsoft Live @ Edu.
3. “Establishing Active Directory domains for devices and individuals.” Active Directory is a Microsoft service that will sync your Windows account – you’ll be able to access synced files from any computer on campus.
Jerry points out in the last paragraph of his email that a main impact these three projects will have on faculty is that they’re taking up quite a bit of time and energy on IR’s side – which means that we might need to be patient when we have special requests that require IR staff time.
Reactions, thoughts, comments?
Just a few quick comments here:
Identity Access and Management (IAM) is a large, multi-phase initiative that goes well beyond usernames and passwords. Without getting too geeky, it’s all about your digital identity, how that identity changes over time (as you change roles), what your digital self is entitled to do and use, and how individuals can gain access to federated resources (for research & collaboration, etc.). Phase one is largely foundational work, which is why most people outside the IR division are only seeing the username aspects of it pop up in conversation. Later phases will very much be focused on how we can leverage our new IAM environment to deliver a better experience and integrate more services offered beyond our walls.
Our Active Directory project also needs a bit of clarification. While it’s true that Active Directory can be used to offer services like roaming profiles(1) and SharePoint services(2), those features are not on the radar for phase one. Phase one of Active Directory is focused largely on getting a handle on centralized desktop management(3) and establishing a platform that will facilitate integrating other Microsoft-friendly services in the future, like Live@EDU.
(1) Roaming Profiles : Log in to any machine and it becomes your desktop, at the expense of copying your profile across the network
(2) Sharepoint : clouded file storage and collaboration
(3) We’ve grown way beyond the scale where sneakernet is expedient and viable without burning out our staff
Thanks so much for the clarifications, Tony!
[…] 2010 (“More IT Forum Updates”), and more details were provided in February 2011 (“IT Update: What it Means for Faculty”). Please look at the IT Security manager’s (Tony Maszeroski’s) comment to that post for […]