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?