April 2009

Many of you know it has long been a desire of mine to house our entire division under one roof, rather than the current structure of dispersed offices across the Kent Campus. There are numerous benefits associated with this goal. One space would allow for heightened team building, improved communications among units, a reduction in time and expenses of staff traveling to meetings across campus and the opportunity to create a central information technology training center.

At the end of last month, the Kent State Board of Trustees approved funding to make this goal a reality. The board authorized a project to renovate Stewart Hall, currently an unused residence hall, into a general office building for our division. Renovation is scheduled to begin soon and be completed over approximately 18 months.

I want to thank the many individuals who recently moved or are preparing now for temporary moves until this renovation is complete. This includes those members of our team who are scheduled to relocate from the third floor of the University Library to the Administrative Services Building in May.

I'll continue to keep you updated as the project progresses and more details become available. If you have questions, don't hesitate to give me a call or drop a note to cio@kent.edu.

Ed Mahon
Vice President for Information Services
and Chief Information Officer

Infrastructure and Operations

Client Infrastructure Group

• The Active Directory restructure project is progressing. BlueChip has migrated 37 of 91 departments to the new Active Directory structure, with 60 percent still to complete.
• The Windows XP version of a new universal imaging utility has been released for use by End User Support. The utility will image nearly any Dell client device with the university's standard image, including Office 2007/2003 and other common applications. The Vista version of the utility will be released in the next month.
• The team has created a mini-site for its presentations at the Ohio Higher Education Computing Council conference, accessible at https://sharepoint.kent.edu/CIG/OHECC. Featuring content from two presentations, the site also allows for follow-up discussion by conference attendees; information gathered will be used in future presentations.

Network/Telecommunications Services

• Telecommunications engineering work on the Private Branch Exchanges at the Salem and East Liverpool campuses has been completed. The upgrade provides more calling capacity and bi-directional caller identification at a lower cost. A similar project was completed at the Tuscarawas Campus earlier this year.
• FlashZone wireless was added to Lowry Hall to cover the Department of Anthropology and to Lake-Olsen to cover the Department of Visual Communication Design.

Operations

• Several projects are envisioned for the Library Data Center to improve efficiency of energy utilization. The latest project, completed March 15, involved sealing and fire-stopping all penetrations beneath the data center raised floor to prevent loss of cold air pressure.
• The Access Management Group has completed back file document scanning of all 2008 documents and all years of confidentiality agreements. Scanning of new access requests and modifications was integrated at the end of 2008. Audit and security questions now can be resolved or answered immediately, potential for lost documents is greatly reduced and space required for paper document storage is being recovered.
• In February, several teams took part in a disaster recovery exercise. The recovery team was able to rebuild core enterprise networks, authentication systems and databases and restart core applications, including Banner. A validation team completed four hours of testing to verify that the Banner modules supporting Human Resources, Finance, Institutional Advancement and Student Systems were functioning accurately. This provided a significant expansion of the scope of the previous exercise in July 2007.

Server Support Group

• Exchange disaster recovery is up in the CDW Minneapolis Data Center, and data replication is complete. A failover test took place in late March.

Educational Technology

• Final preparations continue for the upgrade to the Blackboard Vista (formerly Web CT Vista) course management system. The upgrade features several enhancements for faculty, including heightened content control, increased opportunities for customization and an easier-to-use interface. Testing took place last fall and continues this spring with a small pilot of faculty members. All courses will go live in Blackboard Vista in Summer Semester 2009.
• The multimedia team is completing a Web site for the School of Art's art education program. The site focuses on recruitment and providing resources to current students.
• A video conferencing room recently was installed in Satterfield Hall. The room allows the Department of English to reach out to a school in Dresden, Germany, for its English as a Second Language course. This is the first video conferencing room on campus capable of high definition conferencing.

End User and Business Services

• The Kent State University Helpdesk assisted 4,593 callers in February and responded to 387 e-mails. Approximately 90 percent of these constituents rated Helpdesk service as above average or excellent.
• The Helpdesk is working with managers from across the division to close tickets older than 60 days. Many of these are attached to projects or purchases that are indefinitely on hold or to service requests for which clients subsequently have delayed.
• A project to define software supported by the Helpdesk is drawing to a close. The goal of the initiative was to identity those titles and versions of software for which the Helpdesk provides user assistance, generate additional Knowledge Base articles for this software and decrease the number of pieces supported overall. Members of the federated teams have identified additional software that they support to provide a comprehensive resource list for the division.

Enterprise Support and Application Services

• The new Destination Kent State program was launched in March. This university initiative provides a two-day summer orientation for incoming freshmen. Students sign up for appointments through FlashLine and Self-Service Banner. The system provides e-mail appointment confirmations, eliminating the need to generate letters.
• Preliminary work for the Banner 8.2 upgrade has begun. Research and planning are underway to determine best timing. New features and enhancements are being delivered for each of the Banner modules.
• The Enterprise Application Services team will be working on the following application upgrades in 2009: ODS 8.0, Kronos, Famis, uDirect, Darwin database, Luminis database and Vista course management system. The developers and database administrators participate on these projects, along with the Server Support Group and project managers for each functional area.
• During the next few months, the Banner multiple ID project will be launched. SunGard has provided Kent State with the opportunity to use a beta product called DupeFinder that interrogates the Banner database tables, using common matching routines, to identify instances of multiple IDs. Once testing is complete, the tool will be used against the production environment to locate records that need to be addressed. Functional areas that own Banner data will be involved to provide rules for their specific groups.