Open Letter to UF OIT Staff

From Dr. Marc Hoit

Changes and Challenges: IT Steps Up

Every way I turn I see another IT opportunity, and I am continually impressed with all the IT employees and groups that step up and make things happen on this campus. We have a number of activities within OIT that are getting attention and demonstrating the benefits of this collaboration and coordination among so many IT units.

We have launched an emergency information collection form for collecting location and emergency contact information for students. We rolled this out in conjunction with student pre-registration that started October 29th. Students are required to submit the information every term before they are allowed to register. Two major pieces of information being collected are cell phone numbers and emergency contact information. The cell phone number is in connection with our new emergency TXT message service. We can now send a TXT message to all students in case a critical situation arises where notification could ensure their safety. Faculty and staff are also encouraged to fill out the same information. It can be accessed through MyUFL -> My Account -> Update Emergency Contact. Everyone is automatically signed up to the emergency only TXT warning list. The emergency notification plan for campus has very clear and stringent requirements for deciding when to notify and is limited as to who has the authority to approve a message.

We are researching the idea of adding the use of the UF.EDU domain. UF has rights for both UFL.EDU and UF.EDU. Consistent with the UF branding campaign, it would provide a more consistent university presence if we could advertise "go to UF.edu" or "my e-mail is mhoit@UF.edu." The expectation is that both domains would run in parallel. There are also questions about how complete the change should be. The answer is: that depends on the required effort, resources and technical considerations. One possibility is that we accomplish the easy, externally-facing changes that have the least required effort and resources while providing the most visible change. Obviously, some of the internal systems may not need to be changed. I have asked web admin to develop a project document that shows the required effort, issues and solutions, required resources and possible timelines. Please help by providing input to develop a document that will be used to decide how to proceed. See www.webadmin.ufl.edu/projects/domain-update/ for more information.

The UF Exchange project is speeding along. Migration to the new front end servers is expected to happen in January. This new front end will replace the current 2003 federated front end servers and provide the ability to connect our new unified platform, existing federated mailboxes and new 2007 federated mailboxes. The early adopters will be moving to the new platform also starting in mid-January. This is an exciting launch and will offer an option to help unify campus messaging services. See www.it.ufl.edu/UFExchange for more information.

The Florida LambdaRail (FLR), of which UF is a board member and part owner, is Florida's Regional Optical Networking organization (RON). FLR provides our connection to Internet 2, National LambdaRail (NLR) and our commodity Internet connections. FLR was recently named as the networking provider in a partnership in the Big Bend Regional Healthcare Information Organization as part of the FCC Rural Health Care Initiative grant. $9.6M was granted for this project. The networking consists of a new 1 Gbps fiber optic network which will link approximately 9 rural hospitals in 8 counties to the existing Florida LambdaRail backbone, and will extend to community health centers and clinics through broadband wireless, improving patient care through disease monitoring and access to specialists, and enabling access to distance education and other existing networks.

Some good news on the funding front: the legislature has approved a new technology fee starting in 2009 for all SUS institutions. The fee is 5% of tuition and is expected to generate about $4M annually. The university has a high demand for these resources. The following are a few examples of services we cannot offer due to lack resources: 24/7 Help Desk (only 7:30AM-10PM weekdays currently), maintenance and improvement of classroom technology (currently no recurring funding), university-wide event calendar (to improve event notification and searching as well as improved event security), portfolio and collaboration sites for teaching (wikis, blogs and other modern tools for student and faculty interactions).

The plan for allocating the tech fee will be through an advisory committee of faculty, students and technology experts who will make recommendations on educational technology priorities. The money will be split into recurring and onetime enhancement projects. Recurring funds could be used to support the annual costs of existing and new learning technologies such as ePorfolios, 24/7 Help Desk services, classroom technology support and others once implemented. Onetime enhancement projects will be used to develop and implement new and innovative technology to support students and faculty in the learning environment every year. Examples could include: new campus-wide event calendar, paperless forms and student signup, improved IT security and more.

Finally, I have been asked frequently by faculty about getting information on university processes that they need to do their work. Here are a few things that will help them report on their efforts:

Did you know that all faculty evaluations are available on the Provost website in the form needed for T&P? See http://www.aa.ufl.edu/aa/dass/tcheval/index.asp .

Also, the graduate school GIMS system has a full listing of all graduate students for each faculty member (needed for their annual reports and T&P packets). Go to https://gradschool.rgp.ufl.edu/GIMS1/gatorlink/PreSiteEntry.asp and:

  • Login
  • Select Graduate Faculty Information
  • Enter your UFID or last name
  • Click name search

Finally, faculty submit forms (UCC1) to create a new course or new program. This submission is now online for the graduate school and will be online for all undergraduate courses soon. Submission and tracking can be done through the website http://approval.ufl.edu . Submitted requests and their status are visible under reporting.

This has been a challenging year, and I would like to thank all the IT employees for their excellent work and dedication. Enjoy the holiday season, and I wish for a happy new year for all.

Marc Hoit