September 2008 Archives

Yesterday afternoon members of the Department of Information Technology provided an update on "The State of IT at SHU" to the Faculty Senate IT Committee. The presentation outlined the changes coming in the next few months, including:

• The new campus portal, PirateNet, based on the Banner Luminis portal platform, which will go "live" around the end of October, and will replace the current Blackboard portal


• The new campus email system, based on Microsoft Exchange, which will begin going "live" over the coming winter break

The group also discussed some of the "behind the scenes" work to enable these changes has also taken plan, including the upgrade to the campus Internet connection this past summer and the upgrade to the data center network scheduled to be completed over the next two weekends.

The full presentation, which includes discussion of the current challenges faced in implementing this new technology, can be found at:

Faculty Senate IT Committee 20080928 1200 PDF DFT.pdf

(Note that this file is approximately 1.8 megabytes, only attempt to open if you ahve a high speed Internet connection.)

Steve Landry, CIO

University IT Services (UITS) has a weekly systems maintenance window each Sunday from 12:00 Midnight to 7:00 AM. UITS will always attempt to schedule systems work during this time. During this time any system may be down for maintenance without prior warning. However, UITS will always attempt to inform the University community whenever systems are scheduled to be down, even if that downtime is scheduled during the maintenance period.

Please be advised that UITS has scheduled major work on the network in the data center for the coming three weekends. The impact on University systems will be as follows:

Sunday, September 28: Some limited systems work will take place from 12:00 Midnight to 5:00 AM. Most systems will NOT be affected by this work.

Sunday, October 5: All systems except the University's Web site (www.shu.edu) and Blackboard (myweb.shu.edu) will be down from 12:00 Midnight to 7:00 AM.

Sunday, October 12: All systems except the University's Web site (www.shu.edu) and Blackboard (myweb.shu.edu) will be down from 12:00 Midnight to 7:00 AM.

Note that this is a change from the previously announced schedule to upgrade the data center network.

More information about this upgrade can be found in the September 15th blog post. Click here to go to that post.

Steve Landry, CIO

Comcast users have reported several brief, intermittent problems accessing SHU network services, including email and Banner.

Last week University IT Services (UITS) was able to confirm several outages and gather data necessary to work with Comcast to resolve the problem.

Summary: University IT Services will be completing a major upgrade to the data center's storage network during the scheduled maintenance windows on Sunday, September 28th, and Sunday, October 12th. Most IT systems, including email and Banner, will not be available from 12:00 Midnight through 7:00 AM on those days. Access to Blackboard (myweb.shu.edu) and the Seton Hall University Web site (www.shu.edu) will NOT be affected during this upgrade.

To the University community:

This fall, University IT Services is making many changes to the University's IT systems and services. These include going "live" with the new Banner Luminis portal, replacing the Novell network login with Microsoft's Active Directory, and moving the campus to Microsoft Exchange email. These changes are outlined in previous posts to this blog (see this post, for example).

In preparation for these changes, University IT Services is performing an upgrade to the storage area network in the University's data center. To complete these upgrades, all IT systems except Blackboard (myweb.shu.edu) and the University's main Web site (www.shu.edu) will be down during the Sunday morning (12:00 Midnight to 7:00 AM) maintenance windows on September 28th and October 12th. In particular, email and Banner will be down during those periods. Please plan your work accordingly.

As a reminder to the University community, UITS has established set times to perform system upgrades and other systems work. These set times (maintenance windows) are every Sunday morning from midnight to 7AM. Additional extended maintenance windows occur twice a year during the winter break and the week after the end of summer session. In order to minimize the impact of system work on the University community, UITS will attempt to schedule all system work during these periods. UITS will always attempt to inform the University community if scheduled maintenance will affect access, however, unless prior arrangements have been made with UITS, any IT system may be taken off line during these maintenance windows without prior notice.

Steve Landry, CIO

Seton Hall University is completing a complete revamp of its Web site. This revamp has been led by a steering committee including faculty and administrators and the work has been done by a cross functional team from Public Relations and IT. The new Web site being constructed uses new technologies, including the CommmonSpot Web Content Management System for academic and administrative Web pages, Microsoft Expression for personal Web pages, and the Banner Luminis portal system for pages that require user login to access. As this work progresses, University IT Services will decommission the old Microsoft FrontPage Web servers. The current schedule for decommissioning the old MS FrontPage Web servers is as follows:

• On Wednesday, December 24th, at 12:01 AM, the MS FrontPage Web servers will become "read only." They will continue to serve Web pages to the Internet, but users will not have the ability to update or modify those Web pages.
• On Sunday, March 29th, at 12:01 AM, the MS FrontPage Web servers will be removed from the campus network. After that time, Web pages residing on the MS FrontPage Web servers will not be accessible from the Internet.

Any department or organization that still has Web pages on the MS FrontPage server should contact Marie Somers, Director of Web Development in University IT Services, at 973-761-7566 or via email at somersma@shu.edu as soon as possible to make arrangements to have those Web pages moved to one of the current Web servers.