April 2009 Archives

Reminder: Change Your Password

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Your privacy depends on your password. To keep your personal information secure, University IT Services recommends that you change your password regularly.

In keeping with best practices to secure the University's student, personnel, and financial records, University IT Services is making changes to our critical systems that will require all users to change their passwords at least every 90 days and use strong passwords. Strong passwords have a minimum length of eight characters, contain a mixture of upper and lower case characters and at least one digit and one special character (i.e., "#", "$", "&", etc.). You will not be able to reuse your last five passwords. In addition, to discourage password guessing to gain unauthorized access, critical systems will lock a user's account after five invalid login attempts.

The Technology Help Desk is putting in place a service that will enable them to provide assistance "24x7" to users who have forgotten their passwords or who are locked out of the system. University IT Services will make these changes to our critical systems as soon as "24x7" password support is available to the community.

More information about these changes will be provided in the next two weeks as we get closer to implementing these changes in how you will manage your password for critical systems.

IT Management Team

Electrical Storm Causes Partial Network & Telephone Outage

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This afternoon at approximately 1:30 PM a thunderstorm with multiple lightning strikes to campus buildings damaged some network and telephone equipment in President's Hall and Bayley Hall, creating brief telephone and network outages for parts of the campus. Most camus telephone and network services were restored by 3:30 PM. A few network switches servicing portions of President's Hall and Bayley Hall had to be repaired or replaced. Full service to these areas was restored around 5:00 PM this afternoon. Anyone experiencing continued access problems is advised to reboot thier computer and to call the Technology Help Desk at 973-275-2222 if this does not clear the problem.

University IT Services

Banner Cross Functional Team Meeting Agenda

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The Banner Cross Functional Team is meeting this morning. Some issues for discussion at this morning's meeting include:


  • Update on the implementation of MS Exchange, MS Active Directory, and the Oracle Identity Management suite

  • Preparing for the University's annual audit, including the annual security audit for Banner and other critical financial systems

  • Planning for the University's upgrade to Banner 8.x (Sungard has announced desupport of Banner 7.x after September 1, 2010)

A DRAFT agenda for this meeting can be downloaded at:
Banner Cross Functional Team DRAFT AGENDA 20090401.pdf

Stephen G. Landry, Ph.D.
CIO