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On Friday, July 31 the legacy Novell file and print servers will be permanently decommissioned. Former Novell users may notice a change to their PC login screens.

If you are running the Novell client, indicated by a red "N" in the bottom right corner of the desktop, please note the following:

• At your next login after July 31, the Novell login prompt may be replaced with the standard Windows login screen.


• If the Novell login screen still appears, please make sure that the "Workstation only" option is checked before logging in.


• If you encounter problems with login, file access or printing and have not rebooted since July 31, please reboot and log in again.

Daniel E. Svitavsky
Systems Support
University IT Services

To the University Community:

University IT Services (UITS) understands the importance of continued access to the University's IT systems and services. To minimize the impact of upgrades and repairs, UITS always attempts to schedule work affecting systems and services during off hours. To help the community plan for upgrades and outages, UITS has established regular maintenance periods. Weekly maintenance occurs every Sunday morning from 12:01 AM to 7:00 AM. For larger projects, UITS estblishes two annual extended maintenance periods that take place over the Christmas break and between the end of the second summer session and the start of Law School orientation.

This summer's IT maintenance window will begin Friday, August 7, at 5:00 PM EDT and will end on Monday, August 17, at 7:00 AM EDT.

Most IT systems and services will be available most of the time during that period, and UITS will always attempt to alert the University community whenever a system is expected to be down during this period. During this time, however, some systems may be brought down for extended periods and with short notice in order to facilitate major upgrades to UITS networks, systems, and services. Please plan your work accordingly.

Stephen G. Landry, Ph.D., CIO

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

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

This weekend University IT Services upgraded the DNS and DHCP servers on the campus network. These are critical services that enable your computer to access the Internet. Following this upgrade, the University now has redundant DNS and DHCP servers in different locations around campus, ensuring that members of the University community will have uninterrupted access to the Internet in the event one server or network link fails.

If you experience problems connecting to the Internet or to campus servers this morning, please reboot your computer, as you may have obsolete information about the campus Internet connection in your computer's memory.

Steve Landry, CIO

From Information Technology Services

Approximately 400 University faculty, staff, and administrators have moved from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange for their email and calendar. University IT Service plans to have all members of the community moved to MS Exchange email by the end of May. University IT Services wants you to be aware of some issues that everyone will encounter during this transition, as members of the community are in each system.

For example, while you can schedule meetings across both systems (that is, if you send a meeting invitation, it will appear in the calendars of all recipients, whether they are using the MS Exchange or Lotus Notes calendar), until everyone is in one system, rescheduling meetings will not work as expected (moving a meeting in one system will not move the meeting for users in the other system). If you have scheduled a meeting and need to make a change to the original meeting for any reason (e.g. new date, new time, new location), instead of "rescheduling the meeting" or updating the meeting invite, as you might now, you should cancel the existing meeting, notify all the participants via email and then issue a new meeting invite/request.

This past fall Seton Hall University launched a project exploring the use of an eReader in select classes. Approximately fifty faculty and students were provided with an Amazon Kindle eReader and select readings (including textbooks, literature, and blogs) to see if the Amazon Kindle provides a convenient alternative to traditional textbooks and whether itimproves the amount of reading students do and their comprewhension. This week the Teaching, Learning, and Technology Center, in collaboration with Freshman Studirs and the University Core Curriculum Committee, released their preliminary findings from the Lindle Pilot Project. A summary of the results is available on the Educause Web site at:

http://connect.educause.edu/Library/Abstract/IntegratingAmazonKindleAS/48346

Steve Landry, CIO

Everyone acknowledges that we're in very tough economic times. The state of the economy has created some uncertainty for Seton Hall University, as it has for other colleges and universities. As the economy has shrunk, enrollments at private colleges have declined while at the same time the need for financial aid has increased. In response to these challenges, the University has prudently reduced its overall operating budget. These budget reductions will have some affects on IT services at the University. While the specific cuts and their impacts are still being finalized, some of the affects will likely include:

• Faculty laptop computers: Faculty and eligible academic administrators whose laptops are provided through the University's Mobile Computing Program will have their laptop computers replaced every three years, rather than the current two year replacement cycle.


• Computer Labs: Desktop computers in the public computer labs maintained by IT will be replaced every three years, rather than the two year replacement cycle. The hours of certain labs may be be reduced.


• Faculty Grants: The operating budgets for internal faculty grants from the TLT Center will be reduced. Some grant initiatives such as the Faculty Innovation Grants and the Student Undergraduate Research Fund may be suspended.


• Internet2: The University's membership to Internet2 may be discontinued, and its connection to Internet2 may be reduced or eliminated.


• Support Services: The current hiring slowdown may result int he elimination of open positions. This in turn will mean that some services may take longer. For example, more laptop repairs may be done off campus rather than in our repair shop, taking longer for those repairs to be completed.

Steve Landry, CIO
email: cio@shu.edu

Seton Hall University has selected the 2009 laptop and tablet PC models for the Mobile Computing Program. The laptop model will be the Lenovo ThinkPad T500, featuring a 15.4" wide screen monitor and the ATI Radeon Mobility video card. The tablet PC model will be the Lenovo ThinkPad X200 Tablet with a 12" LED backlit screen.

Full sepcifications for the 2009 models can be found in the document:
2009 SHU Mobile Computing Standard Models.doc

Sophomore refresh will begin in mid April and continue through the end of final exams. All sophomore students who have registered for the fall semester are eligible to upgrade their current laptop or tablet computers before the summer.

Steve Landry, CIO

Now that all students have been moved from Lotus Notes to MS Live@EDU, University IT Services (UITS) is focusing on expanding the pool of "early adopters" of faculty, staff, and administrators for MS Exchange.

This week, UITS successfully added MS Exchange to the list of systems that support "single sign-on" through the new PirateNet portal. The PirateNet portal is based on Banner Luminis, and provides enhanced access to the University's Banner system, as well as providing single sign-on for most commonly used campus systems.

Next week early adoptes from the Law School and Housing and Residence Life will be migrated to the new MS Exchange email system. This will provide UITS an opportunity to test the migration process and user training.

There are four ways to access MS Exchange email. Using MS Outlook is one of the most common, and allows users to download their email to their computer and work "off line." Outlook Web Access (OWA) works in MS Internet Explorer and provides roughly the same functionality as MS Outlook over the Web. OWA Light works in any Web browser and provides an interface similar to MS Hotmail. You can also access MS Exchange email from other devices and clients, including the Blackberry and iPhone, using IMAP.

As we get more early adopters converted to MS Exchange email, UITS will share a more detailed conversion schedule with the University community. Look for this later in February.

Steve Landry, CIO