ITS continues to relieve technical debt, by replacing and retiring outdated equipment associated with the converged infrastructure. Other projects include:
- Update and migrate to a new automation infrastructure (CHEF)
- Data Warehouse for Financial Information
- Improve the process of software acquisition, customer relationship management and managing the request forms/tasks
IT Strategic Planning – Focus groups are completed. The Information Technology Survey sent to all K-Staters is open through May 11. As of Monday, May 7, there are approximately 1200 responses with 50% from student respondents. The Plante Moran Consulting firm is assisting with the effort.
Encrypted File Transfer – ITS staff along with campus constituents are researching applications for secure file upload and sending documents across campus.
Professional development – On May 23 and 24, Information Technology Services hosts the Computing in Higher Education Conference in Kansas (CHECK 2018) at the Olathe Campus. More than 300 attendees will network and learn about best practices from regional institutions and vendors.
Security – Chad Currier, Chief Information Security Officer, began April 30. His office is located in the Unger Complex.
The number of compromised eIDs for Jan – April was 188 from 176 phishing scam emails (in comparison to 1245 for the same timeframe in 2017, from 394 phishing scams). There were 55 compromised eIDs in April 2018 compared to 617 in April 2017.
Some of our summer projects include:
Infrastructure
- Ubuntu 18 Upgrade Project – Upgrade to latest long term production release of Ubuntu Server.
- Active Directory 2016 Upgrade Project – Upgrade AD functional level to 2016 and refresh servers.
- Monitoring Consolidation Project – Consolidate to a single pane of glass monitoring system
- EST Documentation Consolidation Project – Restructure and Consolidate EST Internal Documentation.
- FIS Infrastructure Improvement Project – Improve system reliability and performance metrics.
- Legacy Hardware Retirement – Retire legacy hardware in the datacenter and continue migration to the converged infrastructure.
- Catfiles Storage Expansion – Expand NAS storage supporting Catfiles and file storage.
Applications
- Mobile Commencement live streaming for Polytechnic, Manhattan and Graduate School in K-State Mobile app – added service for Students, Family and Friends personas to the K-State mobile app to add live commencement ceremony streaming and on-demand access in the future
- Commencement archives moved to K-State’s YouTube channel – freeing up university storage space and $
- Graduate School application and process forms from paper to online – automating approvals and workflows for internal business process, providing applicants with a dashboard to understand the progress of their application, and adding functionality to improve the user experience and efficiency of processes.
- K-State Alerts process and functional improvements with Police and DCM – coordinating updates to improve native language support for non-English speakers and developing an automated enrollment process
- Online Admissions process for non-degree seeking students – updates and improvements to the experience and internal workflows of non-degree seeking student admissions
- Developing a Student Services K-State Online course with New Student Services – working with SGA and Student Life to provide better access and improved communications around student services
- University level Video Captioning policy, governance and procedure in development – working with a wide array of university staff to improve K-State’s services for video captioning and to improve compliance with required standards
- Python 3 upgrade project – update key university applications to latest version to ensure long-term maintainability
- Completed data integration services in support of key university initiatives in functional offices such as with CITI, an HCS training platform, AcademicWorks, a scholarship management platform, Teamworks collaboration software for K-State Athletics and updated Cashnet services
- Improved reporting tools and user experience for KSRE Kansas Pride, an online tool for helping Kansas Communities maximize community and economic development efforts by encouraging all groups to coordinate.
Technology classrooms – Leasure 013 will receive updated AV equipment including touch screen controller, system processors, document camera, wireless microphones, laser projector, and cameras for web conferencing. Nichols 301 will receive a new projection system (input plate, controller and projector) and the orientation of the room will be rotated 90 degrees now facing to the west. CW 143 and 146 will receive a new projection system (input plate, controller and projector).
