The newsletter for the Office of Information TechnologyThe Summit brings together innovators and...

FROM THE CIO• Welcome to the OIT Connect NewsletterI am excited to have another avenue to communicate with our partners in the UT Dallas technology community. In the following pages, you will see many of the things our teams are working on, or have achieved so far this year. We could not have accomplished this without the valuable support and partnership of our friends like you in the technology community. Our focus within OIT is to support the institutional strategic goals by:

We have stayed very busy this year, and I am pleased with the successes of a number of important projects that had a direct impact on the customers we serve. We continue to identify areas where we can make improvements, and value your feedback and the help you provide us in those efforts. Thank you again for believing in the work we are doing, and the work you do, on behalf of our great University.

Warmest regards,

WINTER 2019In this issue:

• From the CIO –

• Microsoft Office 365 Available for UT Dallas

Faculty and Staff – Page 2

• Help Desk Statistics – Page 2

• Help Desk Customer Corner – Page 2-3

• New OIT Website Coming Soon – Page 3

• Save the Date for the Lunch-n-Learn – Page 3

• Save the Date for the 2020 Innovation &

Technology Summit – Page 4

• Office of Information Technology Attended

Supercomputing 2019 Conference – Page 4

• Cyber Infrastructure/High Performance

Computing Team Growing – Page 5

• PeopleSoft Update Manager (PUM)

– Page 5

• New Orion Student Center Now Live

– Page 6

• Big Data Pilot Program – Page 6-7

• Office of Information Technology Adopting

Cloud-Based Technology

• OIT Co-Sponsors HackUTD VI – Page 7

• Data Centers Migrated – Page 8

• Team Collaborative Efforts on Microsoft

Office 365 Project – Page 8

• Getting to Know Our Team: Pulin Bhatt –

Director of Client Services – Page 8

Questions or comments? Email [email protected] call: 940.369.5500/Toll-Free 855.868.4357

Frank Feagans

1 Questions or comments? Email: [email protected] | OIT Helpdesk: 972.883.2911

© All rights reserved by the Office of Information Technology. Winter 2019Published Quarterly

The newsletter for the Office of Information Technology

• Keeping our IT applications/systems/network/data secure, available and highly

performing.

• Providing cyber-infrastructure services that help attract/retain tenure system faculty.

• Providing digital transformation services that reduce administrative burden and

boost decision making.

• Providing work opportunities for students that enhance their career and employment

opportunities.

• Providing client services that meet the expanding needs of our campus.

• Increasing local, national and international recognition of UTD.

• Providing a positive and healthy work environment.

• Delivering elite customer service to students, faculty and staff.

• Collaboratively partnering with distributed IT.

2 Questions or comments? Email [email protected] call: 940.369.5500/Toll-Free 855.868.4357

CUSTOMER SERVICE & IT BUSINESS AFFAIRS Client Services • Microsoft Office 365 Available for UT Dallas Faculty and Staff UT Dallas faculty and staff are licensed to access the Microsoft Office 365 suite. The Office of Information Technology offers a series of trainings, and provides resources and answers to frequently asked questions to help users maximize all of Office 365’s applications.

The O365 platform includes Microsoft Teams, which provides one solution for your communication and collaboration needs. Teams leverages much of what you know about Skype for Business and expands what’s possible, integrating chat (IM), online meetings, file management and a project workspace. More information about Teams can be found at: https://www.utdallas.edu/oit/howto/microsoft-teams/.

• Help Desk Statistics Below are some statistics that the OIT Help Desk

has achieved during the Fall semester (beginning August 13) through November 2019.

• 10,000+ calls • 2,200 web chats • 4,700+ email inquiries • Average interaction with the Help Desk is 6 minutes. • Help Desk answers over 94% of calls within 18 seconds. • Have assisted over 3,500 faculty/staff and 6,900 students

• Help Desk Customer Corner Customer Corner: Below are some of the most common questions that the Help Desk team received this quarter.1. Question: How do I reset my NetID password?• Answer: Visit https://utdallas.edu/oit/howto/netid/.

2. Question: How do I change my preferred UTD email address?• Answer: Visit https://www.utdallas.edu/oit/howto/change-your-default-from-address/.

3. Question: How do I change my NetIDplus devices or add another device?• Answer: Visit https://www.utdallas.edu/oit/howto/netidplus/.

4. Question: What is OneDrive and how do I access my files on it?

• Answer: Visit https://www.utdallas.edu/oit/howto/onedrive/.



The Client Services team was on hand in the Residence Hall South to answer questions about the Alexa pilot.

Bryan Sherwood, Assistant Help Desk Manager, and Noorali Mohammed, Help Desk Manager, listen in at the recent OIT Forum.

Questions or comments? Email: [email protected] | OIT Helpdesk: 972.883.2911

https://utdallas.edu/oit/o365/training/

https://utdallas.edu/oit/o365/training/

https://utdallas.edu/oit/o365/faq/

https://www.utdallas.edu/oit/howto/microsoft-teams/

https://utdallas.edu/oit/howto/netid/

https://www.utdallas.edu/oit/howto/change-your-default-from-address/

https://www.utdallas.edu/oit/howto/netidplus/

https://www.utdallas.edu/oit/howto/onedrive/

12 Questions or comments? Email [email protected] call: 940.369.5500/Toll-Free 855.868.43572 Questions or comments? Email [email protected] call: 940.369.5500/Toll-Free 855.868.4357

CUSTOMER SERVICE & IT BUSINESS AFFAIRSMarketing, Communications & Engagement• New OIT Website Coming Soon The Office of Information Technology has been undergoing a complete website redesign, and it is expected to be launched in January 2020. Below is a sneak peak of the new home page, which features members from the OIT team.

• Save the Date for the OIT Lunch-n-Learn The next OIT Lunch-n-Learn is scheduled from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday, January 21, 2020 in the JSOM Executive Dining Room. Come join us to hear the latest news and trends from Amazon Web Services (AWS). You can find the agenda for the Lunch-n-Learn online at https://utdallas.edu/oit/events/lunch-n-learn/.



Pulin Bhatt, Director of Client Services, presents about the Office 365 upgrade at an OIT Lunch-n-Learn.

OIT Chief Technology Officer, Brian Dourty, left, with Nate Howe and Nick McCormick from Information Security, at a recent OIT Forum.


CUSTOMER SERVICE & IT BUSINESS AFFAIRS Marketing, Communications & Engagement(Continued from page 3)• Save the Date for the Innovation & Technology SummitMark your calendars to spend the day with us at the 2020 Office of Information Technology Innovation & Technoloy Summit. The Summit is scheduled for Tuesday, April 21, 2020, in the Davidson-Gundy Alumni Center on the UT Dallas campus.

The Summit brings together innovators and consumers of information technology to engage faculty, students and staff in enriching conversations and learning opportunities about teaching, community IT, research, and collaborative partnerships. For the 2020 Summit, we are significantly expanding our lineup of major keynote speakers, notable subject matter expert presenters, leadership panelists, and attendees from the UT Dallas community and beyond. For more information about the Summit, contact Amanda Pritchard at [email protected].

CYBER-INFRASTRUCTURE & RESEARCH SERVICES• Office of Information Technology Attended Supercomputing 2019 Conference The Office of Information Technology represented UT Dallas at the annual Supercomputing Conference, which was held November 17-22, in Denver, Colorado. SC presented six days of scientific and engineering achievements from some of the world’s leading researchers, engineers, developers, and organizations.

OIT collaborated once again with UTD researchers and partners from Japan, to showcase the strides being made in high performance computing and networking. SC20 will be held next year in Atlanta, Georgia. Learn more at https://sc20.supercomputing.org/.

12 Questions or comments? Email [email protected] call: 940.369.5500/Toll-Free 855.868.43572 Questions or comments? Email [email protected] call: 940.369.5500/Toll-Free 855.868.4357Questions or comments? Email [email protected] call: 940.369.5500/Toll-Free 855.868.43574


Frank Feagans, OIT Vice President and Chief Information Officer, introduces President Benson at the OIT Summit. The 2020 Summit is April 21, in the Davidson-Gundy Alumni Center.


Shanthi Vellingiri, a Ph.D. candidate in the Computer Engineering department, used virtual reality to connect to Keio University in Minato, Tokyo, Japan while at SC19 in Denver.

mailto:Amanda.Pritchard%40utdallas.edu?subject=

https://sc20.supercomputing.org/

CYBER-INFRASTRUCTURE & RESEARCH SERVICES(continued from page 4)• Cyber Infrastructure/High Performance Computing Team Growing The Cyber Infrastructure/High Performance Computing team is one of the newest and fastest growing teams in the Office of Information Technology. When the group was started four years ago, the goal was to support a small cluster in central IT of roughly 25 nodes in a system called Ganymede. Ganymede at the time was a condo cluster, meaning every user bought equipment and storage in the system. The condo concept is important for researchers, because it means that they can have a high-quality computational environment without needing to know anything about system administration.

Ganymede has grown from a hand full of condo nodes to now over 250 nodes, with 16 condo queues and the addition of over a hundred nodes in the free queue. The free queue allows users who do not have the money to buy into the cluster, but have a legitimate scientific use to have compute resources as a university service at no additional cost. Providing and growing this as a campus-wide resource is critical for the continued success in research and the Universities’ Tier 1 status. Learn more about the HPC/HPN team at https://utdallas.edu/oit/departments/circ/.

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATIONIdentity Management • PeopleSoft Update Manager (PUM)The Identity Management team went live with upgrades made to the PeopleSoft Finance, Human Capital Management (HCM) modules and the portal on December 9, 2019. Functional testing began last month, and is in development.

Upgrades are also underway for the PeopleSoft Access Catalog. The upgrades will:

• Make requesting/updating access for a user easier;

• Requests will be related to the functions the employee will

be performing;

• Includes an Approval Tool to help reduce delays when trying to find approvers.

Shivani Narain, Manager of Identity Access Management, left, and Pat McEachern, Administrative Assistant for Digital Transformation, right, at the last OIT Forum.




OIT team members Brandon Navarre, Business Manager, left, and Noorali Mohammed, Help Desk Manager, right, at the last OIT Forum.

https://utdallas.edu/oit/departments/circ/


DIGITAL TRANSFORMATIONPeopleSoft and Analytics• New Orion Student Center Now LiveThe new look for the Orion Student Center is now live! With the development of smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices, it is important to provide a better experience and consistent service to our students through all devices.

The latest upgrade to Orion is a joint collaboration between Enrollment Management, the Bursar’s Office, and the Office of Information Technology. As a result, Orion now displays a fresh appearance that highlights important content and elevates the user experience for UTD students.

For more information, visit https://utdallas.edu/oit/orion/.

INNOVATION, CLOUD & PLATFORM SERVICES• Big Data Pilot ProgramBig data is an evolving branch of data science that encompasses analyzing the extremely large volumes of data that is generated by people and programs every day. Entities across all fields of business are harnessing this wealth of knowledge to improve their services, diagnose issues, and predict their success.

Social Media Analytics is Innovation, Cloud and Platform Services’ first Big Data pilot project, which is being led by the Database Services team. The goal is to tap into social media to discover insights about the university’s online presence. Keywords and hashtags from Twitter along with Reddit posts are ingested into a data repository. From there, each tweet and post undergo natural language processing for sentiment analysis (if the content is positive, negative, or neutral) and entity analysis (what the content is talking about, like a person, place, or thing). This data is cataloged and used to create dashboards that can answer questions such as:

(continued on page 7)



Participants at the SC19 conference stopped by the UT Dallas booth to learn more about the supercomputing research efforts, as Frank Feagans, OIT Vice President and Chief Information Officer, right, looks on.

OIT team members volunteered their time at HackUTD VI, the largest university hackathon in North Texas.


https://utdallas.edu/oit/orion/

INNOVATION, CLOUD & PLATFORM SERVICES• Big Data Pilot Program(continued from page 6)

“What is the top student feedback on Reddit?”

“Are the University services (such as CometNet) available and well-received?”

“What are the most popular topics on Twitter or Reddit?”

This data collection, processing, and analysis is achieved using Amazon Web Services (AWS) services such as Kinesis Data Firehose, Athena, Comprehend, and Lambda.

As the project progresses, Innovation, Cloud and Platform Services hopes to gather and display information on trending topics outside of the university, project response rates for posts on Twitter and Reddit, determine targets for social media campaigns in response to current trends, and other key performance metrics that determine the success of our online presence. With the sheer volume of data available, services such as Amazon SageMaker, Elastic Map Reduce (EMR), or Kinesis Analytics can be of further aid to develop powerful analytical models to explore and predict the outcomes of strategic decisions.

• Office of Information Technology Adopting Cloud-Based TechnologyThe Office of Information Technology (OIT) is actively adopting cloud-based technologies selecting innovative, cost-efficient, scalable, and resilient solutions to enable the University of Texas at Dallas be one of the nation’s best public research universities and one of the great universities of the world.

OIT is developing a comprehensive plan for migrating applications and infrastructure to the cloud using cloud-native services as appropriate. Some systems will need to remain on campus. The shift to cloud services requires a transformation of OIT into a Cloud Center of Excellence.

OIT has an “AWS Organization” account leveraging Texas DIR Contract. The Organization account allows additional accounts to be extended to Schools, Departments and Researchers on campus. The “AWS Organization” account leverages “AWS Landing Zone” providing a framework to create accounts with best practices and security baseline for each account. OIT provides billing using UTD Cost Centers. More information will be shared via our new OIT website.

• OIT Sponsor HackUTD VIThe Office of Information Technology once again served as one of the sponsors for HackUTD VI, which is the largest university hackathon in North Texas. More than 700 hackers were on the UTD campus to attend the 24-hour event on Saturday, Nov. 9 and Sunday, Nov. 10. OIT was involved in the Alexa skills competition.



More than 700 hackers were on campus for the HackUTD VI that was held in November. OIT has co-sponsored the event for the last two years.


Kishore Thakur, Sr. Director of Innovation, Cloud & Platform Services, right, mentored students at HackUTD VI.


SYSTEMS, SECURITY & IT ARCHITECTURE• Data Centers MigratedThe Office of Information Technology successfully migrated data to newer storage technology, as well as collapsing an aging Data Center as part of an initiative to provide better resource capabilities to the University. This was all accomplished by OIT working together with multiple collaborative groups in order to achieve success with very minimal downtimes to reduce impact to the University business. Not only did OIT migrate to newer, faster technology, but we were also able to consolidate data center space and reduce the power and cooling capacity costs.

• Team Collaborative Efforts on Microsoft Office 365 ProjectThe Systems, Security & IT Architecture team collaborated with the Client Services team on the project to license UT Dallas faculty and staff with the Microsoft Office 365 suite.

GETTING TO KNOW OUR TEAM• Beginning with this newsletter, we will introduce you to a different member of our team. This month, you will learn more about the CLIENT SERVICES team.

PULIN BHATT, Director of Client Services1. How long have you been at UT Dallas? Since December 2017.

2. What is your past job experience? I’ve worked in many industries ranging from law, corporate, banking, and 9 years in Higher Ed. In all of these my focus has been IT support, with expertise in IT Service Management.

3. What do you enjoy most about leading the Client Services team at UT Dallas? We have a dynamic team with so many skills and incredible attitudes. Everyone in Client Services believes in doing what’s right for the students, faculty, and staff of UT Dallas. We can truly impact the experience of all we support and that’s not a privilege we take lightly.

4. Is there anything you would like our customers to know, or a helpful tip you could offer them? You may know that we offer support through email, online chat, and phone. We also have 3 walk-up support areas where you can get help in-person. UT Dallas owned equipment should always be supported by your local Desktop technicians.

5. Tell everyone one fun fact about you? When I was 7, my dad bought me my first computer. I took it apart and broke it within a week. My dad had to hire someone and pay half the cost of the computer to fix it. Since then I’ve loved everything related to computers!



Alison Lewis, Business Technical Analyst III for the Digital Transformation team, listens in at the recent OIT Forum.

Shivani Narain, left, Manager of Identity Access Management, Brandon Anderson, Naveen Jindal School of Management, and Brian Dourty, Chief Technology Officer are all smiles at the recent OIT Forum.


https://utdallas.edu/oit/helpdesk/

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