Current and Upcoming Information Technology Services (ITS) Projects for 2018

In the fall of 2017, Information Technology Services began a program that paired an ITS staff member with an academic chair from each of the University colleges to collaborate in an exchange of information. The purpose is for ITS to better understand each academic department and their programs while simultaneously providing possible technology solutions where the college needs it the most. This is one of many initiatives our new CIO, Jake Hornsby, has initiated in supporting the President's goal of improving student success. By gathering and compiling these data points from the departments, ITS hopes to recommend sustainable and effective processes and technologies that promote this goal. A dashboard will soon be published to reflect this information for our campus partners to review.

As part of Provost Edward Inch's initiative to improve learning spaces in the campus that encompasses classrooms and labs, University CIO Jake Hornsby has partnered with Academic Affairs in implementing a program to review and redesign various labs across campus. The goal is to ensure that learning areas such as labs are accessible for students-- even when off-campus-- utilizing up-to-date technology. ITS will employ modern methodologies and infrastructure to improve usability, management, and maintenance cost; while improving software availability and ease of its use in these classrooms and labs.

"With Provost Inch's guidance and the trend of increased need of computer resources in classes, ITS has focused on ensuring that each student have access to compute resources that will allow them to complete their course requirements and tasks via partnerships with the various colleges to improve and upgrade the various labs we have on campus. We feel this is a very good first step in helping students matriculate and progress through their degree courses." said Gene Lim, ITS Director and in charge of coordinating the effort to improve the labs.

From 2016 to now, ITS has been working on a campus-wide project to upgrade telephones on both the Hayward and Concord campus from the old standard to an updated “Voice over Internet Protocol” system, or “VOIP.” This new system will have the benefit of running over the campus data network instead of standard phone lines. The project has been rolled out in 2 parts, with Phase 1 consisting of a test roll-out to 150 users across campus that was completed early this year. Phase 2 involves the installment of VOIP phones across both campuses, and is currently in progress. 

ITS is currently working on the 3rd Phase of the Website redesign, where individual departments and other pages will receive the same updated look as the CSUEB homepage. Departments will be contacted by Web Services to redesign their site, or to teach Cascade Server experienced staff how to take the Do-It-Yourself Approach. Taking the DIY approach gives Departments a chance to review their content, ensuring that only up to date content is migrated over to the new website, and allowing them to design their own pages by using the new content types available.

Web Services gives a 1-hour training on how to use the new templates, giving them a clean site shell to start with. Users interested in getting this training and doing a DIY website should contact Web Services.

So far Web Services has completed migrating the College of Science, Student Affairs, is wrapping up the College of Education and Allied Studies, and is starting on the College of Letters, Arts, and Social Sciences soon.

More items are being added to the Service Catalog in ServiceNow, such as SARFS/ESARFS. These forms are going to be transitioned from the original paper forms to fully online forms, which will be processed as standard tickets. Permissions such as team drive access, administrator access, VPN Access for vendors, etc. will all be processable through ServiceNow in the future, with an estimated completion of Spring 2018. This transition will streamline the request process, allowing users to view the progress of their requests and be easily notified of any missing qualifications or other steps they need to take.