It’s been another fairly uneventful week for IT here at the Center. There were only a couple of items of note involving the video conferencing system. The first was an issue with Monday’s Entomology Colloquium which was transmitted from the Stockwell room. Pullman saw only a black screen at the start, but eventually got full viewing, but reception for Island County never improved beyond that. I was contacted afterward by AMS to schedule a maintenance session to see if we can figure out what the problem might have been and how to avoid the problem in the future. The will tentatively be Monday morning. However, I have not received confirmation back from the AMS tech.
The second issue was for a class in the large conference room where the transmission was not going through the projector to the large screen. Restarting the system reset the equipment and everything started working normally. I was not around when this occurred, so I cannot speculate on what caused the problem. Keep me informed if this becomes a regular occurrence.
Other news:
Jim met with various groups on campus last Friday including Bill Bonner and Nick Pappin in CAHNRS IT. Jim informed me that they had a good discussion about our communications systems and what we need to move forward. They also discussed improving communications between us so that we all stay in the loop on how/when things will get done. Jim explained our frustrations when we are left in the dark about what is happening on their end. They said they will try to send us frequent updates to let us know what is going on over there, even if its just to tell us that they have not heard back from whomever they are waiting on that may be holding things up. At least we will know they have not forgotten about us. As for the phone system.. Apparently, the roadblock, for now at least, is that they need to finish upgrading our internet systems before that can happen. Jim hopes to know more about all of this before the next faculty meeting.
IT Updates:
Security: security updates continue to be released and installed to various systems on campus, such as Orale and Cisco updates. Most of these are related to the enterprise systems that run the business operations, but they also affect some of the managed cloud services such as myWSU. (seen note below)
myWSU: There will be maintenance to the myWSU Portal environment this weekend. On Saturday morning, February 10th, Oracle will install a critical security update into our Portal environment. While they do not expect major impacts to users during this maintenance, access to myWSU will be available, but end users may experience unexpected results or lose access and need to log back in to re-establish connections if they access myWSU during the maintenance. This is scheduled to occur from 1:00 am to about 9:00 am Saturday.