OIT News
Monthly news briefs, information and announcements
Office of Information Technology, NC State University
Issue 40, February 2011
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01: New campus voice mail system coming April 14
02: Campus IT employees to pilot Google Apps @ NC State
03: OIT to hold information session on e-mail services Feb. 17
04: ComTech continues work on campus IP telephony project
05: OIT Lunch & Learns: “Changing Face of e-Books & NCSU Libraries” and “New Voice Mail”
06: SAR training scheduled for March 8
07: Safely disposing of storage drives
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01: New campus voice mail system coming April 14
OIT Communication Technologies (ComTech) has delayed the deployment of Cisco Unity Connection, the new campus voice mail system, to April 14. To prepare for the deployment, staff collected data from colleges and campus departments to map individual users to their associated telephone numbers and Unity IDs. This process, however, took longer than anticipated.
Cisco Unity Connection will consolidate the voice mail systems of Main Campus and the College of Veterinary Medicine into one highly-resilient, feature-rich system. In addition to the traditional telephone interface, the new voice mail system will eventually offer campus users the ability to access their voice mail via Web and e-mail clients. Cisco Unity Connection replaces the aging campus Octel voice mail system.
OIT ComTech is currently testing the new voice mail system and will provide users with instructions on how to set up their new voice mail boxes prior to the deployment. More information will be available on the ComTech Web site.
02: Campus IT employees to pilot Google Apps @ NC State
As an early step in the process of moving faculty and staff to Google Apps @ NC State, OIT has migrated a small number of campus IT employee accounts into the same e-mail service that students have been using since the fall. These are the first of a series of early migrations, which will later include other faculty and staff representatives.
OIT announced last November that it was moving forward with a phased testing process to migrate faculty and staff to Google Apps Education Edition. This action was recommended by the NexGen E-mail Task Force, which was charged last spring by Dr. Marc Hoit, vice chancellor for information technology, to explore the next generation of e-mail systems for university employees. Last fall, the recommendation received endorsements from the Messaging Technical Oversight Committee and Campus IT Directors.
Early adopters are currently testing the employee migration process in order to streamline it for a subsequent migration of other university employees. After significant planning and testing, OIT will move e-mail accounts of current Unity/Cyrus e-mail users to Google Apps, followed by GroupWise users’ accounts.
An update on this topic will be a part of an overall e-mail services meeting to be held with campus IT staff at 3 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 17 in the D.H. Hill Library Auditorium.
03: OIT to hold information session on e-mail services Feb. 17
OIT invites the campus IT community to an information session on its e-mail services from 3 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 17 in the D.H. Hill Library Auditorium (formerly the Erdahl-Cloyd Theater).
OIT staff will provide updates on the campus transition to Google’s Postini service for anti-virus, anti-spam and message archiving; the GroupWise 8 upgrade; and the status of moving employee e-mail accounts to Google Apps @ NC State. For more information, visit the Next Generation (NexGen) E-mail Project Web site.
04: ComTech continues work on campus IP telephony project
OIT ComTech is continuing to work to migrate the campus telephony infrastructure from AT&T digital lines to Cisco Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology. Phase II of this project is slated to begin this spring and is expected to be completed in June 2012.
More than 5,000 AT&T digital telephone lines will be converted, and the actual telephone sets currently used by customers will be replaced by Cisco Internet Protocol (IP) telephone sets. Customers will receive a new VoIP telephone if they now have a Meridian telephone or if someone who answers their calls has a Meridian telephone. OIT is identifying affected users and will be contacting them soon. Training on the new Cisco handsets will be made available, and customers will have a three- to five-day period to gain expertise on the new telephone before their old telephone is removed. Future project updates will be available on the ComTech Web site.
05: OIT Lunch & Learns: “Changing Face of e-Books & NCSU Libraries” and “New Voice Mail”
OIT’s Brown Bag Lunch and Learn series will present the following upcoming workshops:
- “The Changing Face of e-Books and NCSU Libraries” will be held from noon to 1 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 23 in 216 Scott Hall. The e-book landscape has changed dramatically, and library collections are becoming more and more digital. How does this affect you and your favorite e-reader? Orion Pozo and David Woodbury of the NCSU Libraries will take a look at the latest generation of e-readers available, describe the library’s digital collection, and talk about how your personal e-reader can interact with that collection. Bring questions! To register for this workshop, visit Classmate.
- “New Voice Mail for Campus” will be held from noon to 1 p.m. on Wednesday, March 16 in 216 Scott Hall. On April 14, the aging campus Octel voice mail system will be replaced by Cisco Unity Connection. Trish Palmer of OIT ComTech will provide a brief outline of how the new voice mail system will be deployed to campus and a demo of its telephone and Web-based interfaces. Palmer will close with a brief discussion of how this project relates to ComTech’s Internet Protocol (IP) telephony project,” which will replace the campus AT&T digital line infrastructure with a Cisco Voice over IP (VoIP) infrastructure. The IP telephony project is slated to begin after the completion of the voice mail system conversion. To register for this workshop, visit Classmate.
06: SAR training scheduled for March 8
Security Access Request (SAR) training for campus requestors and approvers of access to secured university data will be held from 9:30 a.m. to noon on Tuesday, March 8 in ITTC Lab 2 in D.H. Hill Library. Please visit Classmate to view available classes and to sign up for training.
07: Safely disposing of storage drives
Hard drives can be found in a variety of equipment today including computers, multifunctional printers, copiers, fax machines, USB drives, and other storage devices. Before you recycle, surplus or dispose of your individual or business storage devices, make sure you no longer have personal or sensitive data stored on them. Keep in mind that programs storing temporary files or even just Web browsing can result in sensitive data being stored on your hard drive.
According to OIT Security and Compliance, deleting files and directories or reformatting hard drives and storage devices will not fully remove any sensitive data physically from them, even if the data is protected by a password or key. Many deletion techniques for data only erase the data to the point where it can still be recovered by forensic programs.
To safely reuse your hard drives or the equipment containing them, Security and Compliance recommends using programs such as Active@ KillDisk Professional, which permanently removes data stored on the hardware by overwriting the data multiple times. The university has purchased an enterprise license for this product, and it’s available to campus computer users for free.
If the hard drive is broken, or you cannot reuse it for some other reason, Security and Compliance recommends destroying the hard drive or other storage device physically by shredding, crushing and/or disintegrating it. For more information on how to dispose of electronic media with sensitive data, visit the OIT Electronic Media Disposal Process for Campus Web page.
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