The Office of Information Technology completed many projects in 2019, including establishing a new strategic plan, mission and vision for the organization. Finance and Operations IT was also consolidated into OIT to offer effective, cohesive and collaborative technology services to the campus.
OIT completed much work this year that affects teaching, learning, research and operations. A few highlights are listed below.
Teaching – Made great progress migrating from Tegrity to Panopto as UA’s new lecture capture software with over 1,200 videos recorded this fall.
Learning – Implemented an Argos Student Performance dashboard which helps identify at-risk students by comparing student grades to course averages, informing UA faculty and staff how to help students achieve success in their courses.
Research – Upgraded UA’s high-performance computing environment and added 600 TB of HPC-accessible storage.
Operations – Supported UA’s core technologies by performing five Banner bundle upgrades (128 individual upgrades), 15 database refreshes, 23 Oracle database upgrades and 17 SQL server upgrades.
Additional highlights:
- Installed over 227,687 feet (43 miles) of structured cabling enhancing the campus network.
- Upgraded 1,500 building switches.
- Moved from WPA2 to Eduroam wireless network.
- Triaged 12,000 IT Service Desk tickets.
- Retired the TDM Nortel switch and migrated all phone lines to Voice over Internet Protocol.
- Upgraded over 850 computers across campus from Windows 7 to Windows 10.
- Launched new online campus map.
- Processed 440,000 workflow instances.
- Developed award-winning work order mobile app for Facilities and Grounds.
- Upgraded 13 classrooms, installed 59 digital signs.
- Hosted 52 instructional technology workshops.
- Provided captioning grants to support captioning and transcription for more than 8,000 minutes of video and audio content.
- Kicked off a project to move OIT-supported mailboxes to the Office 365 cloud environment.
- Deployed System Center Configuration Manager to OIT-supported workstations for next-generation remote desktop management.
- Blocked an average of 9,062,979 threat email messages per week.