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October 30, 2009
Update on Web Services Outage
This morning at approximately 1:00AM we suffered a hardware failure that interrupted myUMBC and campus web page (e.g. www.umbc.edu) services. The problem was reported at 6:30AM today and DoIT staff began working on the problem remotely. Our response team arrived on campus by 7:15AM and had all services restored by 8:15AM today.
We are currently examining logs and other records to determine what caused this hardware failure to ensure it does not occur again.
This outage only affected the web services listed above. Peoplesoft, Blackboard, and E-mail were unaffected by this outage.
Posted by mikec at 10:45 AM | TrackBack
October 26, 2009
Re-Register for E2Campus By Oct 31
A recent change to the authentication system for E2Campus means that all members of the UMBC community need to re-register for emergency campus text messages. If you registered your phone prior to August 26, 2009 you MUST login through myUMBC under your personal profile and notifications or directly at:
https://my.umbc.edu/go/alerts/
Users who have not re-registered by October 31, 2009 will no longer receive UMBC alerts.
FAQs
I already registered for E2Campus, can I migrate my old account?
Unfortunately, existing accounts cannot be migrated. All existing users will need to re-register with E2Campus. Since we now know who the person is relative to UMBC's identity management system we will not need to do future re-registrations.
How long before my existing E2Campus account is deleted?
Existing E2Campus accounts will remain functional through October 31, 2009. UMBC will purge the old accounts after this date, thus leaving the new accounts in place.
If I re-register now will I get two text messages sent to my phone?
Users that have re-registered but still have an old account (i.e. until Oct 31st) will not receive duplicate text messages. E2campus can tell if the same phone number is in their system for more than one account, and will only send one message to that phone number. After October 31, 2009, old UMBC accounts that have the same phone number as new accounts will be deleted.
Why is UMBC changing the system?
Background:
E2Campus was initially setup to use external, non-UMBC accounts. This meant that users had to create a user name and password that was hosted at E2Campus. This presented a few challenges for UMBC.
-There was no way to know a user’s affiliation (Faculty, Staff or Student)
-We can't tell if a user is still affiliated with the university (e.g. graduated, quit, terminated etc.)
-Users forgot both user name and password but UMBC DoIT Help Desk could not assist.
Solution:
DoIT worked with E2Campus to be the first campus nationally to use the Shibboleth authentication standard to provide single sign on (SSO) ability. This means that users will no longer need to create an external account with E2campus. Instead UMBC is the identity provider and passes this information to E2Campus.
Benefits of New Authentication System:
- We know who the person is and their affiliation (e.g. student, staff, faculty, grad student etc.)
- We know the person’s status (graduated, quit etc.)
- There is no password to remember since the login is done via SSO from myUMBC.
- We can purge/delete old accounts of people who have left the University
Posted by mikec at 10:19 AM | TrackBack
October 23, 2009
Windows 7 Is Here But Don't Rush an Upgrade
Windows 7
Microsoft released Windows 7 on October 22, 2009. DoIT staff have been actively testing the Beta versions of Windows 7. Initial results from the testing are promising. The new interface is more streamlined, the boot times are faster and many features that worked just barely under Vista now work flawlessly. While testing has gone reasonably well DoIT will not officially support Windows 7 until February 2010. We encourage waiting a few months before upgrading existing systems to Windows 7. This will allow many of the bugs and lagging application and driver support to catch up thus preventing problems for users.
Posted by mikec at 11:05 AM | TrackBack
October 9, 2009
UMBC "Check My Activity" Reports for Students Now Available Inside Blackboard
Based on user response to a system-wide announcement in all UMBC Blackboard courses this past week, the Division of Information Technology (DoIT) has made a permanent link to the self-service "Check My Activity" (CMA) reporting tools for students on the myBlackboard tools menu.
Specifically, all students now have an easy way to find the "Check My Activity" (CMA) and "Grade Distribution Report" (GDR) tools for comparing their own activity against an anonymous summary of their course peers. Using this same myBlackboard tools menu link, faculty and staff have access to similar reports, though staff are unlikely to have need for the GDR tool, which is only valuable if a grade has been entered in a Bb grade book.
As reported previously by DoIT and The Retriever Weekly, students have had access to their own CMA and GDR tools since Spring of 2009. However, adoption has been slow, probably because the tools don't reside inside Blackboard. So, a link to both reports was posted on Friday, October 2, at 5 p.m. and expired a week later at the same time on Friday, October 9.
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| CMA & GDR Demo |
- In just one week, CMA & GDR usage activity increased more than 1,000 percent to 6,051 visits compared to 391 visits the entire previous month (Sept. 1 to Oct. 1).
- The total number of page views increased to 20,008 from 537 the previous month. Average page views per visit also increased to 3.31 compared to 1.37.
- The average time spent on the CMA & GDR reports jumped to 1 minute, 18 seconds, compared to just 13 seconds the previous month.
- Also, returning visitors accounted for 83 percent of all page views, and they spent more time on the site (1 min, 26 secs) compared to new visitors (58 secs). This means the the CMA & GDR tools constitute a "sticky site," in that once visitors discover it, they come back again and again.
- Is is worth noting that the Grade Distribution Report (GDR) was by far the most popular tool, accounting for 73 percent of all visits to the UMBC Blackboard Reports site that contains all "self service" tools and list of Most Active Courses for each semester over the last two years.
While user activity steadily declined as the week progressed, it may be because there were fewer new grades to compare user activity against. This strong interest in grades and related Blackboard activity confirms key findings of a national study showing students value the ability to check grades and gain access to practice quizzes and sample exercises as the most valuable functions in a course management system (CMS) like Blackboard.
A full report showing the CMA & GDR usage activity from September 1 to October 9 is available here.