Enterprise Systems Support is working hard to provide our customers with the new Windows 7 OS, as well as the new Microsoft Office 2010 software suite. The new client environment has been deployed throughout the ESS office for about 3 months in order for us to do testing and gain experience using and supporting the new environment prior to a universal deployment. We are now in the process of deploying the new client environment to a small group of employees that we support outside of our department to begin getting customer feedback on the new environment so that we can do further refinements.
Some of the major enhancements included in the new environment are:
The Julian Hall data center is being remodeled and redesigned to improve the existing infrastructure and allow for increased usage of the data center by all departments on campus. The datacenter layout has been revised to increase space utilization and cooling efficiency, and the raised floor is being replaced as each new section of the data center is remodeled. All new server racks and power backup systems are being put in place and the cooling systems for the space are being evaluated for a complete re-design to handle the increased server density.
Some of the major enhancements to the data center are:
The Enterprise Service Desk (ESD) is designed to handle questions and issues concerning enterprise-wide services such as PeopleSoft, SharePoint and other administrative applications. The ESD was created and staffed in time to come online for the May 1st start of the Benefits Choice period using the new PeopleSoft software. As of July 1st, the ESD also began assisting employees with questions concerning the PeopleSoft payroll and human resources modules as well as the new Budget Management and Reporting System (BMRS).
The Mainframe Outsourcing project will plan and execute the outsourcing of the University’s mainframe to a 3rd party provider. The project has created, submitted, and received responses back on an RFP and is currently in the process of evaluating those responses. Once a response is selected and approved by the Board of Trustees, then implementation will being. Implementing the outsourcing will take several months and should be completed by mid-March, 2012.
The project to create a campus-wide SharePoint 2010 environment is underway. Currently configuration, site administration and migration procedures are being developed in the test environment. Production virtual servers have been requested and are being provisioned. Site migration should begin in February, with the production environment being available by March 2011.
The SCOM Integration project has just completed Phase II of a planned three phase project. With Phase II, SCOM is monitoring almost all of the enterprise applications such as the VMware environment, Oracle Environment, DATATEL, BMRS, PeopleSoft, and SAN. At this time it also monitors the hardware components and usage of a large number of the other servers supported by ESS. The SCOM system has also been integrated into the Altiris incident management system so that SCOM alerts will automatically create incident tickets and assign them to the appropriate support team. Phase III, which runs from July 1st through Dec. 31st of this year, will see all of the rest of the servers and services supported by ESS being monitored by SCOM.
The new Exchange 2010 environment came online on April 1st. Most mailboxes have been moved off of the old Exchange 2003 environment, but there are still some areas of campus that are waiting until later summer to migrate their customers to the new servers. The new Exchange 2010 architecture is fully redundant and has greatly increased performance.
Some of the new features of Exchange 2010 are:
How to Turn Off Pop-Up Blockers
One of the most frequent questions we get from our customers here at the Enterprise Service Desk is how to view our paychecks in iPeople. For a lot of people, simply clicking on the paycheck date doesn’t do anything and the same can be said for other ISU websites when their browser tries to open [...]
Smartphone Updates
They’re a few reasons why updating your smartphone devices regularly is important. Updates renew security features as well as provide bug fixes. You should check for a new version of software about every 1-2 months. Below are commonly used devices as well as update information: IPad/IPhone: To upgrade your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, connect [...]
