There is excitement in the air as this term winds down, and we wish you all good luck! UIS is continually tweaking our new Services Portal with great feedback from our community. It has also been one year since our massive SQL migration, and we appreciate all the immense help and hard work that now lets many of our core systems run faster and more efficiently. Several other systems are undergoing big improvements right now, and we appreciate all of the partnerships that make these possible (for more info on those please read on). As always, your UIS team is just a phone, email, or Zoom connection away!
Thank you and go Boxers!
Brandon Gatke
CIO / CISO
Services Portal Keeps Getting Better
Since we launched our new Services Portal a month and a half ago, we've continued to make improvements: Several new services were added to the UIS service catalog with new help request forms. New knowledge base articles have been added. Requests for the Marketing & Communications team were added (with more departments coming online soon). We made it easier to get help even if you don't know what form to fill out. The search tool on the site has been improved.
Thanks to everyone whose feedback has helped us improve this system.
Zoom Recordings Expiring After One Year
Starting Feb. 2, on both regular Zoom and Protected Data Zoom, cloud recordings will start expiring once they have been in Zoom cloud storage for one year or more. As of Feb. 2, any recordings that are already one year or older will go away, and afterwards recordings will automatically go away on a rolling basis when they reach one year of age. This is a necessary measure to preserve our limited and rapidly dwindling cloud storage quota. UIS recommends downloading recordings from Zoom and storing them on a system such as Box.
Read Receipts Being Enabled Jan. 11
After review by the University Technology Committee, UIS will enable the ability to request email read receipts when sending internal emails beginning on Jan. 11. Once enabled, within the Boxer Mail web interface you can request read receipts go out to Pacific email account holders (students, employees and sponsored accounts). Recipients will be asked if they want to send a receipt back to you verifying that they read your message. Compatibility with email clients other than the Boxer Mail web client is limited. For further information and restrictions, please read Google's instructions on using read receipts.
Watch For Gift Card Scams
With the holidays upon us, gift card phishing is growing in volume. Be aware that Pacific employees will never email you to ask you to purchase gift cards for payments of goods without prior conversation. Please double check the email address of any emails asking you to do anything you don't normally do, and request assistance if you need help determining if an email is legitimate.
Google Tip: Find a Time to Meet
Google makes it easy to find when people are free for a meeting. When you are in the Google Calendar web interface and start creating a new event, and you've added people in to the "Add guests" box (you can put in either names, email addresses, or a Google Group) then you can click "Find a Time" in order to see every invitee's free/busy times. You can also click "Suggested Times" under the list of invitees to have Google provide you with a list of times where everyone's calendar is free. If you also have the Zoom Scheduler Chrome extension installed and setup, you can then click "Make it a Zoom Meeting" to schedule a Zoom meet and add its link to the calendar invitation.
Creative Cloud Price Reduction
Creative Cloud is a subscription service that gives access to Adobe creative products such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, etc. Taking advantage of a deal with Adobe, we are now able to give existing Creative Cloud license holders two-for-one for their existing licenses, allowing them to give access to more people in their departments, and we can obtain new licenses for $99 per year per employee. In addition, we are transitioning the way we provide Creative Cloud to students: giving them user-based licenses rather than restricting them to accessing Creative Cloud in particular computer labs. To get Creative Cloud for members of your team, see Technology and Software Purchasing in the Service Portal.
Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Starting now, when you have a ticket with UIS that gets closed, you may be randomly selected to receive an email inviting you to do a survey about your experience. The survey only takes a few moments to fill out and helps us to continue to improve the services we offer to you. We appreciate all of your feedback.