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Greetings Pacific University Community! We are off to a warm, wonderful start to February, and it’s great to see all of our students coming and going on our various campuses. Over the next few weeks you may notice a few changes in Google, and in Duo, our multi-factor authentication application. These are changes that our service providers are pushing out to all customers to keep these services up to date and are no cause for worry. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel reach out to us.
We’ve been getting lots of great feedback on ways to help improve wireless service. We’ve started receiving the wireless hardware we ordered many months ago to increase access, and yet we’re still trying to do our best, while knowing that the average individual on campus has three to five wireless devices in use. This makes it a unique balancing act to prioritize learning, patient care, instruction, and everything else that goes into having a great quality of life on campus. As always, your UIS team is just a phone, email, or Zoom connection away!
Thank you and go Boxers!
Brandon Gatke
CIO / CISO
Zoom Recordings in the Cloud Expire After a Year.
All Zoom recordings stored in Zoom's cloud recording space are now set to expire one year after they were made. You will not receive any warning before your year-old recordings expire. However, after a recording expires it is still accessible for 30 days in your "Trash" in your Recordings menu in Zoom and can be retrieved from there. UIS suggests downloading any recording you need to keep long-term and uploading it to Box or Google Drive.
Daily Message Limits May Affect Mail Merges
Employees who send mail via mail merges may run into Google's daily email message limits. Google limits email messages for individual accounts to 2,000 messages or 10,000 recipients within any 24 hour period. If your job duties require sending out emails that exceed the daily limits, please contact the Technology Helpdesk for assistance setting up alternate methods to allow you to send larger email merges.
Out-of-Date Computers May Be Restricted
The Helpdesk has been in touch with multiple employees about computers that are badly out of date or missing important security or client management software. Starting Feb. 28, computers that are still out of date may lose access to the internet or face other restrictions. If you have received messages from the Helpdesk about an out-of-date machine, please get back to us by the 28th to avoid possible disruptions.
Beware of YouTube Community Guidelines Violations
Some instructors have asked students to use YouTube to record and share video assignments. Please be aware that YouTube automatically detects and flags any recording that looks to be a violation of its Community Guidelines. Videos can be flagged even if students do not make them publicly accessible. We have seen student assignments that, out of context, give the appearance of violating one of these guidelines and resulted in students' YouTube accounts being locked, making those students unable to use YouTube for their other school work. The CETCI team can help instructors find alternatives to YouTube for video assignments.
Google Chat and Interface Changes Coming
As of Feb. 22, UIS will turn on Google Chat as the default chat client for Pacific Google accounts. Google Chat is Google's successor to Hangouts. If you have Hangouts visible in your Boxer Mail web interface, this will change to Google Chat the next time you re-load. Your messages from Google Hangouts will be visible in Chat. Google Chat will also be available at chat.google.com after the change.
By the end of June, Google will be making a mandatory change to the interface you see when viewing your Boxer Mail account on the web. You can preview this change here.
Multi-Factor Authentication Change
As of late January, Duo (our multi-factor authentication provider) made a minor change to how it prompts users with Yubikey devices. Rather than a pop-up asking you to use your Yubikey, you must now select it from the "Device" pulldown menu and click the green "Use Security Key" button.
Starting Feb. 22, we will move to Duo's Universal Prompt. This change will future-proof us from changes recently announced by Google that would otherwise make your Yubikey unusable. You can see a preview of what the universal prompt will look like here.
Google Tip: Send Mail As
You can use your Boxer Mail account to send mail as any email address you control. Just add the mail address in Google settings, confirm the request from that other address' inbox, then you can select this address in the "From" pulldown menu when composing messages in the Boxer Mail web interface. Just be aware that this message will show up in your Boxer Mail sent items, and not in the sent items for the other address' mailbox. For more information, see Google's documentation.