Postini is being removed from mail services
013 hours
To: Smith Community
From: Office of Smith IT
As the migration from Lotus to Smoogle is functionally complete, we will be turning off Postini spam filtering services as of Tuesday May 28th and instead will be delivering email directly to Smoogle. Nearly all users have had their filtering already disabled as Google (who owns Postini) already has spam filtering features built in. The Postini quarantine reports have already stopped for most users (as the reports are only generated if you have emails that are newly quarantined) and as of Tuesday those reports will stop completely.
You can now manage your Spam folder directly in your Smoogle account. By default the Spam folder is not displayed; you can either click More at the bottom of the list of folders over on the left and scroll all the way down to Spam, or change the label settings so that the folder always appears, as described in this article from Gmail under the ‘How to change your labels settings’ section.
If you find an email has been incorrectly marked as spam you can select it and click the Not Spam button to put it back into the Inbox. You can also add the sender to your Contacts to prevent any further messages from that person being mislabeled as Spam. See this article from Google on other tips you can use to manage spam: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/9008?hl=en
You can find more information from Google as to why messages are marked as spam, how to report spam etc from this article:
If you have any questions please contact the Office of Smith IT Helpdesk on 301 405 2269 or via email at helpme@rhsmith.umd.edu
Thank you.
Office of Smith IT
SYSTEM ALERT: Monthly Server Maintenance Outage – Friday May 24th 2AM – 7AM EST
016 hours
by Chris Gleeson
in Maintenance
To: Smith Community
From: Office of Smith IT
This is a notice to advise you of the upcoming Server Maintenance Outage that will occur at 2am EST Friday, May 24th and last until 7am Friday, May 24th. During this outage many of the Smith servers will be getting patched with the latest Security and Critical Updates that Microsoft and various vendors have released. All Smith School services will be affected due to reboots that are required when the patches are installed. The Active Directory File Server, all Lotus servers and Smith Apps/Citrix servers will also be restarted. Email delivery inbound and outbound will be queued and messages delivered once the servers are placed back into production.
The following services will be effected during the outage:
Blogs (blogs.rhsmith.umd.edu)
MBA Caserooms
Email (Incoming and Outgoing)
Sametime
UNet
MBA Networth
Smith Website
Application Databases that run from Lotus Notes
Active Directory File Server (K and O Drive)
SmithApps/Citrix
Conference Room PCs
Labs & Classrooms
Please direct any questions to the Office of Smith IT Help Desk at helpme@rhsmith.umd.edu or 301-405-2269.
We apologize for any inconvenience that the outage may cause.
Office of Smith IT
Summer Help Desk and Open Computer Lab Hours
0The Office of Smith IT Help Desk will be open 9am – 4pm M-F beginning May 20. Open Computer Labs (1572, 3507, and 3515 VMH) will be open 8am – 10pm M-Th; 8am – 5pm F; and 10am – 6pm S/S beginning May 20.
ePortfolios in Canvas – webinar May 16
0Higher ed: Thursday May 16, 2013, 1pm ET
Description: In this session, we will visit Canvas ePortfolios and consider ways to use ePortfolios as a cumulative resource for students and teachers. We’ll talk about ways to help students organize content as a showcase of assignments, activities and projects, and how to use those ePortfolios to provide evidence of learning.
Register online at learncanvas.webex.com
Getting Started with Canvas
034 days
Summer and Fall Courses are in Canvas now. If you’re anxious to begin building your course site we’re offering a few Getting Started workshops before the end of this spring semester. We will offer them again in August and on demand throughout the summer as well. Our Getting Started session focuses on tips gathered from faculty from across campus, touching on all the basics you will need to know to begin re-designing your space to fit in Canvas. They will all be held in VMH 3522. Register at:
https://umd.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_eM9jEUvuCHxZYEJ
Contact us at canvas@rhsmith.umd.edu with any Canvas questions or to make a one to one appointment anytime.
SYSTEM ALERT: Monthly Server Maintenance Outage – Friday April 19th 2AM – 7AM EST
036 days
To: Smith Community
From: Office of Smith IT
This is a notice to advise you of the upcoming Server Maintenance Outage that will occur at 2am EST Friday, April 19th and last until 7am Friday, April 19th. During this outage many of the Smith servers will be getting patched with the latest Security and Critical Updates that Microsoft and various vendors have released. All Smith School services will be affected due to reboots that are required when the patches are installed. The Active Directory File Server, all Lotus servers and Smith Apps/Citrix servers will also be restarted. Email delivery inbound and outbound will be queued and messages delivered once the servers are placed back into production.
The following services will be effected during the outage:
Blogs (blogs.rhsmith.umd.edu)
MBA Caserooms
Email (Incoming and Outgoing)
Sametime
UNet
MBA Networth
Smith Website
Application Databases that run from Lotus Notes
Active Directory File Server (K and O Drive)
Please direct any questions to the Office of Smith IT Help Desk at helpme@rhsmith.umd.edu or 301-405-2269.
We apologize for any inconvenience that the outage may cause.
Office of Smith IT
Summer and Fall, 2013 course spaces
036 days
Things to know about if you’re teaching Summer or Fall – News about course names, the new EMT tool, migration from Blackboard changes, and steps to copy from one course to another.
The new naming convention for courses should be in place, but missing section numbers until sometime in May. For now they will look something like: ”BMGT000: A real course name here – Fall 2013 jsmith” Before Summer 1 this name will also include section numbers. As before, by default there is one space per course id for each professor teaching. If you want to split that course space into individual courses by section there is a tool to do that now.
Course spaces in Canvas are not created until an instructor has been assigned by the scheduling officer Master course spaces can be created for instructors who are not assigned to a course yet and may want to start building a course space. You can use EMT (see below) using the Create Organizations option to set one up yourself or contact us at canvas@rhsmith.umd.edu and we can set it up for you.
New Tool – EMT
It is called the ELMs Management Tool or EMT. Just click the “ELMs Management Tool” button in the menu at the left on http://elms.umd.edu. With EMT you can:
1. Combine Sections and Courses that are currently separated
2. Create Single Section Courses
3. Manage Enrollments NOTE: While you can add Designers this way (or what we used to call Course Builders in Bb) TAs still must be added by the scheduling officer via SIS data entry (this is a Registrar policy) Email scheduling@rhsmith.umd.edu to add TAs or other Instructors.
4. Create Local Users (users without a Directory login ID)
5. Create Organizations (any non-term based spaces)
6. Look-Up ‘My Courses’ Info
Documentation to support the use of these tools has been is embedded in the EMT both as a full document on the EMT landing page. If you run into problems using it please contact us at canvas@rhsmith.umd.edu.
Blackboard Courses Migrated – it’s different this time
NOTE: The old Blackboard spaces were migrated already. If you haven’t checked them, please do. Make sure any material you will need is there. Blackboard will be completely decommissioned in June and nothing will be available after that happens. The Fall migration this time is more than a file dump! Now it is easier than ever to migrate old course content to new course spaces because all documents, power points, videos, links and text editor content has been migrated into a course structure. Modules were created from the former Bb menu with links to content that was migrated in. It should be far more useful than the old Bb migrated spaces for Spring. See what the Fall migration looks like: http://www.elms.umd.edu/sites/default/files//webfiles/documents/doc/Fall_MigrationInfo.pdf
However, third party content was not migrated and you may need to clean up, relink and rebuild some files that you want to keep or delete. So please do check what migrated before June 30.
6 Easy Steps to get existing Canvas content into New Fall 2013 Course Space
o Go to Fall 2013 course space
o Click on “Settings” on left menu
o Click “Import Content into this Course”
o Choose “Copy content from another Canvas course”
o Select the course you want to copy from
o Then either copy everything from that course or pick and choose what you want to migrate. Make sure to click “Import Course Content”
Here’s a guide on copying courses (complete with screenshots) http://guides.instructure.com/s/2204/m/4152/l/57077-how-do-i-import-content-from-another-canvas-course
Workshops and other help
We will be announcing workshops soon for those who didn’t get a chance to attend Getting Started yet. We plan a few in early May, and more in August. We can schedule other times as needed, and individual appointments too. We have lots of time Monday and Thursday afternoons between now and mid-May and other times on request. Please do let us know if you want to sit with one of us to discuss anything Canvas and clear up any questions you might have. Email canvas@rhsmith.umd.edu to set up an appointment.
Smoogle services now restored
037 days
To: Smith Community
At approximately 8:25am EST we started receiving reports that the Smoogle (hosted on Google Apps for Education) mail system and associated services (e.g. Drive, Sites, Groups etc) were unavailable. This outage appeared to affect all Google Apps customers and not just the business school.
As of 9:50am EST we believe that Google engineers have resolved the issues and services are now available. If you are still having issues logging into your Smoogle account please restart your browser and try again.
We will post updates as and when we have further information. You can also check the status of Google services at any time by visiting their Apps Status dashboard here:
http://www.google.com/appsstatus
Thank you
Office of Smith IT
SERVICE ALERT: Outage Sunday evening, slow mail delivery Monday morning
046 days
by Chris Gleeson
in Alerts
To: Smith Community
From: Office of Smith IT
At approximately 5:30pm yesterday evening a network switch supplied by Campus OIT failed causing multiple service outages in VMH. This impacted the ability to access user files on Active Directory, Smith Apps store and the Blogs server and other miscellaneous services. Smith IT network engineers responded to the outage and the affected switch was fixed and all services were restored on site by 9pm. Campus engineers are continuing to examine the failed equipment for the root cause of the problem.
Additionally overnight a large spam attack was initiated against our legacy Lotus mail servers (scheduled for retirement May 30th as the migration is nearly complete). This caused many tens of thousands of messages to flood the email queues. Network engineers have completed their remedial work and blocked the attackers and removed the spam messages and all email is now flowing normally. Messages that were caught up in the spam attack have been released and been delivered to all of our users.
We apologize for any inconvenience that either of these two events have caused. If you have any questions please contact the Office of Smith IT Helpdesk on 301 405 2269 or via email at helpme@rhsmith.umd.edu.
Thank you.
Office of Smith IT
Robert H. Smith School of Business
3520 Van Munching Hall
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742-1815
301-405-2269 TEL
301-405-2276 FAX
http://www.rhsmith.umd.edu
http://www.rhsmith.umd.edu/smithit
http://www.rhsmith.umd.edu/smithit
Adobe Connect Now Available for Web Conferencing
052 days
Adobe Connect Now Available for Faculty and Staff Web Conferencing
The University of Maryland Division of Information Technology has recently purchased a campus-wide license for the web conferencing software, Adobe Connect. Faculty and Staff may now initiate a web conference, and student hosting capabilities will be added soon. For more information on training opportunities, tutorials, and other online resources, see the Learning Technologies’ Adobe Connect page. (Additional note: There is excellent Tech support available 24×7 by Adobe at 800-422-3623 – let your participants know that connection issues can be resolved by calling this number.)
Adobe Connect Pro is a real-time virtual classroom environment designed for distance education and collaboration. Faculty can now create fully-featured live virtual classrooms to hold office hours, guest lectures and meetings. As long as individuals have stable broadband Windows-based or Mac operating systems computers, they can participate in live (or view recorded) web conferences.
To initiate your own web conference, please visit http://www.webmeeting.umd.edu and login with your directory ID and password. Tutorials and training info can be found at http://otal.umd.edu/adobeconnect. Best Practice tips we’ve gathered from users so far:
Some best practice tips from early Faculty adopters:
- Wired connections with fast internet speed are best. Hosts and other presenters MUST be on a wired connection even if their wireless connection is faster. There is variable latency on wireless connections that can cause problems that require re-connection.
- Don’t give everyone mic rights have them raise their hand if they’d like to speak and then grant them mic rights on an individual basis
- Use a headset w/ mic to reduce echo and background noise.
- Have the room set up how you would like ahead of time with PowerPoints already loaded. The navigational tools are better with uploaded slides than they are with slides on your shared desktop.
- Hosts and presenters should take 4 minutes to watch these tips on sharing Powerpoint. See how to control what the see or allow they to control slide progression: http://tv.adobe.com/watch/learn-adobe-connect/sharing-powerpoint-presentations/
- Prepare in advance – Be sure to click through each slide to make sure they were not changed in the upload conversion. Run the audio set-up wizard. Practice with a friend.
- If you are using guest lecturers do a practice session a couple days ahead of time with them connecting from the exact same location and computer they will be doing the live session to make sure their connection is ok.
- If it is a large group with guest lecturers have a moderator to keep the conversation going and keep track of questions coming in.
- The best troubleshooting tip is to simply switch browsers first. Or log out and then log back in ( I was in a webinar today in Adobe with 250 people at least and that is the only troubleshooting they gave people), they can also just go through the audio-set-up wizard. If these steps don’t work, the user with issues should call Adobe Connect support at 1-800-422-3623
- Here is a doc on known Chrome issues that are different with each different version of that browser: http://helpx.adobe.com/adobe-connect/kb/google-chrome-browser-incompatibility.html Hosts and presenters are most affected by the Chrome issues. Participants can attend, but not share webcam, audio or files if these problems exist.
A recording of the DivIT Intro to Adobe Connect webinar: https://webmeeting.umd.edu/p737vfzf9r0/
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