Information Technology Services activities
End-of-semester support
Typically, there is an increase in demand for support services at the end of each semester and this semester was no exception. The ITS Help Desk received over 2,000 “tickets” in April and May alone. The expansion of support services into the Bartle Library, known as the ITS Service Desk, provided additional support during this extremely busy time. The Help Desk also supported other areas of campus, creating new accounts for the many summer employees hired by the Physical Facilities Department, in addition to creating accounts to support the growth in faculty who joining Binghamton in the fall.
Other areas of ITS helped support the public printers and computers across campus, which were used to print over 6 million pages during the semester. The public computers had 9,214 and 8,802 unique users during the months of April and May, respectively. The campus Virtual Desktop environment use continues to grow, with nearly 2,500 unique users in April and May. To support this growth, a system upgrade was completed at the beginning of June.
The Academic and Research Services area of ITS also replaced some public computers across campus in the beginning of June. Eighty-seven computers were replaced in the Downtown Center, in addition to incremental upgrades made to the public computers in some residential computing areas including College-in-the-Woods, Brandywine, Hinman, Hillside, C4 and Mountainview.
Updates to campus infrastructure
ITS continues to make upgrades to the campus infrastructure with a focus on providing efficient systems. The Operations and Infrastructure group continues to configure virtual servers to support campus needs including new projects and software. Work continues on the second phase of the comprehensive network upgrade across campus. The wired and wireless networks in the West Gym and other areas across campus were upgraded, in addition to the wireless networks in both Science 3 and Science 5.
ITS also invested in a new piece of hardware to help reduce the total volume of data crossing the transit links to our campus network. The Qwilt video caching solution was purchased and installed at the beginning of June. This new piece of hardware caches videos from the Internet and stores them locally, allowing video to stream faster and freeing up overall traffic on the campus network. Internet services should be faster overall as a result of this new hardware.
Campus e-waste recycling continues to grow as ITS helps facilitate the recycling of outdated, non-functional IT equipment. Another six pallets of e-waste was processed in the past quarter, resulting in an estimated 18 tons of e-waste recycled so far this year.
Other ITS projects
ITS completed 41 projects last quarter for various campus customers, including an upgrade to the StarRez application, updates to the Annual Faculty Reporting Web application and support for the implementation of the College Scheduler software. The new test-scoring software and process was also launched this quarter and will provide additional data and statistics for the grading of exams.
The Innovations Team completed a project in collaboration with the Student Support Services to create a digital application from the paper forms used for the mid-term evaluation of students’ progress. The paper forms were hard to track, frustrating for faculty to complete, and yielded a low rate of return. The completed project and application was launched last quarter, providing faculty instructions to use the online application to report student status including course grade, attendance and other determined metrics. The roll-out was a success with positive feedback and a higher completion rate. Several campus programs and athletics have adopted this application to help track compliance and other requirements and there are plans to potentially roll the application out to all faculty in the future.