As we gear up for another academic year, CTS reminds the campus community: All questions about or problems with any CTS-provided and/or –supported device or service should be directed to the CTS Helpdesk: helpdesk@potsdam.edu , 315-267-4444. If you are directed to voice mail, leave a message with contact information to ensure the fastest response to your report or inquiry. Thank you for helping us to help you!
ACTIVE students have been migrated to Office 365 and should have all received a final message on our old mail server. If you are an active student and can not log in to Office 365 at portal.office.com, please contact the CTS Helpdesk at helpdesk@potsdam.edu or 315-267-4444. If you are directed to voice mail, leave a message with contact information and someone will return your call. GRADUATED students (Alumni) will be migrated in groups this week. If you are an alumnus, do not attempt to use Outlook/Office 365 until you receive notification that you have been migrated.
Here are instructions for creating an e-mail signature in the web version of Outlook: http://blogs.potsdam.edu/network/o365-creating-an…ture-web-version/
To the Campus Community: The Moodle maintenance window scheduled for Friday, August 19th has been canceled and tentatively rescheduled for Friday, August 26th at 8:00 P. M. to Saturday, August 27th at 8:00 A. M. Moodle will be unavailable during this time. Please plan your Fall 2016 course preparation accordingly. We have delayed in order to ensure that our Moodle migration is as transparent and minimally disruptive to you as possible. We have encountered a small subset of very large Moodle courses that have been problematic to the migration process during testing. Our team is working to resolve this issue so that we can complete the final migration to our new hosting provider in a timely manner. We also continue to configure and test the course shell request and creation process to ensure that it works seamlessly in the new Moodle environment.
To The Campus Community: CTS has worked diligently this summer to upgrade and improve a number of the mission-critical technologies utilized by faculty, staff, and students. I am pleased to inform you that we will be moving Moodle to an off-campus hosting provider, as well upgrading to the latest version of the platform. An extended maintenance window will be required to complete the project. During this window, Moodle will be unavailable while final course data is migrated from our on-campus servers to the new hosting provider. Please be advised that we are tentatively planning for Moodle to be unavailable beginning Friday, August 19th at 8:00 P. M. until approximately Saturday, August 20th at 8:00 A. M. to complete the migration. Please plan accordingly. Any changes to our current plan will be announced by Thursday evening, and a confirmation email will be sent to the campus on Friday. What does this migration mean for you? You can continue to prepare your Fall 2016 courses right up until 8:00 P. M. on Friday, August 19th. At that time, a copy of all your data will be moved to the upgraded Moodle site at our hosting provider. Beginning Saturday, August 20th, you can continue to prepare courses at the new Moodle site. All your data from our current Moodle site will be available to you in the new one. Past semester course data will also be migrated to the new system. Course shell request processes will remain the same for our new site. Procedures for seeking help remain the same. Please contact moodlesupport@potsdam.edufor assistance with Moodle specific issues. Please contact helpdesk@potsdam.edu for assistance with username and passwords. Why are we migrating Moodle now? We have very few, small windows where such a migration can take place without affecting live courses. While there is never a perfect time for such an outage, this window, between summer session final grade submission and the beginning of the fall semester, is the most suitable for a migration of this size. The new Moodle site will be more stable and reliable, utilizing the Amazon Web Services cloud for hosting. We wanted to have this stability in place before this coming academic year.
We’d like to invite you to apply for a job at our Helpdesk in Stillman Hall if you have been awarded Federal Work Study at Potsdam. You don’t need to be a computer wiz to work for us. All we ask is a willingness to learn and an interest in technology. If you have a computer and have installed software, a printer or other device, that’s a great start. We’ll teach you much more as you help us support the College technology and you’ll gain valuable skills to take with you after graduation. We have a PDF that you can download and fill out electronically or bring into the Helpdesk. http://www.potsdam.edu/cts/news/studentemployment.cfm We look forward to you joining our team!
Last night’s batch of users, including all of Raymond Hall, was the largest single group we have migrated so far. Users’ mail is still being copied as of this writing. Please be patient and give the process some more time to complete. Be advised that the process is NON-DESTRUCTIVE, and that all of your pre-migration e-mail still exists on our old server where you can still reference it via Apple Mail, Thunderbird, BearMail, or SOGo. If you need to reference e-mail that has not yet made its way into Office 365, you can find it there in the meantime.
Apogee’s Engineering Team has made a decision to change our SSID’s/Network names within the next week and now all schools will have 2 network SSID’s instead of 1. The main reason for the change was incompatibility between the 2.4Ghz wireless devices and 5 Ghz wireless devices. MyResNet Legacy-2.4 Ghz devices; if a device is 2.4 ghz only this will be the only network they will see. MyResNet-For 5ghz devices
• Reason for Upcoming Maintenance: (APOGEE MAINTENANCE) • Maintenance Start Date: (Wednesday, 7/27/2016) • Maintenance Start: (09:00 PM EDT) • Maintenance End: (6:00 AM EDT) • Expected Duration: (9 Hour) • Impact: (Users will experience interruptions in service while we complete the maintenance activities; the interruptions are expected to be 1-2 hours of downtime intermittent during maintenance window total)
To the Campus Community: In the coming weeks CTS will be working to convert the campus Calendar and E-mail systems to Microsoft Office 365. This is a major upgrade which sees us migrating away from locally-hosted servers to a cloud-based service supported by Microsoft. Advantages include greater reliability, better integration over time with existing and new services, and an improved user interface. CTS will automatically migrate existing e-mail and calendar data to make the transition as easy as possible. There are multiple ways to access Office 365. The most popular will likely be the Outlook Web Interface since this is available from any location and any computer on the Internet, and thus will replace Bearmail and SOGo. Outlook is also available as an app similar in overall functionality to Apple Mail or Thunderbird. CTS is in the process of deploying this app to all campus-owned faculty/staff computers as part of the upgrade to Office 2016, which is ongoing. CTS will appreciate your patience and cooperation when we contact you to schedule your upgrade. Once fully deployed, the Outlook Web Interface and the Outlook app will be the only campus-supported means for accessing Office 365. The app is available for MacOS, Windows, iOS (free), and Android (free). Answers to frequently asked questions about this project and other information can be found here: O365 FAQs The migration will begin next week and will take several weeks to complete. We will let you know ahead of time when you are being migrated to the new system. Instructions for accessing Office 365 will be provided at that time. Sincerely, Computing & Technology Services