ITS Newsletter

The Workday project has just been officially launched. The move from Colleague to Workday is a leap forward, measured in decades worth of technical advancements.

Carleton, like most all colleges and universities, has seen tremendous growth in online file storage. Thoughtfully reducing our cloud storage not only lowers college costs and energy use, but also helps you save time searching for your digital materials.

New posts and new authors have appeared on the ITS Blog. In case you missed them, here are the highlights, with links to the full posts.

October (Cybersecurity Awareness Month) is over, but there are things to highlight from it. The training site is still online and available, and we have a few statistics to report about our phishing simulation. You can also find tips for how to distinguish between phishing attacks and spam email, and how to respond to each. Stay Cyber Strong!

Carleton is adopting a new password security policy and will be requiring all faculty, staff, and students to create a new password for themselves between December 6th, 2021 and February 7th, 2022. The new passwords are one step in keeping the campus safer from online attacks.

As Moodle usage skyrocketed during COVID, the system experienced capacity problems which led to a series of outages. In response, ITS added a “load balancing” feature — moving Moodle from a single server to three servers — which offered more capacity and flexibility, and also more complexity.

About six years ago, the ITS Leadership Team put in place a formal “incident management” process. Two of the lessons from a recent outage are a reminder to make even routine changes outside of the busiest class periods whenever possible, and to double check our sense of what we consider a routine change.

A new campus calendar for WordPress is in progress. The calendar is being tested by more than 20 of our faculty and staff colleagues and will launch the week of December 6th.

Welcome back! Many lessons from the past 18 months about the intersections of technology, teaching, and working are informing the changes you will see this fall.

While it might be different than the Fall we had hoped for, or like other Falls we’ve had, we seem to be edging closer toward a New Normal at Carleton.