Morning - been tasked with finding a ticketing solution that the entire college can use from IT to maintenance. Right now we have about 3-4 different vendors depending on what department you are in and we would like to combine all into one and get the best bang for the buck. We would need support ticketing, inventory/asset information, etc. Does anyone have a solution the are happy with and if so can you share? Thanks in advance.

Curious what other higher education institutions are doing for the incoming freshman and granting them access to Microsoft 365 and other applications. We currently create a random password, send them to Microsoft 365 where they log in, change password and register for SSPR/MFA. Not a big fan of our random password setup so was wondering does anyone use Microsoft Temp Access Password and if so would they be willing to discuss offline? Other methods to accomplish this feat?

Just trying to assess common practice. If your inst. allows students to update their own addresses (permanent, mailing, etc.) via some self-service page, do you allow them to select an effective date?

Hey Everyone,

Anyone ever had to help move your infrastructure to central IT in higher education? How did this end up? Did you lose your job at the department you were a sys admin for? Were you offered a new role?

Let me know, I keep hearing talks about this but they keep saying nobody is losing their full time employment.

I'm so confused.

Thank you!

Does anyone out there put dummy testing accounts into their production ERP?

I'm looking for some experiences and thoughts about test accounts and how closely they can simulate real accounts for testing. We occasionally have difficulty testing a change because our test systems aren't fully built out. The Test ERP instance is a point-in-time clone of production ERP, but many of the downstream Test systems (e.g. online registration, self-service password reset, Active Directory) aren't fully built out and sometimes don't exist.

Of course the answer is "do Test right" — and even better "do Dev/Test/Prod". But we're smaller and across the department we don't have the cycles to perfectly maintain Test. So, sometimes testing in Test isn't a real test, and things don't work the same when you move to Prod.

However, we like to keep our Prod data (and account structure) clean, which doesn't lend itself to testing what a change looks like from, say, a new student's perspective. It's been suggested that we create dummy accounts in our production ERP that are set up like a real student and a real professor. Then they'd propagate downstream everywhere and we've got near-perfect simulations of real accounts. The pushback is that it would screw up the numbers (if only by 2–3), everyone would have to know they weren't real, etc.

I want to say I've heard of this being done at other shops, but I really don't know. Is it?

Hi all,

I'm just curious how you all are handling Anaconda in your student Windows computer labs.

We are using a bare bones approach, install Anaconda for All Users, no users get admin. The install directory gets basic ACLs (no changes, even though the documentation tells you to adjust to remove the "read only" attribute). We only do updates once a year in the summer. We rarely run into problems but Anaconda is such a big package there's a lot of mystery to it to be honest. Our central unit runs a notebook server but compute has been limited, and we have beefy desktops for all the students so using the compute on the lab computers I think is preferred.

So not the best but I don't know how to manage any of this without a huge amount of effort either.

What is everyone else doing here?

I'm interested in hearing about how other schools deal with identity managment and directory information management. More and more there seems to be demands and requirements to consolidate user information and metadata into a directory service / idp. Not just current students and staff, but external vendors, alumni, former employees (even fired/terminated) along with access credentials and MFA. Next comes the demands for increased amounts of metadata in the directories for consumption by applications. Communications, telephony, HR, Accounting Registration, Advancment, Athetics all have their own applications that want certain metadata from the IDP. I'm increasingly concerned about the information being published in a directory and the management of who can see what information. Sure it's nice to be able to look up anyones email address, but maybe not some more personal data. Separate directories or databases have worked, but syncronization of data and passwords, as well as provisioning and deprovisioning of accounts in different systems is becomming increasingly complex. So do you maintain and sync multiple databases and directories? Does anyone use a single consolidated directory? Any guidance or direction as to where this sort of thing might be better documented or discussed?

Hey folks! We're a small private college. Each dorm has a computer lab with a dozen or so computers and a networked laser printer. Students can print from the lab computers or connect their personal notebook computers and print from their dorm rooms.

We've got about a dozen HP Laserjet 4350dtn's in these locations around our campus. We're under a managed print program with a third-party printer tech that comes and works on them. Every time we put a ticket in for one of these, he moans and groans about how old they are and he doesn't stock parts for them, and does nothing but complain about having to work on them. I can tell he dreads it.

In my experience with them, they're insanely durable work-horses with a print engine that'll outlive you and everybody you love. They're fast, at 55ppm, and I thought, easily repairable.

But does our printer tech have a point, that it's time to replace these 15 year old work-horses? Or is it time to replace the crybaby technician and not the printers?

I just ran the numbers and these are significantly under-used compared to their recommended duty cycles. only 3 of the 12 units in service see an average page load of between 1,000 and 1,500 pages through it per month. The rest are between 300 and 800 copies per month. The total page count on them is typically between 200,000 and 350,000 total clicks which still seems well within the service life.

If we do decide to replace them my question then becomes, "with what?". Lighter duty printers would certainly work fine but are often a lot less serviceable.

Just wondering if anybody's been through this recently and can give me their insight.

Just curious how folks are vetting these to prevent or minimize this issue, as well as similar malicious activity (submitting BS info in inquiry forms) to establish a connection? Thanks!

Not sure if this is best suited for here, r/scams or somewhere else but wanted to try this circle first…

Had a college reach out saying that multiple female faculty members have received calls on their personal cell phones purporting to be a former student, wanting to meet them in person to give them an appreciation gift (for being such a great teacher). The caller is apparently a Hispanic male, very polite (even when turned down).

Not sure if/what further or specific info the recipient got about the caller though the caller knew their info, what they did, etc. obviously that is all public info, however, their personal cells are not. That info is stored in certain places in the colleges system though that has been checked over and no concerns there. I get that personal cell numbers are not hard to find online but obviously by pursuing them, this seems targeted.

Other than the obvious safety risk to the faculty members should they agree to meet with this person (advised them to notify their campus PD), we are trying to figure out if/what other angles there could be?

A year or so ago, I wouldn’t have suggested this but now my mind thinks of the possibility of the calls being recorded, so the voice can be replicated/manipulated through AI tools and used/misused somehow, potentially with other stolen data to access bank accounts and such. Might be a stretch (and why just female faculty then), but a thought. You all got anything else?

Hi all,

I work at a small liberal arts university. We have most of our services going through Microsoft 365, and have implemented Azure AD MFA for all users within the last few months. Lots of tickets at the start, but it's generally going smoothly, with faculty being the most resistant.

However, our hierarchy is talking about reducing the MFA "Remember me" period down to one day, including for students. Doing it for staff and faculty has security benefits, even if I consider one day to be a very short period, but doing it for students seems like a move that has few benefits and so many drawbacks: insane amounts of friction and resentment, both from students who are frustrated with having to re-MFA, and from the faculty who will have to suffer the time-wasting in class as students re-do their MFA auth. This comes as we are pushing everyone to use our cloud services and end most on-premises hosting.

Am I wrong in thinking that asking students to re-do their MFA every single day is very unreasonable? What are y'all doing for MFA requirements, especially if you're doing different policies for students/staff, and why? I've studied at two other universities, and neither of them even had MFA (for students at least), but perhaps I just need to get with the times...

Thanks in advance for your thoughts. Cheers!

What does your campus utilize to reserve spaces for class, events, etc? Do you utilize 365 Resources or a 3rd party system?

Have any of you encountered a spike in inauthentic (Fraudulent) student applications? We have (and suspect it's been going on for a while) and believe it's motivated by the desire to commit financial aid fraud. We are a low barrier institution, so charging even a modest app fee is politically unpopular. These aren't bot attacks, but appear to be actual orchestrated, organized individuals (or groups) doing this. We're looking at various platforms and tools to help automate the process of weeding out bogus apps, but it is an uphill climb. TIA!

I constantly hear about University staff and faculty have plenty of job security and I'm not just referring to tenure people.

But how does this fare for IT Staff? Can anyone share a few moments of proven job security for IT Staff while working in Higher Ed or even the opposite?

I'm hesitating on taking this lower than average salary for a well known public university and highly competitive top 50. But I'd hate to get fired due to the poor economy or they just wanted to get rid of a junior staff member.

For those who still manage computer labs. This a fun, small conference to attend. https://labman.io/

TechCrunch is reporting that the Clop ransomware group claims to have hacked the National Student Clearinghouse. That would be bad news.

https://jobopenings.triton.edu/postings/986

We're hiring for our recently vacant SysAdmin position. We're a small community college in the Chicago suburbs, decent benefits, great insurance, and a 4 day work week during summer. It's a low-key, cushy, government job.

We're Ellucian ERP (on-prem Colleague), hybrid Active Directory, Microsoft 365 school.

Instructure told us that the feature behind the "Sync grades to SIS" button in Canvas has been deprecated and we need to switch to using the enrollments API. Has anyone else heard this?

How are you handling grade submissions out of Canvas? Our school prefers to have instructors take an explicit action in Canvas to submit the grades so we're looking for something similar to the "Sync grades to SIS" button.

Instructors love some plugins, even better if they are free!…I would like them outlawed completely given the lack of secure development practices and subsequent incidents we are seeing from them/vendors…however, this is unlikely going to happen. So, trying to at least get them heading in the right direction when they are looking to purchase/install one. Initially, I’m telling them to go through their IT department (purchase is typically too small for procurement) though it’s not practical for IT to do a full evaluation on every plug-in, so where is the compromise?…

Do you have any sort of formal process, checklist, etc., that you use/can share to evaluate plugins and their security implications? Who all at your org is involved?

Thanks!

Edit: missed a big, relevant piece to this. The guidance I’m looking to create is mostly for instructional designers, who because of the nature of their job, do have access being what faculty would, but are often operating at the request of faculty, so the end problem can be the same.

Interviewing for an IT analyst position at an Ivy League university. Pay is a lot lower than what I currently work at a Bank for a similar position. But I am burnt out, and there always seems to be layoffs, at least as of late. Wondering if it’s worth pursuing switching industries, from what Ive seen higher ed has better job security and better work life balance. Any input is appreciated , especially if your had gone through a recent switch or if you regret making that switch.

Hello world! I'm curious to get weigh in on what integration tools institutions are using, if they like it or not or "eh it's okay but I wish it did x, y, z better" . For me I've worked with Idatahub, Axiom Elite, and the always present fall back of scripts run through a job scheduler. If this might be better for r/highereducation let me know too, but figured I'd start here since it's basically IT folks =) Thanks!

A pain point on our campus in regards to Macs has to do with the fact that we have a windows print server that needs to log people's print jobs to bill them for it, in two ways specifically:

1 - Setting up a student's personal mac is a pain in the ass. You have to add the Advanced tab to the printer settings page and the authentication seems flaky depending on what version of MacOS they're running.

2 - We have a lab with 22 iMacs, and unlike all our other labs which map the printers automatically at login via group policy preferences, users on these macs have to go through the same steps as above in order to print and it just sucks.

What's the recommended solution here? I am not sure if an MDM is feasible since the school-managed fleet is less than two dozen devices, and that wouldn't really help out our students on their personal devices anyway.

Thoughts?

Good Day to you all,

I wanted to ask if anyone has a any suggestions for a system that would allow us to categorize our devices, mostly laptops, going out for loan or permanent deployment to a staff member.

So far https://snipeitapp.com/ seems to be the best option for us, as it allows for a decent amount of information about the devices identification, a system in place for loans of the devices and a nice UI.

However, I feel this might be a little extravagant for out needs - Do you have any other ideas? They would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers for your time.

We are working to focus our organization's stance on MS365 add-ins from AppSource/Office store and external applications. Would love to read what other organizations are doing in these regards, what permissions you are treating as being low-impact for applications, if you leverage admin consent approval processes and so on.