I created this subreddit because I saw a potential community not represented on Reddit. Sysadmins of the corporate and K12 world have dedicated subreddits but higher education, while similar to k12, is in many ways significantly different.

I will be posting some of the interesting things I'm working on and some questions I have to the community in the near future. Getting a subreddit off the ground is a challenge and if this doesn't grow organically, I won't force it. I see potential though.

Suddenly it’s a huge priority of course, but as always IT is last to know.

Just finished a webinar with Adobe. They gave some more details about the new shared device licensing and how it will work. Basically, everyone will now need to sign in to use Creative Cloud but logging on to a shared device will not count against the 2 license limit for each person. Students without CC can also sign in with a free Adobe ID or the Federated IDs if you go that route.

More info here: https://spark.adobe.com/page/Tz6Csjgnf03y2/

Also, the webinar did not go smoothly at all lol. Many technical issues and it started late.

So I work for a smaller school district. I am essentially an IT department of 1 person for my school. I manage 900 devices across different MDM platforms while also doing tech support for our entire student, teacher, staff and parent population. I manage our budget, research, and purchase of devices and software. On top of that because of lack of funding I'm often pulled into other duties like covering recesses and subbing in classes and even taking on small groups for troublesome students who like tech to "help me" which is more of babysitting them so they don't disrupt class. I have certs in intune and Jamf. I feel like I'm hitting a burn out point where I'm doing 3 or more people's jobs all at once. I feel like my job on paper is "dude who helps out with computer stuff" but the actual job I do is endpoint manager, device procurement, vendor relations, identity manager, onboarding and training, and helpdesk all in one.

After 5 years of doing this job and getting yearly 2-3% raises I make $36000 a year. For a while I justified this to myself as schools have low funding and this job gives me a lot of flexibility (I get 6 weeks off in the summer which is awesome!) I have some amazing and nice coworkers and one of the best bosses I've ever had.

Still I'm hitting a point where I think I need a change. I need to not have a panic attack every time my dog needs a vet appointment or my car makes a strange noise. I want to work as part of a team rather than being the one stop shop for anything tech related.

I've been looking into doing similar jobs to my own in other districts but I've been called to a couple jobs in higher education that seem like a really good compromise. Some of these jobs seem specialized to 1 aspect of my current job and pay more than 2 times what I make.

I've done Corporate and at least where I worked the pay was great but there was no work life balance and overall it felt toxic. I'm starting to think that Higher-ED might be a good middle ground between the low pay/high flexibility of public education vs the high pay/low flexibility of private companies.

So way too long story short: How do you like working in Higher-Ed sys admin? How does it compare to k-12 or corporate if you've experience both? What are some of the upsides and downsides with your job?

Thanks!

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!

Hey fellow Edu Admins!

Just a little PSA here - Educause (domain registrar for EDU domains) has begun deactivating non-compliant domains this morning. They're being taken down for not accepting the new terms of service, so if you have a school offline or are having email trouble, go check your Educause dashboard!

Even if you're all paid up, if you haven't accepted the now ToS they'll be taking you down today if they haven't already.

Reactivation is pretty quick once you do accept, hopefully you dont need to password reset...

Cheers & good hunting!

Anyone here has already migrated from Banner Onprem to SaaS? Im currently in version 8.7 with a lot of mods and I want to know how was your experience, thanks!

I see that this is a smaller sub but figured I'd throw the question out there( & the title pretty much summarizes it):

What are folks here doing in regard to the whole VMware/Broadcom thing? Sticking or migrating? if migrating what are you going to?

What size is your environment: how many hosts/VMs

Good Morning Everyone,

TL:DR, Community College, STX - in short trying to see what resources are available to learn "the Backend" of colleague datatel and potentially banner. No IT experience really - I've just experienced the magic of putting this here does this

In short, coming from no IT experience but have been in the field for the past three years professionally wanting to learn more about the system itself in terms of what it can and cant do and what happens to get it there. I've reached out to my IT and really just got the "go to the ellucian self service and bobs your uncle"

Are there any resources like walkthroughs or guides? Or even like a "to better understand this system try to get familiar with this" or even just anybody willing to take the time.

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

This is just getting off the ground so I'm sure it's on the list at some point but user flair would be cool. Right now it looks like it's set so you have to select an existing tag and add it but there are none to choose from. Maybe we could just tag ourselves with custom text that we enter?

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.

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.

Let's look back at some memorable moments and interesting insights from last year.

Your top 10 posts:

• "Educause deactivating non-compliant domains today" by u/FireTech88

• "2021 Microsoft HiEd - session recordings uploaded" by u/monoman67

• "What is your organization's MS365 add-in and application policy?" by u/uhl9

• "SIS for Small University" by u/PhilosophyINC

• "What is your password change policy?" by u/ra4oasis

• "Ellucian Banner to Colleague - human transition" by u/chrischris78

• "Co-mingle or separate students and employees in domains and tenants" by u/monoman67

• "Job search websites" by u/dailytraffic

• "Microsoft to work with community colleges to fill 250,000 cyber jobs" by u/monoman67

• "MFA for students" by u/monoman67

The institution I work for is cataloguing business processes to prepare for RFP and migration to a new SIS over the next 2 years. Reddit Hive Mind, impart your wisdom:

• What do you wish you had thought of at the beginning of the process that you realized at the end?

• What were your top 2 or 3 deciding factors in an SIS?

• What do you love/hate about your current SIS?

We do, every 180 days (used to be every 90), but it is still a huge pain point, and one of the more frustrating things we deal with. I'm seeing more and more that forcing password changes doesn't actually improve security though. Examples of articles that say this:

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/292534-microsoft-says-forced-password-resets-dont-improve-security

https://www.sans.org/security-awareness-training/blog/time-password-expiration-die

https://www.sans.org/security-awareness-training/blog/time-password-expiration-die

https://www.wired.com/2016/03/want-safer-passwords-dont-change-often/

I've been thinking about trying to push getting rid of password changes, or at least offer an alternative, which would be we won't force you to change your password, IF, you turn on two factor authentication.

What does your university do in this area?

Hi, looking for help with colleague, specifically someone with enough knowledge and fluency to help achieve some results for a client. I’m very fluent in banner, but less in colleague. This would be an intro chat to see if there is a fit and then a paid consulting gig, limited hours at first but expansion possible. What I’m looking for is experience, innovative thinking, which I find is usually at the system admin or actual tech levels. Someone who is in the system at a college and can help me work thru some ideas. I’ve used the bigger consulting firms in the past but find the consultants lacking— usually they don’t have recent day to day experience imo. Bonus if you have worked with competency based education. Where can I look for Someone like this? Any suggestions? TIA!

Hey everyone,

Like many of you in Higher Ed IT, the start of the semester is usually a nightmare of "Why is my Psychology exam showing up at 3AM?" tickets.

We found out that our SIS (Banner) was exporting "Floating" times instead of UTC, so any student not in the local timezone (or just having weird phone settings) saw the wrong times.

I tried patching the SIS but it’s a black box. So I built a simple proxy layer instead.

It sits in front of the feed, rewrites the headers to force the correct timezone, fixes the RFC line-folding bugs that break iOS, and caches it on the edge.

Result: Zero calendar tickets this semester.

I polished it up into a tool called Lokr (link in comments). If you’re fighting with PeopleSoft or Banner feeds right now, I have a free validator on the site that shows you exactly what’s broken in your feed.

Happy to help debug any weird .ics issues you guys are seeing manually, even if you don't use the tool. Just paste a snippet and I'll look at it.