{"id":5038,"date":"2020-09-28T11:40:12","date_gmt":"2020-09-28T18:40:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/cis\/?p=5038"},"modified":"2020-09-28T11:40:12","modified_gmt":"2020-09-28T18:40:12","slug":"fall-2020-update-from-the-cio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/cis\/2020\/09\/28\/fall-2020-update-from-the-cio\/","title":{"rendered":"Fall 2020 update from the CIO"},"content":{"rendered":"
Hello everyone,<\/div>\n
\n

Well, here we are in Fall 2020.\u00a0 Everyone is facing new challenges and living through tough times.\u00a0 The Mudd community is showing its strength and compassion in numerous ways, and I find it inspiring.<\/p>\n

This is the update from CIS for the Fall Semester.\u00a0 There is much to tell you, so I have written this as an overview with links to more detail.<\/p>\n

Good stuff in Identity and Access Management<\/strong>
\nWe launched a new Identity and Access management system at the end of June.\u00a0 This was an enormous amount of work, two years in the making and I am so proud of the CIS team for bringing it to fruition.\u00a0 More than 20 different servers and systems were involved in the change and it went smoothly overall.\u00a0 The new system, Rapid Identity, puts us in a position to add additional services to the single sign on environment more easily.\u00a0 Among the benefits, we count the ability to provide Office365 accounts for faculty and students, which you can read about in our news article Microsoft Office 365 for Students and Faculty<\/a>.<\/p>\n

New services\u00a0<\/strong>
\nSoon after IAM was launched, we rolled out an expanded Gradescope<\/a>\u00a0offering, Screencastify<\/a>\u00a0for screen recording and campus level Zoom<\/a>, which was funded by the Dean of Faculty.\u00a0 You now all have access to three excellent video conferencing solutions: Google Meet<\/a>, Microsoft Teams<\/a>\u00a0and Zoom<\/a>.\u00a0 Each has great features, and we encourage you to explore them. Each is also getting new features almost monthly.\u00a0 For example, Google Meet just added the ability to blur backgrounds, and Microsoft Teams got Whiteboard integration with sticky notes<\/a>, while Zoom has better directory integration<\/a>.\u00a0 In the face of all this I sometimes feel like I\u2019m looking at a four hundred item menu at a restaurant, and I get stressed out. But I remind myself that we are living in an age of endless choice in technology.\u00a0 So, I turn to my preferred metaphor of a garden with lots of flowers at different seasons, to be enjoyed, and the more I look or learn the more I can enjoy.\u00a0 The people at CIS are more than happy to walk around any part of the garden with you and we have a (partial) guide in our service catalog<\/a>.<\/p>\n

More services to come<\/strong>
\nOctober is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month<\/a>, now in its seventeenth year. To mark it this year, CIS will be introducing two new services.<\/p>\n