The myYC Portal was been getting a significant amount of traffic since the beginning of the semester.  Historically, the first week of classes is our highest point of usage for students using our web based products like Blackboard and now the myYC Portal.  It is very encouraging that the portal has been able to withstand all of the initial traffic without a resource issue.  We have, however, resolved some issues that came up recently, one of which interrupted service briefly to Blackboard and email on Monday.  Below are some of our recent improvements and changes to the myYC portal:

On August 22nd, we implemented our new password policy requirements to move away from insecure passwords including social security numbers.  Historically, we have been using social security numbers as passwords ever since students had access to the YC network.  About 4700 students, faculty, and staff have changed their passwords since our policy change last Friday.  It was both a technical and a change management challenge.  I would like to thank everyone involved for their efforts in helping our students adapt to the change.  We have refined the process dramatically over the last week and we are confident that students will have a much improved experience going forward.

As some on the Prescott Campus have seen, we now have a siren installed on the western corner of Building 1 roof top.  The Facilities team did a great job in coordinating the crane and elaborate stanchion that the siren is placed upon.  The siren itself weighs about 500 pounds so an industrial crane was used to lift the siren and other materials into place.  The Verde Campus is set to have a similar siren installed on Wednesday of next week (8/6/2008).  The siren project is a joint venture between the Facilities Department, IT Department, and Campus Safety Department in support of our overall emergency response planning efforts.

The siren vendor, Federal Signal, will be onsite in both locations the week of August 11th.  Tentatively, live tests are scheduled for August 12th (Prescott) and August 13th (Verde).  The Office of Public information will send out information to the YC community and public regarding these events in the near future.  In addition, we plan to also test our other methods of emergency communication (text messaging, computer alerts, classroom phones, etc) at that time.

If you have any questions please contact either Patrick Burns (patrick.burns@yc.edu) or Jeff Rose (jeff.rose@yc.edu).

Project Galaxy is moving right along and we are proud to have launched the myYC Portal, our first publicly accessible component of the ERP project.  Presently, only staff and faculty have access to the portal to ensure that we thoroughly test it before we make it available to students.  If you have not checked it out, you should try it.  It seamlessly brings together various content from YC and areas of our website which require you to login (email, Blackboard, etc).

Much work went into creating the myYC portal.  We started back in February and the portal team members have put in many hours to make this thing happen in record time.  We truly have one of the most useful and attractive portals that I have come across in my research since we selected Banner.  Many people from all over the College were either involved in the implementation or gave valuable feedback through its development.  I want to personally thank everyone who contributed (too many to name).  In addition, I want to thank everyone on the ITS staff who put in the hard work to get this done especially the Web Services staff (Jerry, Michael, Kate).  Lastly, I want to recognize Sean Hagan for his leadership and hard work throughout the project.  Visit the portal at http://myyc.yc.edu

I am happy to say we are 99% done with our migration of email from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange.  We have some applications that use Lotus Notes that we will continue to support until we replace them with a different application.  In addition, we have a couple of email accounts that we know are still active and are working toward fixing them.  If you have not been migrated over to Microsoft Exchange, please email theresa.gloyd@yc.edu and let Theresa know.  We hope to have this wrapped up completely very soon.

Thanks to the entire district for your patience and courtesy during the migration.  We completed the process really quickly and without any major problems.  This project was a huge undertaking, especially while we are working on the Banner implementation.  Bobby Cloutier and Theresa Gloyd went out of their way and worked many nights and weekends to get the job done, Thank You!  Additionally, I want to thank Desktop Services, System Admin, AppDev, and TELS for their assistance.

The ITS Department will soon put into effect new YC network password requirements for faculty, staff, and students.  When activated, the system policy will force you to reset your network password (Computer login, Blackboard, Exchange, etc) at least one time per year and will also ensure minimal password complexity standards.  You do not have to do anything immediately as everyone will be prompted to change their password upon login the day the policy is activated.  Passwords for AMIS (Cosmos), Admin Access, Long Distance Codes, or Electronic Student Services will be excluded from the policy.  Another notice will be sent out prior to activation.  Below is the new password criteria that will be used:

Passwords must contain seven characters from at least three of the following classes:

• English upper case letters [A, B, C, ... Z]

• English lower case letters [a, b, c, ... z]

• Westernized Arabic numerals [0, 1, 2, ... 9]

• Nonalphanumeric characters such as punctuation symbols
  
  

Well we just wrapped up the "Organizational Information Gathering" (OIG) sessions and phase of the portal project.  What is OIG?  A fancy way of saying that we wanted to know what was important to you.  Easy enough, huh?

So if it wasn't already obvious, this is a fairly complex process.  We began planning and initial preparations back in December 2007, and we're usually meeting or participating in a conference call three or four days of the week.  The entire portal implementation from start to finish is expected to take around eight to ten months.

For those that haven't heard, YC has purchased a new portal product called Luminis.  We're excited to be working on this new project and think that the College community will find it to be of significant value - whether you're a staff member, faculty, or student.

 Let's address some of the questions that have been asked so far:

In case you didn't notice, almost a year ago we eliminated the necessity to use the "2" in our web address (e.g. http://www2.yc.edu is now just http://www.yc.edu).

Why is this news? Well it means that (a year ago) we finally were able to move the Lotus Notes web server out of production. It represents one of the final steps in moving to a fully-dynamic, self-maintainable web infrastructure.