The University of Wisconsin-Madison is a large place, with many staff members. One of the struggles that is familiar to many is how to balance specialized needs for divisions, colleges and other groups inside the university, with the administrative goals of simplifying services at a central level. In particular, email transmissions that are handled by software without the intervention of human hands can struggle when modernization occurs: the need for multi-factor authentication and deprecation of POP/IMAP protocols conflicts with services run by groups such as the college of Engineering.
My presentation goes over the journey I made as the sysadmin for a ticketing program that needed to be able to fetch and send emails through O365 as a computer — not a human that could perform multi-factor auth. I will discuss the basic layout of the way that I solved the issue, point out some pitfalls that arise because of the University’s bureaucracy and hierarchical structure, and offer some tips for others trying to write middleware in the trenches.
My audience will understand this better if they know the underlying mechanisms of emails and how they’re sent or accessed, as well as Office 365 authentication mechanisms.
The key takeaways are that writing middleware or API layers at the University can be quite difficult and challenging, but given the right circumstances, also successful. Another thing to learn is that challenges are almost never purely technical in nature, a lot of obstacles that come up are going to include tasks that take people-knowledge and social skill in the workplace. An appreciation for the wide variety of business needs among campus IT will be emphasized strongly.
Do you find yourself swimming in a sea of form requests? At UW-Madison’s Division of Continuing Studies, we certainly did – and we turned to Salesforce and FormAssembly to bring order to the chaos. With some simple Form Assembly set up we were able to automate the creation of campaign and case requests in our Salesforce CRM. You can too!
You will learn how to utilize partner solutions (Form Assembly forms tool) to streamline of routine requests through automation.
Extension uses SharePoint in Office 365 as a robust, modern Intranet for program collaboration, administrative communication, and business workflows.
In 2019 Extension merged with UW-Madison, which required transitioning all IT infrastructure including our SharePoint-based intranet. An aggressive timeline and minimal campus support of SharePoint in Office 365 made for an exciting project. We will discuss how we migrated from a legacy on-premises SharePoint server farm to UW-Madison’s Office 365 SharePoint Online tenant, the compromises and improvements we made, and the relationships with DoIT that we built.
Attendees will learn potential ways to leverage SharePoint in a large school/division, tools and techniques for managing SharePoint migrations, and working with SharePoint with minimal DoIT support.
When specialized IT fields – Development, Security and Operations – work together, they can solve problems that separate departments many not be able to handle. The process looks different from each perspective. Yet it is teamwork and respect for people with different skill sets that strengthens the UW IT community and keeps technology growing to meet the needs of the University and beyond.
Our presentation covers an overview of how a partnership between CS and CAE has been providing instances of Jupyterhub notebooks for instruction over the past several years. We will discuss how we have implemented the notebooks using AWS, structured load balancing and integrated with Canvas courses. There will be some demos of the tools we’ve used including terraform, helm and an alternating pair of A-B AWS instances for production and testing environments. We will conclude with a brief chat about future work items we are still figuring out and look for discussion with the community about best practices.
Familiarity with the concepts of cloud services, AWS especially, would be very helpful. Some familiarity with the concepts of containers and CI/CD pipelines will also help.
Attendees will become (more) familiar with cloud resources, learn about innovation in instructional support, discuss when projects take off at the university and stop being “pilots”. They will also learn about ways that people can work across various units in the university and facilitate inter-departmental cooperation.
The YouTube live stream button is a go.wisc redirect that will go live no later than 8:30am on June 2nd.
Keynote Description
We, as IT professionals, play a critical role in designing, developing, and supporting the digital campus. We have created and evolved the digital campus over the last forty years, and in 2020 it became the primary mode of interaction for our communities. What can we learn from the rapid pivot to online, and more importantly, how can we evolve our thinking and approaches?
Let’s discuss how we can use our expertise and our voice to create digital spaces where people can thrive. Using ideas from fields such as critical design practices, conflict management, and polarities, we will explore the most effective approaches for providing spaces where multiple voices are empowered, and diverse communities can thrive.
The session will be interactive.
Opening Remarks for the conference will take place from 8:45-9:15am
This new project builds on our existing campus VoIP telephone network and video conferencing software licenses to address the critical need for additional hybrid conference rooms. The standardized equipment in each room eliminates the need for participants to set up AV equipment in meetings and creates a simplified joining experience. Touch screen controllers allow in-person participants to connect to meetings using MS-Teams, Webex, Zoom and Google Meet. Over 60 hybrid conference rooms are being installed on campus this year, fostering inclusive meetings between remote employees, guests, and in-person conference participants. Departments can get started by requesting a consultation at https://it.wisc.edu/services/custom-audiovisual-conference-room/
*Captions have been auto-generated via YouTube. We are actively working to edit these. Please check back if you need captions.
Description
If you have servers, you might want to use Qualys Cloud Agent to learn about which of your servers have vulnerabilities, like Log4J. This session will go over how to navigate the VMDR dashboard to see which Vulnerabilities are highest priority, which servers they are on, and how you’re making progress over time.
Attendees will learn how Qualys can help you avoid scrambling during security events like Log4J.
API enabling your DNS server will let you do awesome things! See why having API access to DNS for all necessary parties enables automation on a level we’ve only previously dreamed about. We were manually doing certificate renewal for 1800+ certs, but after implementing Infoblox API + AWS Cert Manager + Wiscweb we have 1800+ Automatically renewed SSL Certificates FTW. And this pattern can be used by anyone! This session is perfect for people who have or host websites, or run DNS servers.
Get an update on the Interop Initiative including new infrastructure services and capabilities, and plans for the coming year. Learn about the new tools and approaches that are coming online, and how they impact data access and integration.
