ISC Progress Report, June 2018
Welcome to Summer!
Here’s a brief report on many of our major activities,
organized by our five strategic themes.
Increase Value Through Differentiation & Innovation
HireIT: HireIT, which provides high-quality IT support services to Schools and Centers, is co-leading the campus-wide notebook encryption policy team. This group is examining tools that will allow for encrypting notebooks and auditing compliance with
Penn’s encryption policy.
Special Projects continues to be an important service for HireIT clients. Recent examples include technical support for the Penn Relays, coordination of
Penn Global’s newly renovated space in the International House, and serving as a subject matter expert for
Penn’s BIA initiative.
HireIT clients will be migrated to the new
Backup for Laptop and Desktop service using the cloud-based tool,
Mozy. This provides a single cost for unlimited backup storage.
Project Management Office: On May 17, the
PMO hosted a
Project Partners SIG meeting including a Skill Builder presentation on Project Quality and Requirements.
Virtual Desktop: The priority fix of the
Virtual Desktop environment has been completed. We have two fully operational clusters which both provide redundancy and a highly available solution, which is in use by one of our clients. The virtual desktop team is now working on its roadmap for the next twelve months. This includes an application upgrade, providing virtual desktops in the cloud, and evacuating the primary data center at 3401 Walnut for the Levi Center.
PennO365: The PennO365 advisory team has been upgrading the service across campus: - Sharepoint: Sharepoint is now available for use by Schools and Centers. Please contact ISC Client Care for further details.
- Spam Troubleshooting: We’ve identified the cause of the recent uptick in spam messages. The amount of false positive and false negative messages has returned to nominal levels. ISC continues to be vigilant about working with Microsoft when we see an increase in spam misidentification.
- Advanced Threat Protection & Central Mail Routing: Message sanitation and threat protection will be part of an RFP process that also includes central mail routing. Schools and Centers have worked together to identify a list of requirements.
- Splunk Integration: We are integrating PennO365 message tracing and authentication logs into the Splunk service to give the security team better insight into threats to the Penn community.
- Exchange Domain Retirement: The exchange.upenn.edu domain will be retired on June 30, 2018. Client Care is assembling a communications package, with regular updates taking place throughout the first half of the 2018 calendar year.
Business Optimization, Harmonization & Transparency
Data Center Migration: The 3401 Walnut Street Data Center has served the University community for more than twenty years, and as technology has continued to evolve, the building location is no longer sustainable. The
Pennovation Data Center Expansion Program will enable ISC to migrate all remaining ISC-managed systems, client-owned systems hosted in the ISC Data Center, infrastructures, and applications to an alternate location. ISC will fully decommission the 3401 Walnut Data Center presence by December 2018.
Technology Roadmap: ISC's
Technology Roadmap was updated in April to help Penn’s technology professionals make contextual decisions within the overall University technology environment.
Technology Services Strategy Review Board: ISC's Technology Services Strategy Review Board (TS-SRB) was formed to re-evaluate ISC’s technology strategy and to ensure that our strategy meets the evolving technology needs of the University. The SRB develops, documents, and coordinates standards and best practices to ensure effective and efficient activities in support of ISC and the University's mission.
Apptio: More than 175 clients across campus are using the Apptio Bill of IT. We are continuing to add applications to the Bill of IT, and as of the April billing period we have automated approximately 80% of all billing through Apptio, and have eliminated almost 50% of the manual invoices.
Strengthen & Optimize IT @ Penn
This new edition of the University Catalog will serve as a single source of information about all of Penn’s courses, undergraduate, PhD, and research masters programs, and academic policies and resources. Since our launch last year, the Catalog has had 280,000 unique visitors from more than 200 countries.
Human Capital Management: The
Human Capital Management (HCM) program aims to increase Penn’s HR and Payroll work efficiency, enhance response to changes in regulatory and compliance issues, improve the user experience, and strengthen information quality and access. Check out the HCM Update for the latest news and developments.
Continuous Improvement
ISC Priorities Program: Launched in 2017, ISC's Priorities Program is enabling us to better meet the evolving needs of our clients by improving processes and tools. The Program includes three interrelated projects: Billing, Finance & Funding (BFF), Client Intake, Follow‑up & Reporting (CIFR), and Services.
Cloud First
Thank you,
The ISC Leadership Team
