As the fall semester gets underway, I’m writing to remind you of the risks involved with illegal downloading and/or sharing of copyrighted music, movies, games and software over the Internet. Unauthorized obtaining, sharing or offering such copyrighted material is illegal and in violation of U.S. copyright law. If caught, you may face severe civil and criminal penalties, including prison and monetary damages. Anyone found to have infringed a copyrighted work may be liable for statutory damages of up to $30,000 for each work and, if found to be willful, that amount may be increased up to $150,000 for each work infringed. Movie and recording companies actively monitor the Internet to identify individuals who are illegally downloading and/or sharing movies and music via peer-to-peer networks.

ASU fully complies with Federal law and takes prompt action when notified that one of its students may be illegally downloading and/or sharing copyrighted material. University Policy 500-008, Unauthorized Downloading and File Sharing of Copyrighted Digital Materials, is located on the ASU Computing Services Website, at http://www.adams.edu/administration/computing/policies/policies.php. If caught, ASU penalties could include loss of access to the campus computer network, disciplinary action and in extreme cases, expulsion from the University.

You may think that the large movie or recording companies won’t bother prosecuting a single university-student downloading or sharing copyrighted material. Think again. Organizations such as the Recording Industry Association of America are serious about protecting their copyrighted material. In 2009, a Boston University graduate student was ordered to pay $675,000 for illegally downloading and distributing 30 songs. This comes out to $22,500, per incident, of copyright infringement. There are a number of online sources that provide legal alternatives for downloading or otherwise acquiring copyrighted material. A listing of many of these sites can be found at: http://www.educause.edu/legalcontent.

If you have specific questions regarding ASU’s Unauthorized Downloading and File Sharing Policy please contact the

ASU Computing Services Help Desk at 587-7741 or via email at computingservices@adams.edu.

Thanks and have a great semester!

The following maintenance activities will take place tonight, Thursday September 18th:

Brief outages will occur for Staff Email, streaming media, Ellucian Go, and Banner AppXtender between 9 and 10pm.

Employee and Tec Classrooms will receive updates to Windows, Office, Adobe Air, Flash Firefox and LibreOffice beginning at 9:00 PM. Employees are encouraged to log off but leave their computers on when leaving work today. This will assist the installation of these security patches and minimize any problems.

Computing Services thanks you for your patience and understanding as we perform these critical maintenance activities. As always, if you have any questions, please call the ASU Computing Services Helpdesk at 7741 or contact us via email at computingservices@adams.edu

Thank you!

Computing Services

The following maintenance activities will take place tonight, Thursday September 11^th:

Beginning at 5:00 PM and lasting roughly 45 minutes, the campus Ellucian GO Mobile app will be unavailable as we perform an upgrade to version 3.0. This upgrade includes a feature enhancement which will enable notifications of holds on accounts for students. If you are interested in getting the ASU Ellucian GO app, it is available on both the Apple store and Android Play store.

Beginning at 9:00 PM and lasting roughly 2 hours, ALL Banner services will be down including Forms, Banner Web and Self-Service for an upgrade. This maintenance is required to bring us into compliance with several Federal mandates.

Also beginning at 9:00 PM and lasting roughly 2 hours, streaming.adams.edu will be down for a storage upgrade. Impact to our students should be minimal, however, videos in Blackboard that are located on this server will be unavailable at this time.

Lastly, employee and Tec Classrooms will receive updates to Adobe Flash, Thunderbird, Firefox, MS Office and Windows, LibreOffice and VLC Media Player beginning at 9:00 PM. Users are encouraged to log off but leave their computers on when leaving work today. This will assist the installation of these security patches and minimize any user impact.

Computing Services thanks you for your patience and understanding as we perform these critical maintenance activities. As always, if you have any questions, please call the ASU Computing Services Helpdesk at 7741 or contact us via email at computingservices@adams.edu

Thank you!

Computing Services

With the start of fall semester right around the corner, Computing Services is performing several final maintenance activities in preparation. The following maintenance activities will take place tonight, Thursday August 7^th:

Beginning at 5:00 PM and lasting roughly thirty minutes, we will be performing maintenance on the Banner DEVL storage system. All production Banner services will remain up during this time.

Then, at 9:00 PM until roughly midnight, we will be performing security updates and storage maintenance to several Banner and campus networking services. During this maintenance, there will be very brief outages to ALL campus services as the servers are rebooted and the storage maintenance is completed.

Lastly, at 9:00 PM Computing Services will be removing the Barracuda system out of the email flow. After this maintenance, faculty and staff will no longer receive Barracuda spam quarantine messages, but will still continue to receive Google Gmail spam quarantine messages moving forward. This is yet another step toward the full migration to Gmail for all employees that is underway.

Computing Services thanks you for your patience and understanding as we perform these critical maintenance activities. As always, if you have any questions, please call the ASU Computing Services Helpdesk at 7741 or contact us via email at computingservices@adams.edu

Thank you!

Computing Services

The following maintenance activities will take place tonight, Thursday July 31^st:

Beginning at 7:00 PM and lasting roughly two hours, on-campus Banner forms access will be unavailable due to maintenance. Other Banner activities such as Banner Web and Self-Service will remain functional during this time.

Employee and Tec Classrooms will receive updates to Adobe Flash, Thunderbird, Firefox, and Secunia beginning at 9:00 PM. Users are encouraged to log off but leave their computers on when leaving work today. This will assist the installation of these security patches and minimize any user impact.

At 9:00 PM, we will be performing maintenance on the campus LDAP systems. This will cause a 10 minute downtime window for the password change process and account creations.

Lastly, at 9:00 PM Computing Services will be doing some maintenance on the campus trane server, OneCard manager and some back-end network systems. User impact will be minimal for this maintenance.

Computing Services thanks you for your patience and understanding as we perform these critical maintenance activities. As always, if you have any questions, please call the ASU Computing Services Helpdesk at 7741 or contact us via email at computingservices@adams.edu

Thank you!

Computing Services

The following maintenance activities will take place tomorrow, Thursday July 24th during our normally scheduled maintenance window:

At 9:00 PM, we will be performing maintenance on the campus LDAP systems as well as the Banner monitoring systems. We do not anticipate any downtime to campus services for these maintenance activities.

Computing Services thanks you for your patience and understanding as we perform these critical maintenance activities. As always, if you have any questions, please call the ASU Computing Services Helpdesk at 7741 or contact us via email at computingservices@adams.edu

Thank you!

Computing Services

First off, Computing Services wants to thank everyone who has given us feedback regarding our move to Gmail for our employees. The support was resoundingly positive, and we are excited to move this project forward. We are ready to start migrating Faculty and Staff to Gmail!  Early adopters can sign up from our ASU Google Apps Learning Center:

http://learngoogle.adams.edu

Click on the ‘Sign Up’ button and fill out the form to be added to the early adopters list. Faculty and staff will be migrated according to the order they signed up, so act quickly to get on the list! Once you are on the list, Computing Services will contact you and will assist with the migration of your existing email over to Gmail. Over the next several months, we will be working directly with departments to migrate all remaining users to Gmail.

We encourage everyone to get familiar with our ASU Google Apps Learning Center at learngoogle.adams.edu. Not only does it have helpful walk-throughs and videos for getting started with Gmail, but also great resources for Calendar, Docs, Drive, Sites, and more.

The Learning Center will continue to be updated with resources and training, and will remain available even after the Gmail migration is complete.  If you have any additional training or support needs, Computing Services is here to help!

***A few FAQs about the migration process***

Will my email address change?

–          Nope! All faculty and staff will keep an @adams.edu address

Can I still use Thunderbird?

–          Absolutely! Computing Services can help you set up your account when the migration is complete

Can I still get email on my mobile device?

–          Yes! In fact, the mobile interface for Gmail on your mobile device has some feature enhancements as well.

Here is a link to our full FAQ that has more information for you:

http://goo.gl/A4VVzR

If you have any questions about the migration process please contact the Computing Services Helpdesk at 719-587-7741 or at computingservices@adams.edu

Thanks!

ASU Computing Services

****Banner Password Complexity-enhanced security for ASU data****

In accordance with industry standards and to increase the protection of the personal information of our students, parents and employees, Computing Services is taking the action to enhance the complexity of passwords that are used to authenticate to the Banner system. Beginning the week of July 14, and after your current password expires, you will be required to create a new password which uses a new set of standards. Those standards will be posted on the main Banner login page.

We understand that this will create an inconvenience for our Banner users and apologize for having to take these steps. But the threat from cyber criminals to steal personal information from institutions who store sensitive data is at critical levels. As always, if you have difficulty when changing your password, the ASU Helpdesk is always available to assist you.

To make storing passwords easier, we suggest installing the ‘Password Gorilla’ password management utility. This is a tool that helps you store all of your passwords securely and is controlled by a single master password. That way you only have to remember that single master password.

https://howto.adams.edu/index.php/Password_Gorilla

http://www.fpx.de/fp/Software/Gorilla/help.html

****Maintenance for Thursday, July 10^th****

The following maintenance activities will take place tonight, Thursday July 10th during our normally scheduled maintenance window:

At 9:00 PM Computing Services will be installing security patches on employee computers for the following programs: Java, Windows and Office updates. Users are encouraged to log off when leaving work for the day to assist the installation of these patches.

Beginning at 9:00 PM and lasting roughly 3 hours, we will be performing various security updates on all networking and web services. There may be very brief outages as we reboot the systems, but user impact should be minimal.

Computing Services thanks you for your patience and understanding as we perform these critical maintenance activities. As always, if you have any questions, please call the ASU Computing Services Helpdesk at 7741 or contact us via email at computingservices@adams.edu

Thank you!

Computing Services

****Google Account Verification- New Feature****

Google Apps has launched a new feature aimed at keeping our Adams State University accounts safe from hijackers, even if they attained a user’s username and password.

Upon login to your ASU Google Apps, such as Google Drive, Google Calendar, or Student Gmail, you will be prompted to provide a phone number. This phone number will only be used by Google to send a verification code if there is a suspicious login to your account so they can verify your identity.

The number will ONLY be used if when there is a suspicious login.  Most people get less than 3 verification prompts per year.

If you do not want to enable verification for your account you may skip it. Simply click the “skip” link on the verification code page.

For more information, including screenshots of what the page will look like, please check out this Google Support link:

https://support.google.com/a/answer/6002699

****Maintenance for Thursday, June 19^th****

The following maintenance activities will take place tonight, Thursday June 19th during our normally scheduled maintenance window:

At 9:00 PM Computing Services will be installing security patches on employee computers for the following programs: Internet Explorer 11, Adobe Reader, Firefox, Thunderbird and Opera. Employees are encouraged to log out but leave their computers turned on to aid in the successful installation of these patches.

Beginning at 9:00 PM and lasting roughly 3 hours, we will be performing various security updates on all networking and web services. There may be very brief outages as we reboot the systems, but user impact should be minimal.

Computing Services thanks you for your patience and understanding as we perform these critical maintenance activities. As always, if you have any questions, please call the ASU Computing Services Helpdesk at 7741 or contact us via email at computingservices@adams.edu

Thank you!

Computing Services

*****Google Spam Filtering- New Feature*****

Computing Services is continuing forward in our project to migrate Faculty and Staff from our internal email server to Gmail. As a step in this process, we have changed our email routing so that any email messages sent to @adams.edu email addresses will now route through Google’s email servers first, then be delivered to our internal email servers.

Faculty and Staff should not be impacted by this change, but you may start to see spam quarantine messages from Google as spam will be filtered out as it passes through their servers. Here is a helpful how-to that shows what the quarantine summary looks like, how to flag items as spam, or deliver quarantined items to your inbox.

http://howto.adams.edu/index.php/Google_Spam_Quarantine

For more information on our Gmail migration, please check our Frequently Asked Questions page:

http://howto.adams.edu/index.php/Faculty/Staff_Email_Migration_to_Gmail_-_Frequently_Asked_Questions

*****Reminder- Banner Maintenance and Downtime Saturday, June 7^th*****

This Saturday, June 7^th, Computing Services will be taking ALL Banner services off-line as we perform a major Banner upgrade. This upgrade is required as part of the Federal 150% Direct Subsidized Loan requirement. All Banner services will be unavailable from 8:00 AM until roughly 1:00 PM.

*Also, this evening (Thursday, June 5^th) there will be very brief outages to several network services as we perform security updates to various systems. User impact should be minimal.

Computing Services realizes that there is never an ideal time to take down services, but by performing this upgrade outside of normal campus business hours, we hope to minimize any impact this may cause. We thank you for your patience, and as always, if you have any questions, please call the ASU Computing Services Helpdesk at 7741 or contact us via email at computingservices@adams.edu

Thank you!

Computing Services