Current ITS Projects
Current Projects
- 4/26/2013 - Testing is in progress in the Qual environment. Testing in the Prod environment will begin shortly. The UTLogin web page has been updated with relevant information for the new service. Additional documentation for early adopters is under development.
- 5/10/2013 - The assessment phase of the project is nearing completion. The feedback gathered from faculty, students and technical staff will be compiled and presented to the project steering committee at the June meeting.
Additionally, preparations for Canvas use for Summer 2013 semester continue. If you are interested in using Canvas for your course, please send your course name, unique number and approximate number of students to canvas@utlists.utexas.edu.
- 3/28/2013 - User Acceptance Testing has been successfully completed for the Urgent Email System (Phase 1 of the Group Email Upgrade project). Phase 1 of the project is on schedule for an estimated 4/17/13 go-live date.
Work continues on Phase 2 of the project (Regroup). The project is scheduled to be ready for production deployment on 9/17/13. The customer steering committee has recommended a 10/1/13 go-live date to accommodate beginning of semester duties on campus.
- 4/3/2013 - vDesk services will cease operation as a campus-cooperative after the current semester on May 15th, 2013.
Aggregating this type of service, namely disk i/o limitations for several hundred concurrent sessions from a common SAN proved problematic. Industry has offered more scalable and affordable solutions and various CSUs will continue to offer various next generation implementations of this service.
If you are interested in this type of service for your CSU, please contact a CSU that will continue to run this type of service for insight/options:
- McCombs School of Business: David Burns
- College of Communication: Charles Soto
- Cockrell School of Engineering: Bob Gloyd
- 5/21/2013 - As outlined in the March/April update, the proposed UT Web project high-level design recommended three service offerings to meet the diverse needs of the UT Web community:
- Managed CMS environments such as Drupal and WordPress for users in need of basic Web publishing.
- Shared Virtual Hosting for users who need a more customized CMS installation or non-CMS Web applications.
- Dedicated Web Servers (both physical and VMs through the UT-V service) will continue to be available for solutions that require a dedicated server.
The proposed high-level design and recommended service offerings were presented at the March 21, 2013 project steering committee meeting and unanimously endorsed.
Since the 'Dedicated Web Servers' option is available today, it requires no additional work from the project team. This leaves the 'Managed CMS' and 'Shared Virtual Hosting' options. The consensus of the project team is that the majority of existing Web Central customers will opt for 'Shared Virtual Hosting' and therefore the project team will concentrate their efforts on delivering a detailed architectural design for this proposed solution which addresses as many of the project’s requirements as possible. In this scenario, a 'Managed CMS' solution would still be pursued, but as a related initiative outside of the scope of this deliverable.
The 'Shared Virtual Hosting' solution will be designed to take advantage of a public cloud-based shared virtual hosting solution, like Amazon Web Services (AWS). As discussed in the May 3, 2013 steering committee meeting, a recent comparison between AWS and an on-campus hosting option indicates similar costs for each despite AWS offering several additional features (e.g., auto-scaling, multiple data centers, snapshots). The unknown at this point is the bandwidth costs. Initial discussions with Internet2 suggest significant discounts can be expected, but an exact number is not yet available.
Next steps:
- Development of the detailed design is underway, which will include an implementation plan for the deployment of the architecture proposed.
- The detailed design and implementation plan will be presented at the June 20 project steering committee meeting.
- Begin development of site migration strategy and plan in late June.
- 1/29/13 - The Customer Steering Committee is reviewing the results of the IAM Strategy consulting engagement and is preparing its recommendations for the IAM Roadmap.
- 5/7/2013 - Wave 1 of the project is underway. Surveys of the first buildings began last week. Each building will go through a process including surveying, remediation, and deployment. Wave 1 is targeted for completion in September 2013; with each subsequent wave scheduled to take roughly six months. Determination of the buildings planned for waves 2 – 4 is in process and will be published by the end of the month. For an updated status of building deployment, visit the project wiki: https://wikis.utexas.edu/display/itsnt/VoIP+Project.
Details of FY 2011-12 Projects
Detailed timelines for the projects for each ITS department are provided below.
- ITS Applications 2012 project plan (PDF)
- ITS Networking 2011-12 project plan (PDF)
- ITS Systems 2011-12 project plan (PDF)
- Information Security Office 2011-12 project plan (PDF)
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