As spring 2020 brought many new requests from our campus community as Lehigh began to teach, learn, and work remotely, we built on our long tradition of ensuring that our cyber infrastructure, technologies, software, and support all meets emerging needs of those across campus.
Top 10 LTS help topics for August 2020
- COVID lab testing
- Course Site
- Account/Identity Management
- Zoom/Panopto
- Software
- Enterprise Applications
- Device configuration
- Library
- Network (wired, wireless)
BANNER TO THE CLOUD In summer 2020, we migrated Banner—our enterprise software for finance, enrollment, and much more—to the cloud, making enterprise systems applications more responsive, agile, and aligned with campus needs, and improving the user experience for students, faculty, and staff.
Over 400 faculty and staff attended our six spring 2020 Business Continuity workshops, highlighting tips for preparing to work remotely, communicating and collaborating while working at home, and using Lehigh software remotely.
In 2019, LTS partnered with Human Resources to formally promote and recognize LTS seminar participation. Seminars are promoted in HR's PageUp performance management system and in HR staff development communications. LTS training participation is recognized and tracked in PageUp.
Through our Duo Two-Factor Authentication Project for faculty and staff, we saw a 99% reduction in compromised faculty and staff accounts. Planning is underway to extend the protection for students in the 20-21 school year.
Expansion of software and computing resources to meet the demands of students, faculty and staff working remotely. The LUapps team quickly added compute and storage capacity to the Citrix environment to support online teaching and remote work for faculty and staff. They also deployed Citrix XenDesktop (VDI) to provide virtual desktops to support the remote work effort. These VDI instances are helpful for those faculty and staff members who don’t have access to laptops, desktop RDP, or if their work desktop becomes inaccessible. Utilizing a special feature in Citrix, the team deployed two delivery groups to make available all public site lab systems for additional resources for students.
Increasing VPN to support the Lehigh community. The Network Engineering team added additional VPN capacity by repurposing decommissioned firewalls to support online teaching and remote work. In addition, they created two separate VPN pools to support students connecting remotely from multiple locations around the globe. VPN peaked at around 1,200 concurrent users.
Launched new software applications and services:
- Respondus
- Adobe Creative Cloud
- LinkedIn Learning (in collaboration with the Center for Career and Professional Development and Human Resources)
- Slack Enterprise Grid
Physical access integrations: Enterprise Systems architected and automated processing physical access to align with COVID-19 Response Team policy regarding movement on campus to support campus health and safety standards. This included collaborating with IDEAL, Enrollment Management, Client Services, CITL, and Technology Infrastructure and Operations groups to create a daily processing of self-assessment, Health and Wellness isolation and quarantine, and campus access needs. This also included downstream processing efforts such as reporting and operational badging stations.
Lehigh COVID-19 Dashboard: Enterprise Systems architected and automated processing of Vault Health and Heath and Wellness Center data for reporting purposes. In collaboration with the Office of Institutional Research and Strategic Analytics, this data was used to create both internal and external dashboards for campus leadership and the campus community.
The HawkWatch COVID-19 Self Assessment tool was developed with the Lehigh COVID Response Team to monitor the daily health of the campus community.
Launched Jamf, a cloud-based management service that helps LTS maintain security and deliver software to nearly 1,000 Macs, iPhones, and iPads.
The Residential Halls wireless project was completed with the deployed wireless access points increased from 920 to 2,370, installed in all bedrooms and common areas providing 100% wireless coverage in all Lehigh student housing, with latest technologies and standards, and increased performance. We improved wireless coverage for 10 academic buildings over winter break.
The Systems Engineering and Instructional Technology teams optimized Moodle for high-availability and redundancy including three load-balanced web front ends, triple redundant database servers with replication, and a high-speed networked redundant file storage server.
Web & Mobile Services created the new College of Business website, partnered with Registration & Academic Services to implement CeDiploma, a certified electronic diploma option allowing students to request digital versions of their official diplomas, and helped Enrollment Management Services create new portals for applicants and admitted students.
Zoom usage increased sharply since March as faculty, students, and staff transitioned teaching, learning, work, and research to a remote environment.
LTS provides technical support for Lehigh University Police Department (LUPD) systems and we redeveloped LUPD’s Property Registration Online (PRO), allowing members of the Lehigh community to register electronics and other items of significant value.
Technology Infrastructure and Operations met its commitment to keeping our network services operational over 99% of the time, with nearly all services at 100% uptime.
We completed the migration of Lehigh's decades-old traditional PBX phone system to Cisco Unified Communications, transitioning 5,000+ end points (user and emergency phones, faxes, and point-of-sale systems) to next generation Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).
Computing Consultants upgraded over 1,000 computers to Windows 10, Microsoft's newest, most secure operating system, and replaced over 500 PCs with newer systems compatible with Windows 10.
Client Services staff taught 15 software and technology seminars on topics such as Google Mail, Calendar, and Drive, and Computer Data Best Practices, with over 300 attendees.
Successfully completed a multi-year transition from a legacy email system to Gmail, increasing access to the cloud-based academic and administrative software found in G-Suite.
Help Desk and Technology Services: By the numbers
- 10,883 help requests processed in spring, 2020, up from 5,801 in fall, 2019
- 114% increase in concurrent virtual desktops licenses
- 0 breaches of regulated, sensitive data despite dramatic increase in attacks against Lehigh
- 3,886 wireless access points deployed on campus
- 176 websites developed and maintained by Web & Mobile Services
- 191% increase in Bomgar sessions conducted to provide assistance to students, faculty, and staff working remotely