IT News

Employees, students and emeritus faculty may now download free copies of Microsoft Office 2016 on their personally owned computers and mobile devices. Information Technology Services has provided instructions how to install Office ProPlus to ensure all users have the latest features.

The previous version, Office 2013, will not be available for download after Nov. 14. Users who have already installed the older version on their personal machines and want to continue using it may do so or upgrade now to Office 2016.

Many employees and student workers with Outlook email accounts will be able to use a new Focused Inbox feature later this fall to help sort high-priority and less important emails. When Microsoft makes this feature available, it will be turned off by default. However, users may activate this service on their own. This option will not immediately be available to users at WVU Medicine and the Health Sciences Center.

Focused Inbox will separate your current Inbox into two tabs _ Focused and Other. Your most important emails will go into Focused, while the rest remain easily accessible but out of the way in Other. You’ll be able to see the number of emails in the Other tab from the main email screen, and you can switch back and forth at any time to review the contents.

The walk-up support that Information Technology Services has been providing at the Mountainlair is moving to a new location, merging operations with Mountaineer Card Services next to the Box Office on Monday, Oct. 31.

The new IT Service Center will provide technical support, new and replacement ID cards, test scanning services and more from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday, except on University holidays.

Information Technology Services recommends that all WVU+kc (Kuali) users check the WVU Online Directory as soon as possible to ensure that your email address and other information is displayed correctly. Mistakes could result in failure to receive system notifications. To submit corrections, please use this link.

In August, ITS informed you that some WVU Medicine employees were not receiving emails from WVU+kc (system because of problems with address formatting. In working with WVU Medicine and Health Sciences IT staff to resolve these issues, we have discovered this problem also may affect people who are not WVU Medicine employees.

Faculty, staff and students should NOT install either free trial versions or personally-owned versions of Adobe Creative Cloud products on University-owned computers. Installing a separate version of these products will wipe out the officially licensed, WVU-provided version of the software.

Because of recent changes to Adobe licensing rules, all WVU computers running Creative Cloud will need to be updated with new serial numbers by Nov. 30. Information Technology Services will be working with IT managers across campus to ensure that all University-owned machines have the proper serial numbers, and that old versions are removed.

STAR, Listserv and several other systems will be unavailable 8 a.m.-2 p.m. Sunday, Oct 23 while Information Technology Services moves data to a new storage system. This critical upgrade replaces two existing systems with one, increasing storage capacity by 65 percent. This change is expected to save the University more than $500,000 a year.

The affected services include:
STAR & STAR Work Request System
eCampus Request System (eRS
Listserv
Student Evaluation of Instruction (SEI)
Confluence, JIRA, SVN and all other Atlassian development tools
Enterprise Request Apps wvu.onthehub.com

Information Technology Services is canceling the second year of a contract with the research information company Gartner to save nearly $175,000. The contract expires Oct. 31, so any faculty, staff or students who are using paid content must download what they need by that date. This decision is part of the University’s ongoing efforts to reduce costs.

Research relating to technology use in higher education remains available to all WVU faculty and staff from EDUCAUSE. Click the login box at the top http://www.educause.edu/, then enter your WVU credentials in the Federated Login box on the next screen. Many other research resources are available through the WVU Libraries and can be found on the Library website at https://lib.wvu.edu/.