To: UT Knoxville-area Faculty and Staff
From: Chief Information Officer Scott Studham
Subject: OIT Improvements
The Office of Information Technology (OIT) launched a customer satisfaction survey on February 9, 2010, with the purpose of gathering input on your satisfaction with the IT services OIT provides and your ideas for improvement. I personally want to provide an update on how OIT is responding to the results and comments of this survey.
A total of 3,287 surveys were completed (faculty, 491; staff, 937; students, 1,859). A summary of the survey results and all comments is available at http://oit.utk.edu/2010survey.
Three areas that received the lowest overall satisfaction ratings were electronic mail (Tmail, Exchange), UT Web search engine, and online class registration (Circle Park Online). OIT is diligently working to improve all three of these areas.
This year, OIT will upgrade e-mail for faculty/staff from the current 250MB mailboxes to 1GB, with an additional 1GB available upon request. OIT will begin migrating faculty and staff to Exchange 2010 over the summer and continue through the fall.
OIT is working with the Office of Communications and Marketing to implement Google as UT Knoxville’s primary search engine. In May, OIT will implement Google’s custom search on the UTK.edu website. This free service will bring the power of Google search, but with certain Google-imposed limitations. Later in the summer we will implement the Google search appliance. This will remove the limitations and will bring the full power of Google search to UT Knoxville while also enabling OIT to ensure that new pages are indexed in a timely manner. Throughout this process we welcome input on how well it works and will make adjustments accordingly.
Banner Online Services will replace Circle Park Online, starting with registration for Spring 2011. It will provide 24/7 service and will be integrated with the portal to allow single sign-on to Banner, Online@UT (Blackboard) and DARS. You will have more web-enabled access to class roster information, teaching schedule and advisee information.
The portal (single sign-on) is being developed at the request of students via the Student Government Association (SGA) and the Technology Fee Appropriations Board (TAB). This piece is just a part of an overall UT System initiative to standardize our student information systems on a mainstream commercial product and move away from our in-house developed systems. The implementation of Banner also will allow us to retire our IBM mainframe technology for a cost savings of approximately $650,000 per year.
In closing, I invite you to follow OIT on Twitter for IT status updates and other important information at http://twitter.com/UT_OIT.
You also can subscribe to the IT Weekly, a brief weekly e-mail I send to keep the UT Knoxville community aware of IT developments and other timely information. To subscribe go to http://listserv.utk.edu/archives/itweekly.html and click on “Join or leave the list (or change settings).” The IT Weekly archive is available at https://utworks.tennessee.edu/oit/itweekly/default.aspx.