Information Technology News

Information and Academic Technologies

On June 22, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Gottfredson announced his decision to consolidate UCI Information Technology (IT) organizations in non-academic areas.

Effective July 1, Administrative Computing Services (AdCom),  Network and Academic Computing Services (NACS), Office of Academic Affairs Computing Services (OAACS), and Office of Research IT are joining forces as a new organization, Information and Academic Technologies (IAT). The motivation and goals for consolidation are described in the report of the Academic Senior Managers “Big Ideas” IT Workgroup.

Effective integration of IT activities takes time and will be implemented incrementally over coming months. For the present, everything about contacting and working with AdCom, NACS, OAACS, and Office of Research IT remains the same. Please continue to work with your current contacts in these organizations and rely on the appropriate help-desks, as you have done in the past. Our goal is to minimize disruption from IT consolidation activities and we intend to maintain current project schedules and commitments.

With this issue, NACS News becomes IAT News, as part of the ongoing consolidation activity.  IAT news and the iat.uci.edu web sites will be important vehicles to keep you abreast of consolidation progress in the coming months.

Thunderbird Rolls Out in A&BS

IAT-AdCom has recently completed the process of helping UCI administrative departments migrate to a new email service structure.  12 departments and 570 users have been assisted in this process since January.

The migration involved three changes, each intended to improve email service to affected users.  The most obvious change was moving from Eudora, a program that is no longer supported by its developer and has become increasingly error-prone and insecure, to Thunderbird.

However, behind this obvious change, users were also migrated from the POP protocol for email delivery to IMAP.  There are many advantages to IMAP, not least of which is the ability to see the same email messages from every computer, and even from Webmail.  IMAP also allows the server to tell the user when new mail has arrived, rather than the user creating an unnecessary workload for the server by polling it: “Is there new mail yet?  How about now?”

Finally, users were migrated to the campus’s main Enterprise Services email server, allowing for more cost-effective support, and providing better response time and more space for email storage.

Candidate users were given a choice of making the change themselves, using online self-help instructions, or waiting for their department’s turn and getting personal assistance.

While change is never easy, many people have already commented that the new system is an improvement.

Spam Tagging – Your Friend in a World of Spam

NACS employs many techniques to maximize the quality of the campus email system, and in particular to limit the amount of junk email (spam) faculty and staff receive.  Known spam senders are automatically blocked, for example, and campus mail gateways require adherence to email standards (which spammers often ignore) before email is accepted for delivery.

Beyond that, email delivery is a balancing act between reliability and convenience on the one side, and security on the other.  It is annoying to receive junk email, but it is unacceptable to block a message which was wanted.

One feature of the campus email service that helps achieve this balance is the mail-scanning service which rates every incoming message for the likelihood that it is junk mail.  This assessment is recorded in special “header” lines in the delivered email of the form “X-UCIRVINE”.

Sometimes a message comes from a dubious source.  Those messages get a header line “X-UCIRVINE-MailScanner-From:”  Other times the content of the message matches patterns associated with spam.  These messages will get a line “X-UCIRVINE-SpamScore:” with a number of copies of the letter ’s’ proportional to the number of suspicious elements in the messages.

These lines are not normally displayed by email readers, but users can configure the programs to look for these lines and file away such messages in a spam folder for later assessment at their convenience.  For users of NACS’s Enterprise Services email, this spam filter is easily activated with “My Email Options.”

Only messages coming to UCI from off campus are subject to this analysis.  Intracampus email is delivered directly.

NACS tunes the rules that characterize email regularly, incorporating each new trick developed by spam senders into the mail scanner.

Faculty and staff working from home (sending email from off campus) should consider using Webmail, the VPN, or configuring their email software to use the authenticated campus mail gateway (smtp.uci.edu) to avoid the possibility that your email might be scanned, flagged, and isolated.

Course Management System for University Extension

NACS and UCI Extension have teamed up to enable UCI Extension courses to use the Moodle course management system, available at http://learn.uci.edu/ .

This new capability was made possible through “single sign-on,” a technology that allows students to move seamlessly among websites which, by sharing login and other information, eliminate the need to sign-in multiple times.

Extension students use their Extension login to register and pay for classes. They can then move into the Moodle online learning environment hosted at NACS. Once classes begin, students see their classes immediately and can start participating in online discussions and view media-rich course materials. All authentication and student enrollment information are exchanged in real-time behind the scenes.

Jill James, Director of University Extension Information Systems praised the partnership’s success. “NACS’s project management help, technical expertise, and support are fantastic and ensured a very successful launch. As the Distance Learning Center expands, the new automation helps streamline the process of creating courses and linking students.”

The partnership between NACS and UnEx’s Distance Learning Center has served as a model for on-campus IT “in-sourcing” since 2002. NACS provides the IT expertise, infrastructure, and on-call emergency response necessary to host a Moodle site 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This allows the Distance Learning Center to focus attention on their unique contribution on campus: top-notch distance learning education.

Network News (USEnet) Discontinued

The campus USEnet News server, news.service.uci.edu, will be discontinued after the end of the academic year on Tuesday, June 30, 2009.

At present, the service has minimal use and is running with older software and hardware.  External sources of USEnet News have been launched in recent years that provide a variety of quality services.  Campus users still reading news from our server should evaluate and switch to one of those sources or your local ISP’s news feed.

In the past, some classes have created local feeds on the campus news service for discussions. We recommend the EEE Class Mail List system for those needs.

Secure Instant Messaging

NACS has introduced a new component of our communication and collaboration services: Instant Messaging (IM).

This service allows real-time communication between two or more people.  You can type brief messages back and forth, ask and answer quick questions, share links, and transfer files. In addition to person-to-person communications, it can be used to host a group “chat room”, to assist help desk or reception activities, or for contact between faculty and students.

As this service is designed for and operated at UC Irvine, it has many advantages over commercial IM services:

• UCInetID Identification — Your instant messaging ID is the same as your campus login: UCInetID@uci.edu. With the UCInetID system you always know with whom you’re speaking; no need to guess or verify whether an instant messaging handle actually belongs to your coworker.
• Spam-Free — NACS Instant Messaging is not accessible by commercial instant messaging systems. In addition, you must authorize senders before they may send messages to you.
• Security — All transmissions are encrypted using SSL/TLS.

NACS offers documentation for selected instant messaging clients for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

For additional information and connection instructions, please see http://www.nacs.uci.edu/computing/im/