The Students and Technology Achieving Results (STAR) system will be unavailable during an extended maintenance period from 11:00 p.m. on Saturday, November 10 until 8:00 a.m. on Monday, November 12. During this period, do not activate your account or change your password if you have an account in STAR, as the password will not be synced.

Any questions regarding this outage should be directed to the OIT Service Desk at 304-293-4444 or email oithelp@mail.wvu.edu

This Sunday, October 21 from 9:00 a.m. until noon, WVU Network Operations will perform mandatory maintenance on some equipment located in the WVNET Data Center. WVU eCampus system will experience brief outages during the three-hour period. As for other systems such as MAP, STAR, and GroupWise email, there should be minimal, if any, disruption of these services.

In addition, one or two short outages of five to ten minutes in length, will take place in the WVNET Data Center between 9:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. After that, we do not expect any other outages. However, we will still be working on the equipment until noon.

OIT apologizes for any inconvenience as we do try to minimize outages as much as possible. If you have any concerns or questions, contact the OIT Service Desk at 293-4444 or email oithelp@mail.wvu.edu.

West Virginia University is now an Apple Authorized Service Provider for the WVU community, which includes students and University employees. This designation allows WVU to provide warranty and non-warranty service for both personal and institutionally owned Apple products.

Five WVU employees have completed the Apple Certified Macintosh Technician (ACMT) certification. ACMT certification verifies the ability to perform basic troubleshooting and repair of both desktop and portable Macintosh systems, such as iMac and MacBook Pro. ACMT emphasizes identifying and resolving common Mac OS X problems, and uses Apple Service and Support products and practices to repair Apple hardware.

Two service locations are available on campus. One is located in the Health Sciences Center for HSC professional programs. For all other service needs, students and employees can visit the Technology Support Center in G-49 Brooke Tower.

For more information, contact the OIT Service Desk at (304) 293-4444 or email oithelp@mail.wvu.edu.

The Office of Information Technology Systems Administration group will perform mandatory network upgrades at the WVU Primary Data Center from 6:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. on Sunday, September 23. The following primary applications and services will be affected during the test period: STAR, INVAM, Dental, Oncorprod, Pyramed, HSCP, and MyAccess.

The above services and applications will be unavailable during the seven-hour period. OIT apologizes for any inconvenience as we do try to minimize outages as much as possible. If you have any concerns or questions, contact the OIT Service Desk at 304-293-4444 or email oithelp@mail.wvu.edu.

The West Virginia Higher Education Technology Conference 2012 will be held November 12-13, 2012 at The Waterfront Place Hotel in Morgantown, WV. The conference focuses mainly on technology in Higher Education in West Virginia but also includes tracks for K-12 and State Government.

The conference offers an opportunity to present your knowledge of relevant topics and welcomes proposals for presentations on a wide range of topics of interest to K-12, Higher Education and State agency personnel.

To submit a proposal, use the Call for Proposals Submission Form at wvconference.com. All proposals must be submitted no later than September 30, 2012.

A new phishing attack is hitting WVU email accounts claiming to come from the “Service Desk Coordinator” at WVU. The attack claims that all incoming email to a user account have been suspended pending a required update. Clicking the included update link takes the user to a very convincing forgery website that appears to be WVU MIX. However, the browser web address is http://2swans.co.za/mix.htm and is designed to steal your information.

IGNORE this e-mail, and forward it as an attachment to defendyourdata@mail.wvu.edu. If you did enter your information on this forged site, go immediately to the myid.wvu.edu website and change your password. If you use the same password on other accounts, such as Facebook, change that password to a different one as well. Neither WVU nor any other legitimate agency will ever send an email of this type. Think before you click!

The WVU Academic Computing Advisory Committee (ACAC) is sponsoring two Faculty Forums:

• Wednesday, September 12, 2012 from 3:30 – 5:00 p.m. in NRCCE 101 A&B
• Wednesday, September 19, 2012 from 3:30 – 5:00 p.m. in Mountainlair Rhododendron Room

We invite you to join us for refreshments and discuss your technology needs for teaching and learning. Learn about free and specially-priced software available to faculty. Brief updates will be given on MyID accounts, the new student email system, and the new clicker standard. Information will also be shared about a new email system for faculty.

We want your input!

To see the complete agenda and post questions and comments before the meeting, please go to http://oit.wvu.edu/acac/

The WVU Office of Information Technology will offer instructor-led workshops and webinars on a variety of technology topics during the Fall term. We are currently taking registrations for eCampus, Excel, iClicker, and Wimba Classroom workshops.

Additional Fall term sessions will include Access, PowerPoint, Word, Acrobat, Dreamweaver, InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, and Visio. To register, complete the online registration form at http://oit.wvu.edu/training/schedule/ or send email to workshop@mail.wvu.edu.

West Virginia University has acquired a suite of SAS products to distribute to staff, faculty, and students via the OIT Software Licensing Information Center (SLIC). Server and workstation-based products are available for distribution at a very competitive price.

SAS provides business analytics software and services that allows you to perform:

• data entry, retrieval, and management
• report writing and graphics design
• statistical and mathematical analysis
• business forecasting and decision support
• operations research and project management
• applications development

SAS also offers online curriculum resources, which features interactive tools, inquiries, web lessons, audio tutorials, and core disciplines. The subjects that SAS Curriculum Pathways focuses on are:

• English Language Arts
• Mathematics
• Science
• Social Studies
• Spanish

In addition to the suite of SAS products, WVU has also acquired JMP, JMP Pro, and JMP Genomics. JMP dynamically links statistics with graphics to make analytics and information visually accessible, letting you explore relationships, spot hidden trends and easily tell your data’s stories.

For more information visit SAS Business Analytics and SAS Curriculum Pathways. To learn more about JMP visit here for more information on their statistical software.

Contact SLIC for pricing and ordering information. (304-293-4684 or software@mail.wvu.edu)

Image Credit: SAS Institute Inc.

The WVU connection to Internet2, provided by WVNET, will be unavailable from midnight tonight until 10:00 a.m. Friday, July 27 while a damaged section of cable is being replaced.