Examples of account compromises are on the rise. Weak passwords are one culprit. Phishing (social engineering) scams are also rampant. Even programs such as key loggers which record the keystrokes you type and then relay the information to a third party who extracts out the resource and credentials are common. In this day and age, [...]
Recently, we helped one of our departments (who shall remain nameless) identify an external vendor to help them with a website design. We were in the middle of an active development cycle and didn't have time to do the project for them. And so we were acting in the capacity of a consultant, whose responsibility [...]
There's a great new service offered by TAMU Libraries. They have digitized the entire collection of Aggieland yearbooks and put them online, in searchable format with a nice browsing interface. Looking through the old yearbooks, reading their editorials and letters, one can get the sense of how our predecessors lived in Aggieland. Browsing the first [...]
The EmpowerID service will be retired on May 1, 2015 which means you will need to use other preferred methods to reset and change passwords. For password resets, most users are contacting the Technology Services - Student Affairs Service Desk and moving forward this will be the preferred method to reset a forgotten password. [...]
Central IT recently launched a new IT site (http://it.tamu.edu/). This is a complete redesign of the old AVPIT suite of sites into a clean, slick, visually appealing, completely responsive website, designed with usability in mind. The communications team really outdid themselves with this one. I especially like the Services "A to Z" link which allows [...]
This is a very intriguing video about the consequences of smarter and more numerous robots. The end of the video, where the author outlines an argument for those industries which will be hit the hardest, is scary.
In January, Information Technology switched to ServiceNow, an IT service management platform that is widely considered to be one of the best in the world. ServiceNow is currently used to support our incident management process (e.g., tickets) and service management (e.g., ordering, accounts, software). In the future, ServiceNow can support virtually all of the things [...]
It seems like a pretty basic question. But we've learned through experience that classifying our work into different categories allows us to plan our time more efficiently and document what we do resulting in greater transparency. So, what is work? Work is defined as anything that expends human resources. In IT, we divide the work [...]