IT Help Desk and Academic Technology are Relocating

OIT is partnering with CUL to provide more accessible service to faculty, staff and students in Fondren Library.  Over the summer monhts, several teams will be relocating to new offices within Fondren.

Academic Technology Services is currently located in Fondren Library West.  They will be moving to Fondren Library East.  The Faculty Media Lab will be relocated to the space currently occupied by the Student Multimedia Center.  The Multimedia Center will be expanded out into the commons to serve both faculty and students.  Brad Boeke, Shirlene Pearson, Steve Snider, Ian Aberle and the STAR students will be relocating to FLE over the next few weeks.

The IT Help Desk will be moving from the 4^th floor of Blanton to the Fondren Library West space.  This will allow the IT Help Desk to be more easily accessible to the campus community and accept walk in traffic as well as cover evening and weekend hours all in one location.

The Fondren Library West space will house half of the Support Services team.  This includes the Help Desk, Field Support, Cellular Support, Classroom Support and Training Teams.  Rachel Mulry and Abby Kinney will also be located in FLW. The rest of Support Services is located in Expressway Towers. That group includes the Hardware Lifecycle Team and the Client Architecture Team. 

The remaining OIT Teams will continue to office in the Blanton Building on the 4th floor. 

The exact date of each move is still unknown, although our goal is to be in place before August 1.  Once the date is set, additional communication will be sent to the campus!

Major Data Center Activities

Construction on a new “wing” in the campus data center was completed during the month of May.  With the rapid growth of servers, our current data center had completely run out of room and we were close to exceeding the weight limitation of the floor!  Fortunately, we were able to renovate the classroom next door to the Data Center to offer some much needed expansion room as we await the construction of a New Data center on Mockingbird.

In order to begin moving servers to the new wing, a new power path has to be connected.  This work is currently scheduled for June 12.  The maintenance will take several hours to complete and will affect many technology services. However, extensive planning was done to keep as many critical services online throughout the maintenance window. 

Once the power path is up and running, we will be able to move existing servers into the new room as well as add new equipment!  Another major maintenance outage is scheduled for July 10.  More details regarding affected services during this outage will be posted closer to the event. 

Do you receive the IT Change Notices?

Every Wednesday, an email is sent to a dedicated listserve outlining all of the scheduled maintenance activities that affect OIT services.  The list of scheduled maintenance is also posted on our website.  Only those activities impacting a majority of the campus are sent to the campus bulk lists.  If you would like to receive these weekly emails, simply send an email to join-itchanges@list.smu.edu.