Tag Archives: digital transformation

New SJSU Event Calendar

Dear SJSU Campus Community,

Our campus will be implementing a new university-wide Event Calendar on July 29. 

You have shared with me the need to replace our existing calendar because it’s over a decade old and it’s missing a lot of features that have become standard over the years. It is not mobile friendly, it’s difficult to search, and it doesn’t integrate or work with social media or personal calendars. That’s why SJSU IT collaborated with groups from across the university to identify a solution that meets the needs of our students, faculty, staff, and university community in a major way. 

The first thing you’ll notice is the look. It’s updated with better design, it’s mobile friendly, and it’s much more visual. Each event can now include images, a flyer, or an embedded map. 

But the biggest new feature, by far, is the updated categories and hashtag system for better filtering so you can find the events that matter to you. You can filter by date, event type, topic, audience, trending, and more. You can subscribe to these feeds and get notifications and updates when a new event is posted. So, if you’re a student who lives on campus, you can set up a feed of events that are student-focused and on campus. Or if you’re faculty, you can set up feeds for events in your field or professional development opportunities. 

The new calendar integrates better with existing communication and calendar platforms, too. Events are now exportable to personal calendars like Google Calendar and Outlook, so event details are carried over without any copying and pasting. Hosts can also link events to their social media accounts, giving groups another route to drive engagement. 

If you’re using the calendar while you’re logged in with your SJSU ID, you’ll find a “My Events” profile page, accessible from an icon in the top right of the calendar page. There, you can view your feeds, see which events you’ve registered for, and view past events as well. 

Available on July 29, you can reach the new calendar in the same way as the prior calendar — from the Events Calendar tile in one.SJSU, or at events.sjsu.edu. Additional information and training is available at www.sjsu.edu/eventcalendar.

I also want to take a moment to thank all the folks who have worked with us together to identify and implement this new event calendar:

Campus Unit Individual Campus Unit Individual
Student Affairs Donna Mae Rizando Strategic Communications Monica Bosque
Student Affairs Rob Drury Strategic Communications Felicia McKee-Fegans
Student Affairs Jordan Webb Strategic Communications Michelle Frey
Student Affairs Erlinda Yanez Athletics Ryan O’Rourke
Student Affairs Angela Iraheta Athletics Blake Sasaki
Academic Affairs Gina Marin Hammer Theatre Chris Burrill
Academic Affairs Bethany Winslow Hammer Theatre Maria Bones
Academic Affairs Sally Ordonez Hammer Theatre Anthony Sutton
Academic Affairs Jennifer Redd Hammer Theatre Hannah Hudgins
College of Science Cher Jones MLK Library Lynda Nguyen
College of Humanities and the Arts Fred Cohen MLK Library Sylvia Guel Ruiz
College of Humanities and the Arts Lucy Yamakawa Cox MLK Library Leslie Seacrist
College of Graduate Studies Jennifer Nathan MLK Library Mariah Ramsour
University Personnel Tamela Sullivan Office of Diversity Fernanda Perdoma-Arciniegas
Associated Students Trevor Large Student Union Amy Guerra-Smith

If you have any questions about the Event Calendar, please don’t hesitate to contact the IT Service Desk online or by phone at 408-924-1530.

Regards,
Bob Lim

Summer 2020 and the SJSU IT Recovery Plan

SJSU IT Colleagues,

I know It’s been a challenging two-and-a-half months for all of us, but you’ve managed to do some incredible work while telecommuting. Your flexibility, dedication, and positive spirit to SJSU have not gone unrecognized. I appreciate everything you’ve done and I know that all these changes to remote work will help protect you, your families, and the campus community. Thanks to your hard work, our students were able to connect with faculty and complete the Spring semester.

I also want to recognize the anxiety many of us are feeling. The state of California has reported a $54 billion shortfall, which will have consequences that impact all of us. I can’t speak to what that fallout will look like for our division or our campus, but I can tell you that SJSU’s leadership understands the important role technology plays for our campus and will play moving forward.

Now I want to share what’s coming next. There’s a lot of uncertainty about the “New Normal,” Fall 2020, and beyond. One of the biggest questions was answered when Chancellor White announced that all 23 CSU campuses will be a hybrid model and mostly online through Fall 2020. The Chancellor’s announcement is in line with the current digital transformation we’ve been engaging in for the last 3 years to allow our students, faculty, and staff to teach, learn, and work anywhere. This plan builds upon our 3-year journey of transformation by focusing on six key areas critical to SJSU’s ongoing success. The goal is to give us a roadmap for continuing to support the university throughout this crisis and beyond.

1. Online Transition and Process Improvements
First off, we’ll continue to provide the best solutions for students and faculty for online learning, for employees working remotely, or for those that come to campus. We’ve been successfully digitizing processes across departments, thanks to Ryan Campbell, Jocelyn Tom, and Leon Nguyen. The OnBase and DocuSign team has been doing great work in this area (they won the Team Sparta Award). We need to ramp up that collaborative spirit to help other departments operate remotely more efficiently.

2. Teaching and Learning
We are evaluating key technology solutions that enable a flexible approach, given our hybrid model. Faculty have done an admirable job with the sudden switch to online, including their ability to move the classroom experience online with virtual labs, thanks to the work done by Tristan Orlino. We’ll be looking into a number of tools to further enable that online teaching experience, including enhancing virtual labs. We’ll also be working very closely with Academic Affairs to expand PeopleSoft integration so our university can offer more online degree programs.

3. Customer Service
We’re enhancing our customer service model to improve hybrid teaching and telecommuting experiences. Thanks to the entire customer service team, including Jason Ferguson, Sharon Watkins, Mario Rivas, Alfred Eclipse, Bruce Gardner, Kirk Nguyen, Lor Vang, and Patrick Ho, who have already built some of this structure. Enhancing this area means expanding coverage hours with instant virtual communications and developing basic remote support for home networks and home devices. We’re also building on the success of our Personalized Zoom Security Checkup by expanding it beyond Zoom and opening it up to both students and faculty.

4. Engagement
The goal for engagement is to create and expand a digital communications platform that supports both on-campus and remote engagement. Thanks to Andy Trembley’s work as our Google and Zoom admin, we’ve been able to finish the semester with Zoom and Hangouts Meet. As we look forward, we need to provide even better tools to replace at least part of the campus experience. That means looking into virtual event management platforms for things like job fairs, onboarding, commencement, and more. Joel Johnson and his team are looking into queue management systems to let people get in line virtually, ping them when it’s their turn at the window, and let them step back in line. This has obvious uses in light of COVID-19, but would be a useful tool when we’re back on campus well.

5. Information Security
We’ll also be continuing to increase layering beyond our campus walls to enhance the information security program for remote learning and remote working. Cybersecurity is going to be a very large part of our behind-the-scenes work, and we’ve already made lots of progress thanks to Michael Hastings and Janice Lew. We need to extend our strategy to be even more comprehensive and think about how we can help protect our students, faculty, staff, and researchers beyond the workspace and into their homes. For summer, we’ll be looking to use Okta single sign-on in more places and start rolling out Duo for students, a project being coordinated by Maggie Panahi.

6. Hardware, Software, and Infrastructure
We’ve made great strides in this area thanks to Cuong Doan, An Nguyen, Sean Davis, Steve Chang, Tam Vu and the entire infrastructure service team. But obviously, we never expected our new infrastructure to be utilized so heavily and so quickly. Like in every other area, COVID-19 has changed everything in this area. We are accelerating our existing technology and infrastructure strategy through innovative, cutting-edge solutions. We’re expanding our virtual storage environment, our licenses, and our Desktop-as-a-Service capabilities.

As you may have noticed, a lot of these projects are just building on what we’ve already been doing. Our strategy has always been to increase the agility and mobility of our university. Now we need to amplify and accelerate that strategy to support SJSU moving forward. Folks across the university will be looking to SJSU IT to provide innovative solutions that enable their success. Let’s show them how we’re building on the success we’ve already achieved.

I hope you all continue to stay safe. Please reach out to me or to your manager if you need anything.

Thank you.

Best regards,
Bob Lim

Thank you for your support!

Dear Colleagues.

I hope this message finds you and your family all safe and healthy! I never could have imagined the challenges and changes of the last two months. As I take a moment to reflect, I am astounded by all we have accomplished. I am also extremely proud of you and your dedication to SJSU and SJSU IT. It is my pleasure to be part of such an incredible division.

So, what exactly did we accomplish? Within four short days of President Papazian announcing the shift to online modality, we transitioned an institution of almost 40,000 individuals from a traditional campus-centric university to a completely mobile campus, where approximately 36,000 students are learning remotely, 2100 faculty are teaching remotely, and 1500 staff are working remotely! This is truly amazing.

Thinking back to the first week of shelter in place, I remember a conversation that I had with an SJSU IT employee. We were working on the campus’s transition to the remote work environment, and he said, “You know, three years ago we would not have been in a situation to be able to do this.” And he was right!

In 2017 our President, Mary Papazian, elevated SJSU IT to a division level and shared her vision that technology would play a critical role in the digital transformation of SJSU. She and her cabinet invested in emerging technologies and dramatically increased technology funding. With Mary’s direction and support, we also established strong industry partnerships with technology leaders like IBM and LinkedIn. Our campus’ digital transformation – over the last three years – has provided the building blocks for a solid IT foundation, one that is scalable and modern.

We upgraded our networks and VPN, creating a more mobile and secure campus with higher bandwidth; transitioned from desktops to laptops, so people could work where they need to work; added analytics capabilities to evaluate our service quality and build our online support model; and changed our service model to maximize support for students, faculty, staff, and researchers.

We also shifted key communication and collaboration platforms:

  • WebEx to Zoom for cutting-edge video conferencing

  • Jabber (chat capability) to a much more user-friendly Google Hangout Chat

  • Announce to Marketo for prompt emails and an enterprise solution with analytics capabilities

What this all means is we had the right infrastructure in place to transition to a mobile campus, right when we needed it.

When called to help, everyone in our division mobilized and swiftly worked together to support our transition to online teaching and telecommuting. Your dedication, flexibility, and professionalism were unprecedented as you planned, shifted hours and responsibilities, and reprioritized work to meet new demands. Specifically, with very limited human resource capital, we formed a rapid response team, created a rapid response triage model, and extended coverage. Back-end engineers now respond to emergency tickets within five minutes from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Front-end engineer customer service staff have a target closure time of 10 minutes for teaching-related issues. And this is the shortlist of the many critical steps you took to ensure our success!

Did I mention, all of this great work has been accomplished while transitioning yourselves to remote workspaces and taking care of your own families? Thank you for all you have done, and all you continue to do!

We may face more challenges in the next few weeks and months as we manage the issues surrounding COVID-19, but remember, we are a resourceful and resilient community. Together, we will come out stronger on the other side.

Tomorrow, Tuesday, March 31, is an SJSU holiday. Please take this opportunity to relax and spend some quality time with those you care about. Each of you deserves some downtime – please rest, stay healthy, and be safe!

Sincerely,
Bob Lim