Are you interested in making the digital world at Ohio University more accessible for everyone? If so, consider attending the first OHIO Digital Accessibility Network (DAN) meeting on Wednesday, Jan. 29 from noon to 1:00 p.m. in WUSOC 346. If you are unable to attend in person, you can participate remotely via Microsoft Teams.

During spring 2020, OIT will be upgrading software on many University-owned computers. If your computer is affected, you can expect to hear from OIT or your departmental IT technician in the coming weeks. Titles being upgraded include Windows 7, older versions of Windows 10, and older versions of Microsoft Office for Mac and PC. Mac users also will receive a new application called Self Service that provides automatic security updates and one-click install icons for University-licensed software. These upgrades are part of a regular schedule to keep University devices secure, current, and in compliance with vendor license terms

On October 13, 2020, Microsoft will stop supporting Basic Authentication, an older, less secure way of accessing Office 365 services. They also will disable older email protocols like POP, IMAP, and Exchange ActiveSync. When these changes take effect, some older email and calendar clients and mobile apps will stop working with Office 365.

In anticipation of this change and to provide time to address any unexpected side effects, OIT recommends switching to a supported email/calendar client no later than March 1, 2020. For help with this transition, contact the IT Service Desk.

To combat ever-increasing cyber attacks aimed at higher education, OIT now offers Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for students. MFA adds a verification step to your OHIO login, making it harder for a cyber criminal to use a lost or stolen password to access your account. This feature is a great way to protect sensitive personal and financial data.

OIT's ongoing, multi-year network upgrade is having a positive impact on students’ academic careers already, thanks to an internship program in collaboration with the J. Warren McClure School of Emerging Communication Technologies.

On Sep. 24, 2019, OHIO email users found themselves unable to send messages to anyone outside of the university for several hours. The way this outage happened demonstrates just how connected the online world can be and just how important it is to maintain a unique password for your OHIO login.

Software and security updates are about to get a whole lot easier for many university-owned Mac computers. Over the next few months, OIT will roll out a new Mac Management application called Self Service to all university departments. Self-Service offers one-click installers for university-licensed software packages and automatically takes care of required security updates.

If you have a copy of Adobe Acrobat Pro that you downloaded from the OIT Software page or that was installed on your university-owned computer via Software Center, Managed Software Center, or Self Service, that copy will stop working on November 1, 2019. You have several options, depending on how you use Acrobat.

If you have a copy of  Windows 7 or Microsoft Office 2013 on a university-owned computer, you can expect to hear from OIT during May about upgrading to a supported version.  This upgrade is necessary for several reasons. Most importantly, Windows 7 and Office 2013 are no longer receiving updates from Microsoft. 

To support the University’s decision to brand itself exclusively as “OHIO," OIT will retire the ohiou.edu internet domain in favor of ohio.edu on Dec. 21, 2018. From December 21, 2018 through June 30, 2019, ohiou.edu web addresses will redirect to a page that informs visitors of the name change and recommends that they replace “ohiou.edu” with “ohio.edu” in the address they were trying to reach.

OHIO's three-year project to improve website accessibility, usability, ease of maintenance, and brand consistency is gaining momentum. Most behind-the-scenes technical work on the new Web CMS has been completed, 16 departmental sites have migrated to the new system, many more are in preparation or under way, and a new web cache is in place.