Release 2025.04

What’s New: Your ITS Update for the 2025.04 Release

2025.04 was a delivery cycle. In January the college moved onto a new service desk platform. In April a major research cluster was installed, commissioned, and formally dedicated. And across all four months the Robert Day Sciences Center went from a construction shell to a building with fiber terminated, closets racked, cameras planned, and its rooms live in campus scheduling.

It was also a cycle that asked ITS to be flexible — absorbing scope changes, restoring service quickly when the unexpected happened, and making a considered call to move a major system launch to protect the academic year.

Key Initiatives for the Campus Community

1. A New Service Desk, Live

• Live in January: FreshService became CMC’s service desk platform. Historical tickets were imported, every ITS team was provisioned and trained, and prior records were preserved before the legacy system was retired.
• Email straight into tickets: Mail to help@cmc.edu now creates and updates tickets directly, so a message and a ticket are the same thing. The work also confirmed the value of a longer-term subdomain strategy for CMC’s mail and web services.
• Vendor reviews made easier: The security and accessibility review process was rebuilt so ITS is the single point of contact for vendors, working from a standard template. Departments hand us the vendor, and we handle the rest.

2. Research Computing at Scale

• The cluster arrived and was installed: The NSF-supported expansion was delivered in late March and installed over two days in mid-April with the vendor on site.
• Identity rebuilt for automation: Cluster authentication was re-engineered so account provisioning can be scripted — researchers now receive an automated welcome with a guided first sign-in.
• Open to the consortium: Harvey Mudd faculty were granted access, with onboarding built jointly across ITS, the Solutions team, and the help desk, and student access planned as a second phase. Federated single sign-on was set as the long-term destination.
• A dedication: The cluster was formally dedicated in April with the faculty and staff who had driven it — an unusually visible moment for infrastructure work, and a deliberate one.

3. The Robert Day Sciences Center Takes Shape

• Equipment staged and configured early: Phones, switching, and wireless access points were received and programmed well ahead of spaces being released, so ITS was ready the moment the building was.
• Protected through construction: As closets were released, equipment was installed and sealed against construction dust while trades finished around it.
• Rooms into the scheduling systems: RDSC rooms were added to EMS and the student information system, and EMS kiosk configuration was completed.
• Classroom computing revisited: Working with the Dean of the Faculty, the classroom and research lab computing model was revisited to better match how science faculty teach. ITS expanded the planning conversation to cover the management, support, and software questions that come with it, and built a delivery plan around the new direction.
• Savings found in the details: Selecting upgraded VoIP handsets saved roughly $6,000–$9,000, and a competitive UPS quote pursued another $5,000.

4. Systems and Services

• Student system launch rescheduled: After a cost-benefit review with campus partners, the student information system launch was moved to a later window rather than landing mid-year — a deliberate decision to protect the academic calendar.
• Pathify kicked off: Work began on a student portal experience alongside the existing portal, including an emergency-contact workflow explored with the Dean of Students.
• VIA first access: The team got its first hands-on look at the international student system — early in its life, and built SEVIS-first, which is why it was chosen.
• Slack onto Enterprise Grid: Workspaces were consolidated with dual identity providers — one for staff and faculty, one for students and external collaborators — so people land in the right place automatically.
• OnBase upgraded: The document management platform moved several versions forward over a weekend, with client updates following.

Behind the Scenes: A More Resilient & Secure CMC

1. Network and Storage

• The campus fiber loop completed: 144 strands of fiber on 9th and 6th Streets now give redundant, high-speed interconnection between east and west campus, with 100 Gbps available from the regional network and a firewall upgrade path opened to take full advantage of it.
• Wireless and switching kept current: A firmware update across campus switching resolved intermittent connection drops, improving day-to-day reliability in buildings and dorms.
• Data center electrical expansion: The power build for the expanded cluster was completed in a single planned window with staff on site and no downtime.
• Storage replacement evaluated: Vendors were assessed for the shared storage platform behind roughly 150 college servers, with the eventual selection favored partly because a consortium peer already ran it — opening a shared disaster recovery conversation.

2. Security and Readiness

• Incident response, exercised: A practice run in January preceded a formal facilitated tabletop exercise in February, giving the team a rehearsed response rather than a written one.
• Current encryption standards: TLS 1.3 was implemented across the consortium, with the load balancer platform upgraded in a phased, one-at-a-time pattern to keep services available.
• We practice on ourselves first: ITS ran a phishing awareness exercise against its own team before taking a campaign to campus — and the findings shaped the campus program that followed.
• Push, not phone: Student authentication moved to push notifications, a faster and more secure experience, with older telephone-based methods scheduled for retirement.
• A network for scientific instruments: An isolated network segment for sensitive research equipment was designed and put into beta, protecting both the instruments and the wider campus network.

3. Responding When Plans Change

• A classroom back in service: After damage to a Roberts North classroom over a weekend, the media team restored function within days and replaced affected equipment, working alongside Campus Safety and Facilities. No class was disrupted.
• Campus cameras restored: Camera equipment at the tennis courts was repaired and returned to service after exterior maintenance work at the site. It reinforced a simple practice ITS now builds into every project plan: when work is happening near campus technology, bring us in early and we will make it straightforward.
• Depth of coverage, proven: Service Operations carried a week of simultaneous absences with no impact to campus service, backed by every other ITS team — the shared-support model working exactly as designed.
• Support when it is personal: When a member of the community faced a sudden flood of unwanted email, ITS had protective filtering in place the same day — the kind of quiet, individual help the help desk provides year-round.

Looking Ahead: ITS Priorities for the 2025.08 Release Cycle

2025.08 is the largest release ITS has scoped. A new academic building opens, a learning management system is retired, and the storage platform underneath the entire virtual environment is replaced — all before students return in August.

• Open the Robert Day Sciences Center: Complete network, wireless, AV, printing, camera, and room-scheduling deployment, and train science faculty on the new environment.
• Retire Sakai: Complete the move to Canvas and formally sunset the legacy learning management system.
• Replace the virtual environment’s storage: Migrate every virtual machine to a new high-performance platform with immutable backup capability, and complete the virtualization upgrade.
• Open Slack to staff and faculty: Move the workplace messaging platform out of pilot.
• Begin identity modernization: Start the early-access rollout of a cloud identity platform as the future foundation for campus sign-in.