Release 2025.12

What’s New: Your ITS Update for the 2025.12 Release

2025.12 focused on strengthening what the campus relies on every day. Email and endpoint protections were significantly upgraded, the storage roadmap was set out through 2027, and digital accessibility became a campus-wide program with leadership sponsorship. Design work began in earnest on the college’s next capital project.

It was also a cycle that showed the value of the resilience built in earlier releases, as ITS kept services available and recovered quickly through a demanding fall.

Key Initiatives for the Campus Community

1. Digital Accessibility Becomes a Program

• Sponsored at the top: Digital accessibility became a campus priority with senior leadership sponsorship, extending beyond websites to every digital system the community uses.
• A target list and a plan: ITS produced the first inventory of solutions and sites to be assessed, and launched digital accessibility in beta.
• Built into teaching: Accessibility was folded into new faculty orientation and other touchpoints through the year, with particular attention to course materials in Canvas.

2. Teaching and Learning at Volume

• Electronic blue book up 400%: The EBB exam platform grew to 42 sections, 25 faculty, 107 exams, and nearly 700 students — a fourfold increase over the prior semester, with up to four exams running simultaneously. More than twenty final exams were delivered electronically without a single lost submission.
• Why faculty adopted it: Instructors are using the platform to support academic integrity in an era of generative AI, and to give students a clean, focused exam environment. Faculty increasingly run their own exams independently through single sign-on.
• Canvas for staff: Canvas reached general availability for staff use, with project sites created for the Dean of the Faculty, the Gould Center, the Kravis Leadership Institute, the Soll Center, career and professional development, and the Dean of Students.
• Zoom AI, introduced carefully: Zoom AI Companion was rolled out to ITS first as the early-access group — meeting summaries, live transcription, and calendar assistance — with settings configured for privacy and clear guidance that the supported platform tool is the one to use in campus meetings. AI-powered live translation was also deployed successfully for a staff conference.
• A workspace for student staff: A dedicated Slack workspace was launched for student workers alongside the staff and faculty space, completing a three-workspace architecture.

3. Systems and Services

• VIA ready for launch: After nearly a year of work with International Programs, the international student services platform completed its first data import and was scheduled for a January launch.
• Financial aid processing modernized: The tool that brings federal financial aid forms into document management was rebuilt and deployed to multiple Financial Aid workstations, replacing a single-machine process with something resilient.
• Protected health information, centralized: Cloud storage for protected health information was consolidated into a single managed instance, simplifying access control for the research centers that depend on it. See HIPAA workstations.
• Emergency contacts, automated: Emergency contact information now flows automatically from the HR system into the campus emergency notification platform, with a simple prompt for the community to keep details current.
• Consortium leadership: Our shared-services partner asked ITS to help replicate the RDSC room panel design — CMC’s implementation had become the reference for the consortium.

Behind the Scenes: A More Resilient & Secure CMC

1. Stronger Email and Endpoint Protection

• Safe Links introduced: Every inbound link is now checked at the moment it is clicked, protecting the community even when a message looks legitimate. Rollout included careful testing so internal systems and password-reset links continue to work smoothly.
• Mail routing tightened: External mail is now consistently routed through our filtering platform, and certain high-risk attachment types are handled through secure file links instead — both standard practice across the consortium.
• Reporting made easy: Cybersecurity Awareness Month messaging promoted the Report Phishing button, which lets our tooling remove a malicious message from inboxes far more quickly than forwarding ever could.
• Configuration hardening: A systematic review of server, endpoint, and email protection settings raised the college’s overall security posture.
• Independent testing: A dedicated environment was built for the year’s external security assessment.
• Guidance on authentication prompts: A recurring per-semester reminder now tells the community to approve authentication prompts only when they are expecting one — simple guidance that makes a real difference.

2. Storage, Backup, and Recovery

• A roadmap to 2027: The new storage platform now serves the virtual environment, with file services following. It is the planned successor to the legacy platform as that reaches the end of its supported life in 2027 — giving a three-year window for a gradual, low-risk migration, with return on investment projected inside four years.
• File services migrated: The vendor was on site to configure file services jointly with our network partner, moving toward immutable storage across the estate.
• Cloud backup rebuilt: The cloud backup servers protecting campus storage were replaced over a two-week project.
• Disaster recovery scoped: Directory services already replicate to the cloud and critical application backups are there. ITS mapped the remaining design work needed to make cloud failover a tested capability, and scoped it as a project for a future release.
• Directory management upgraded: The identity management platform was consolidated onto a single service for both domains and brought fully current in a single planned window.
• Monitoring extended: Server and device monitoring was extended toward every campus network segment, and spare capacity in our security platform was offered to the consortium as a shared service.

3. Sports Bowl: From Concept to Design

• A design partner engaged: A specialist firm was brought in for fiber-to-the-edge design, power analysis, and growth headroom, along with a study of cellular coverage across the site.
• A network baseline set: The design settled on five fiber pods, with fiber required because cable runs reach 1,000 feet, and a “Wi-Fi everywhere” standard for the venue.
• A converged 3D model: The design partner built a three-dimensional model with conduit routing and technology infrastructure overlaid, with predictive coverage mapping and signal data collection scheduled for December.
• One plan, agreed together: ITS worked with Athletics, Media, and the design team to bring every stakeholder’s requirements into a single coordinated technology plan for the venue.

4. Keeping Services Available

• A demanding season for power: Several campus power events required coordinated recovery sweeps of classrooms, conference rooms, and the Board of Trustees space. A prioritization list built by the help desk became the standard playbook, and configuration changes now bring devices back automatically that previously needed a visit.
• Redundancy that paid for itself: A fiber path in the residential area was damaged and the network stayed up on its redundant strands, with repair scheduled into planned summer work. This is exactly what the redundant fiber design built in 2024.12 was for.
• Fast recovery, consortium-wide: When a shared student portal issue affected all five colleges during pre-registration, service was restored within the half hour.

Looking Ahead: ITS Priorities for the 2026.04 Release Cycle

2026.04 is the cycle in which the governance work of the past two years is meant to land, and in which a new identity and computing foundation gets built.

• Approve the policy and stand up governance: Secure formal approval of the Responsible Secure Computing Policy and establish the IT Steering Committee, then begin enterprise data classification.
• A managed Google workspace: Stand up a managed Google Workspace tenant with dual single sign-on, giving staff protected accounts with full Gemini capability under institutional terms.
• Next-generation wireless: Evaluate the next generation of campus wireless, and test technology that improves cellular coverage in areas where signal is weak.
• Sports Bowl construction: Release the purchase order, order the base network, and begin build-out against a July 2026 opening.
• Academic systems: Confirm the student information system roadmap, launch VIA, and begin Pathify and Interfolio implementations.