Release 2026.08

What’s New: Your ITS Update for the 2026.08 Release

2026.08 was the cycle in which several years of planning met a set of fixed dates. A new athletics complex had to be ready for a season. A new president took office on July 1. CMC hosted the consortium’s annual conference in June. And the academic year had to start on time.

All of those dates held. Of the 30 items tracked in this cycle, 27 were delivered. Three carried into 2026.12, and several planned platform items moved with them so the capital projects and the start of term could have the people they needed — recorded at the end of this page.

What We Delivered

1. The Sports Bowl Opened

• Phase 1 in service: Fiber across the site, wireless coverage indoors and out, the camera layer, and the network behind the display and scoreboard systems — all live for the opening, with camera access handed to Campus Safety.
• Opened in stages: Fields and parking in late July, team practice in mid-August, spectators for the fall season.
• A quiet opening: The first Athletics events ran without a technology issue. On a project this size, that is the goal.
• Day two continues: Baseball, softball, and the remaining press box spaces carry into 2026.12. The complex is in service; the site is not finished.

2. The Presidential Transition

• Ready before day one: ITS worked with President Dudley ahead of his July 1 start on equipment and data transfer from his prior institution, so nothing had to be rebuilt after arrival.
• Spaces and connectivity: The President’s Office was prepared and deployed, and managed campus networking replaced consumer equipment at the president’s residence.

3. A Strong Start to the Academic Year

• Orientation, twice over: A full day of Tech Essentials sessions for incoming students, and a full day of ITS workshops for new faculty, followed by individual deployments and welcome appointments.
• Accounts ready on arrival: Student accounts provisioned automatically as matriculation completed, welcome communications sent over the summer, and multi-factor sign-in confirmed before the term.
• Labs, classrooms, and course sites: Summer equipment rotation on the FY26–27 standard configurations, a new campus system image, rebuilt lab print servers, and Canvas course sites populated before the first day of class.
• Events and moves: Convocation, the summer conference program, the 2026 moves program with Facilities, and the RTA team back and trained before move-in.

4. Academic Systems, Research, and Accessibility

• Respondus LockDown Browser, fully rolled out after the spring pilot, alongside the electronic blue book. The two suit different teaching styles, and the choice stays with the faculty member.
• Academic software, easier to support: License servers moved to new hardware with predictable names, and coursework in one department moved from a licensed statistics package to open-source R at the faculty’s request.
• Research computing: A Hopper Cluster workshop and data center tours in May, a summer file system upgrade for faster research jobs, and a working group convened to give large research storage requests a supported answer.
• Accessibility: Training delivered and recorded in August, the digital accessibility resource site launched, and accommodations built into standard event planning rather than handled case by case.
• Registration continuity: A fix for the corequisite issue open since spring was developed with consortium partners, with affected students contacted individually each week until it landed.
• Hosting CLAC 2026: The consortium’s annual conference at CMC, June 8–11, with the new science building as venue and showcase.

Behind the Scenes: A More Resilient & Secure CMC

1. Infrastructure and Platforms

• Groundwork under disaster recovery: A cloud gateway was built and a large share of campus storage replicated to it — the foundation the disaster recovery work in 2026.12 is built on.
• Fewer environments to look after: Standalone virtualization servers were folded into the main cluster and the cluster upgraded without taking services down.
• Door locks installed: Vendor installation ran through the summer and the new readers were on the network in time for students to return.
• Network work, mostly invisible: Core and wireless upgrades with advance notice, cottage offices rebuilt onto fiber, and existing fiber routes mapped and protected ahead of construction trenching.

2. Security and Continuity

• A mail delivery gap, found and closed: Mail for a group of incoming transfer students was not reaching them. ITS corrected it, followed up with each student directly, and moved the setting to a central configuration so the failure mode is gone.
• Single sign-on upgraded: Because past upgrades left cached browser sessions failing to sign in, ITS published the error and its one-click fix in advance rather than waiting for the tickets.
• Hardening, then correcting for it: Defenses added against attacks on the authentication system were blocking legitimate sign-ins for students abroad, and were adjusted without giving up the protection. Controls that break real work get fixed, not defended.
• Compliance on time: The annual cyber insurance audit and the federal safeguards questionnaire covering student financial information were both completed — groundwork for the GLBA deliverables continuing in 2026.12.

3. Governance, Visibility, and This Website

• IT Steering Committee membership confirmed across academic and administrative areas, with the inaugural session held in 2026.12.
• Asset visibility: Workstations and laptops are now accounted for in the ITS inventory; AV equipment follows in 2026.12.
• Growing demand for AI tools: Requests rose steadily through the summer, each handled through the review established in 2026.04 — which is why that review needed to exist before the demand arrived rather than after.
• This website took shape in the open: A draft opened to the whole department for correction in May grew past a hundred pages, audited against the real service catalog so nothing is promised here that ITS does not offer. General availability follows in 2026.12.

4. What Moved, and Why

Items move between releases as priorities and capacity change. That movement is the system working as designed — and publishing it is part of the deal.

• Carried into 2026.12: the Interfolio faculty search launch, the Robert Day Sciences Center audio tour, and the remaining Sports Bowl site infrastructure.
• Moved to 2026.12: the steering committee’s inaugural meeting, the Pathify student hub beta, the knowledge base early access, FreshService for HR and Finance, the compliance training enhancement, and the architecture map beta.
• Moved to 2027.08: the full Pathify portal launch, which now follows the hub beta by a full cycle. The portal is the page the campus starts its day on, and it is worth getting right.

Looking Ahead: ITS Priorities for the 2026.12 Release Cycle

With the capital projects delivered and the academic year underway, 2026.12 turns to platforms, governance in practice, and resilience.

• Governance begins its work — the IT Steering Committee holds its first session.
• A replacement disaster recovery solution — turning this cycle’s cloud replication into a tested capability.
• Service platforms — FreshService for HR and Finance, an onboarding beta for new employees, and the start of CourseDog.
• Finishing the domain strategy begun in 2025.08, and the general availability of this website.