Partnership with Mills College at Northeastern helps enhance computing performance and security on Oakland campus
ITS quickly procured 32 new computers for faculty and staff at Mills College who were previously using computers that were five or more years old. This rapidly executed procurement effort provides these faculty and staff with laptops that have the updated computing performance and security expected in devices within Northeastern’s global network. Staff in ITS worked with staff in the Mills College Dean’s Office to fund this need that otherwise would not have been fulfilled in this budget cycle.
Employee Hub becomes exclusive digital home base for Northeastern’s global workforce
On Thursday, June 1, Northeastern completed the transition to the Employee Hub by retiring the myNortheastern employee portal. Since the Employee Hub was officially announced on March 27, 2023, employees’ services and links had been found on both the myNortheastern portal and the Employee Hub. Now employees can find their services and links exclusively on the Employee Hub. A new my.northeastern.edu landing page with improved usability and updated information was published at the same time to help guide any students or employees still visiting the old portal. Now, parents and family members are the last remaining community members using Liferay, the platform that hosts the myNortheastern portals, with plans to transition the university completely from the platform before the current vendor contract expires in early 2024.
Latest release to Global Digital Platform increases global engagement, usability, and accessibility
As part of the last release before development on the new Family Hub gets underway, the Hub team pushed out improvements to the Student and Employee Hubs. The Oakland Water Cooler was added to the Employee Hub Communities page, increasing engagement opportunities for the Global Network. On the Student Hub, one of the highest-clicked applications off the Resources page, Registrar Self-Service, was added to the My Applications section of the home page to make it even more prominent and easy to access for students. Finally, this release also made a few accessibility improvements to the Student Hub. Students and employees are now fully transitioned to the Global Digital Platform, with employees being the most recent to transition. Since the cutover from myNortheastern was completed on June 1, approximately 5,220 employees have started over 19,200 sessions on the Hub.
Expanding university captioning services to London campus removes barriers to creating accessible content
IT teams extended the university’s ADA-compliant captioning service to London using Panopto, the lecture capture tool for teaching and learning. The London campus now has caption requester capability, giving faculty and staff the ability to request professionally created captions using British English conventions and to leverage the university’s volume discount. Integrating professional captioning services, such as 3play media, into supported university tools provides a streamlined way to create ADA-compliant captions, helping to improve accessibility and inclusivity throughout the global Northeastern community.
Major milestone rolling out on June 22 in efforts to better streamline and secure Northeastern online login experience
The new, more streamlined login experience will begin rolling out to all faculty and staff across the global campus system on Thursday, June 22, starting with several key university apps and services, including Office 365 and the Employee Hub. The first time that employees access the impacted services after this rollout, they may need to log in several times and reconnect to their services, but the change is expected to solve some of the biggest challenges with account logins and to provide a single, improved login experience. Members of the ITS Customer Experience team are reaching out directly to executive leaders and their teams to guide them individually through this transition. Following faculty and staff next week, the rollout will continue this summer to students and the remaining account holders, as well as to other university sites and services. A campaign site, 1login.its.northeastern.edu, has been set up to help communicate the progress of this transition.
New global cloud-based computer configuration can turn any computer with internet access into a Northeastern learning space with a classroom computer
A new cloud-based computer configuration using Microsoft InTune eliminates the need for specialized on-premises infrastructure, allowing Northeastern to deploy one of its classroom computers at any location with internet access. ITS is collaborating with IT partners across the global network to launch this configuration in 22 classrooms across all of Northeastern’s campus locations outside of Massachusetts. On-ground IT staff and faculty members provided positive feedback to this solution on the San Francisco campus, where ITS piloted the configuration in seven WeWork building classrooms without any Northeastern-specific infrastructure.
Research Computing Summer Bootcamp helps Northeastern research community accelerate their time to science while leveraging the university’s high-performance cloud computing clusters to power their discoveries
On June 12-15, 2023, the ITS Research Computing team hosted its 2023 Summer Bootcamp, a four-day, 16-session hybrid and virtual training event, which 101 researchers attended live and many more can benefit from through on-demand recordings. The sessions introduced Northeastern’s high-performance computing services to newer users and promoted more efficient use of the cloud computing cluster, ultimately helping researchers save time and resources. Researchers benefited from resources and sessions that ranged from beginner to advanced, and that focused on field-specific research topics, including machine learning, bioinformatics, genomics, molecular dynamics, and computational modeling. The annual Summer Bootcamps are part of RC’s robust training and support program that provides Northeastern researchers with computing techniques and optimizations tailored to their needs and disciplines.