TECH.SESP
SESP Technology Team Values
The work of the SESP Technology team is primarily guided by three central themes or team values; privacy, sustainability, and community success.
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Privacy
- Unfortunately, persistent, sophisticated attacks on personal and institutional privacy are the new normal. Helping to ensure the confidentiality of both research data and personal information is a vital component of being a member of the SESP community. Northwestern has implemented new privacy and data security related policies which detail practices and responsibilities that are a requirement for all Northwestern community members. Information regarding these new policies is detailed @ Privacy Policies
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Sustainability
- To support the long term success of SESP, the services and support our team provides must be sustainable from an environmental, financial, and community member well-being perspective. The SESP technology team continually explores opportunities to increase sustainability while still maintaining a high level of service and support. The majority of recent projects completed by our team seek to realize savings in either budgetary expense, administrative overhead, or both and position our team to leverage additional technology assistance and support from the wider IT @ Northwestern community.
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Community Success
- The balancing of privacy and sustainability concerns and requirements is ultimately in the service of during our part to support the success of all SESP community members.
Fall Quarter Planned Updates
For the upcoming quarter, our team has will be working to on the projects detailed below.
- Privacy
- Managed encryption. To bring SESP into full compliance with Northwestern policy, our team will be working this fall to ensure all SESP faculty and staff laptop and desktop computers are encrypted by default. Enabling managed encryption removes the obligation for each individual to set and remember a separate encryption password while providing the required level of protection for local device data.
- Sustainability
- SESP Financial Portal. To address on going technical issues with the existing Microsoft based forms our community members use for reimbursements and purchase requests, we will be migrating to new forms built in Team Dynamics, Northwestern's existing service desk platform. Team Dynamics offers a robust solution for managing service request of all kinds and for easily sharing resources and documentation with Northwestern and SESP community members. Team Dynamics could offer our community members a "One Stop Shop" for all request for service and support. After the launch of the new financial request forms, our team is available to discuss how your program or center could leverage Team Dynamics to improve management of service requests.
What's ahead for the rest of the academic year
Beyond the Fall quarter, our team is in planning for these additional projects.
- Privacy
- Data Use Agreement Compliance Reviews. To bring SESP into full compliance with existing Northwestern policy and in preparation for future requirements including NSMP-33, our team will be working with SESP researchers to proactively verify our compliance with all current data use agreements.
- Data Management Plans. Over the course of this next year, the SESP technology team will continue working one on one with SESP's programs, centers, and researchers to ensure our critical data and files are protected. For most teams, this work will include the identification of the appropriate team member to serve as a Data Steward and to help ensure files and data are only shared with appropriate community members. In addition, we will work to ensure teams are aware of the full portfolio of documents and data storage available at Northwestern and help verify which option will work best for each team.
- JAMF Connect. Currently targeted for the winter quarter, our team will be deploying JAMF Connect, which will seamlessly allow SESP faculty and staff to utilize their NetID credentials to log in to their Mac computer.
- Sustainability
- Review of recurring technology expenses on Pcards. By policy, the payment for reoccurring technology expenses should be processed though a PO. Over the course of this coming year, our team will be working with programs, centers, and researchers to migrate technology related expenses off of Pcards.
- Community Success
- New online application solution for MSED and MSHE. Apply Yourself (current solution) will be discontinued in the Fall of 2025. Our team is already actively working with program staff to identify and stand up a new application platform.
- On-boarding and Off-boarding processes. Working with the staff of the Dean's Office, we will be implementing new technology mediated processes to better support the on-boarding and off-boarding of new staff and faculty.
- Coordinated support for management of non-credit courses and professional development events. Working with program and center staff, we will be exploring options to provide a standard solution and consolidated registration and management support for these important events.
Summary of Technology Projects Completed Last Academic Year - FY24
The SESP Technology team would like to offer our thanks to all SESP community members for their patience and assistance in helping our team accomplish a number of critical technology projects over the course of FY24.
- Privacy
- CrowdStrike. Installation of the CrowdStrike security agent on all SESP faculty and staff computers. (December 2023)
- JAMF. Migration of all faculty and staff Macs from Mosyle to the JAMF management platform. (March 2024)
- Tenable. Deployment of the Tenable vulnerability management client on all faculty and staff computers. (April 2024)
- MECM. Roll out of Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager on all SESP faculty and staff computers running the Windows OS. (May 2024)
- Proactive Patching. Proactive security patch management enabled on SESP faculty and staff computers. (July 2024)
- SharePoint Standards. Over the course of FY24, the SESP technology team has worked to define a set of design and usage guidelines to assist our community members in making the best use of SharePoint as our primary file and document storage solution. Our team has worked with a number of programs and centers to help ensure the privacy of important documents is appropriately managed. (July 2024)
- Sustainibility
- Northwestern Print. While this was a mandated change, and not universally loved, this migration allowed SESP to realize a $3000 yearly licensing cost saving and moved the administrative burden of supporting the print server infrastructure to central support. (September 2024)
- 25Live. With an eye towards the future move to Jacobs, SESP migrated all room scheduling to the Registrar supported 25Live system. This project allowed us to shift the administrative responsibilities for maintaining the scheduling system to Northwestern IT and the Registrar and will have our community prepared for the move to Jacobs where all spaces will also be managed through 25Live. (September 2024)
- Northwestern CrashPlan. The Northwestern Crashplan environment is fully funded by Northwestern IT and allowed SESP to realize $3000 yearly licensing cost savings and leverage additional support from the IT @ Northwestern community. (January 2024)
- JAMF. The JAMF platform is fully funded by Northwestern IT and migrating from Mosyle allowed SESP to realize $4000 yearly licensing cost savings and leverage additional support from the IT @ Northwestern community. (March 2024)
- ADS. Microsoft Active Directory is a vital component of securing access to SESP resources. Retiring SESPAD and moving to ADS allowed us to shift the administrative responsibilities for securing and maintaining Active Directory to the dedicated identity and access support team in Northwestern IT. (April 2024)
- Reduced Microsoft Azure Cloud. While running technology infrastructure in the cloud offers may advantages. including on-demand availability, scaling, automation and service management that assists our team in being more productive, the trade off is in much higher costs. Over the course of FY24, our team identified a number of services which could be moved from Microsoft Azure back to on campus virtual servers. In total these changes, in combination with CTD's move to SalesForce, has allowed us to reduced our yearly spend on the Microsoft Azure cloud by $20K. (July 2024)
- Community Success
- CTD migrated to SalesForce. As the culmination of a multi-year effort, CTD was successfully migrated to SalesForce as their core technology platform. SalesForce provides a modern, scalable solution to better meet the evolving needs of CTD, and the CTD technology team members worked tirelessly and selflessly to ensure the migration was an enormous success. (January 2024)
- Converted Annenberg 101 to a Zoom based design. (September 2023) In late 2020, as we all prepared for the return to campus, our team was faced with numerous technology failures in SESP learning spaces and an inability to repair the spaces with the existing technology framework due to the wide spread supply chain issues. Zoom Room appliances however, were readily available and out of necessity our team converted several spaces to a Zoom Room design. Zoom Rooms quickly proved to be both reliable and more intuitive for our community members than traditional AV solutions. Over the course of 2021 - 2022, and ending with Annenberg 101 in September 2023, our team converted all SESP learning spaces to a Zoom Rooms design to provide a consistent, reliable, and high functioning learning space experience in all spaces.
- Jacobs Learning Space Advocacy. With the move to Jacobs, SESP will be transitioning to primarily utilizing registrar supported learning spaces for the majority of classes and events. Over the course of the fall and winter quarters, SESP leadership, successfully lobbied to evolve the standard design of a registrar learning space to match the current SESP design. All spaces in Jacobs will be designed around the Zoom Rooms technology, and most larger spaces will have at least two projectors or large monitors. Barring any back tracking, the learning spaces in Jacobs should meet the needs of the majority of SESP courses and events.
- Shared Mailbox Conversion. In preparation for the Northwestern IT's July roll out of verified push for DUO authentication, our team helped identity all organizational email account, being used by SESP programs and centers and coordinated with Northwestern IT to convert these accounts from NetID based authentication to a shared mailbox to allow seamless team access to these email accounts.
- Communication and Collaboration. During the FY24 school year, our team implemented several initiatives to increases awareness within the SESP community of important changes in the technology at SESP and Northwestern. Beginning in the Fall of 2023 we began publishing a quarterly technology update which provides a look ahead at planned technology changes in the up coming quarter. Additionally, we began hosting quarterly technology discussions with technology liaisons from each of our programs and centers. Finally, beginning with this current document, our team will commit to publishing a yearly technology recap and guidance on potential projects and changes for the next academic year.
Thank you again to all SESP community members for your patience, your invaluable feedback, and support. We hope everyone has had an enjoyable summer and we look forward to collaborating with you all this coming year.
SESP Technology Team
If you have any question regarding these changes or any other technology matter please open a ticket and our team will get back to you ASAP.