CTS Announcements & Systems Status

The Campus is experiencing some network and phone issues as a result of the unexpected power outage this morning. Technicians are investigating and working on the problem. 

BearDeN will be offline on Sunday Jan. 8, 2017 from 7:00 am until 4:00 pm for a software upgrade.

The EMS system will be offline on Friday 01/06/2017 from 4:00 – 4:30 PM for a software upgrade.

ITEC will be taking down production Banner servers for O/S firmware updates on February 24th, 2017 from 12:00am – 7:00am. During this time Banner, BearPAWS and BearDeN will be unavailable.

Fall 2016 courses are currently being transferred to the new Moodle environment now that the semester is complete and grades submitted. This transfer process is tentatively scheduled to be completed Monday, December 26th. In the meantime, final grades can be accessed via BearPAWS.
Spring 2016, Winter 2017, Spring 2017 courses are currently available in the new Moodle environment. If a course missing, please 1) confirm that you have already requested a course shell via BearPAWS and 2) contact moodlesupport@potsdam.edu with missing course information.

ITEC will be patching the database tomorrow (Dec 22) from 6am-7am. During this time Banner, BearPAWS and BearDeN will be unavailable.

Faculty/Staff: During Winterim, CTS will be diligently working to complete outstanding conversions to the new Active Directory structure, as well as Office 365 client installations. Primary focus areas will be Physical Plant Complex, Van Housen Hall, Maxcy Hall and Satterlee Hall. Those affected areas will be contacted prior to project onset. During this time, your cooperation would be greatly appreciated and will help to ensure a smooth transition. Thank you!

CTS will be performing updates to Flagg 162 and Smart Classroom podiums, both of which are set to begin during Winterim. In Flagg 162, Mac Minis will be replacing all iMacs, which is projected to be complete prior to the start of the Spring semester. In Smart Classrooms, podium computers will be receiving replacements beginning in Winterim and extending through to Summer. No change in operational use of these computers will occur for either of the updates.

CTS would like to welcome Zebulon (Zeb) Virnig to our Host Services team.

One of the new features of Office 365 is the way file attachments are handled when you make use of your included OneDrive cloud storage or when someone that has OneDrive shares a file with you.
When composing a new message, and you click Attach, you’ll see something similar to what is shown below, with your OneDrive files as the first option. If you select a file on your computer, it will offer to upload it to OneDrive for you in the next step.

Once you select a file you will asked the following:

• If you choose Attach as a OneDrive file, the recipient will receive a link to the file with a notification that you shared it. This is extremely handy as most email providers have an email size limit.
• Selecting Attach as a copy will result in a traditional file attachment where the file is included with the email itself, but may be subject to attachment size limits.

While the first option is more flexible in terms of storage space and not being rejected due to a size limitation, not everyone is accustomed to attaching files via cloud storage, so your recipient may be confused or suspicious of your file’s link. Be prepared to explain in a followup e-mail what it is or be clear in your first email that it is a link to your file.
For those on the receiving end, an attachment from OneDrive will look similar to this:

As always, make sure that any files you receive are from someone you know and something that you may be expecting.