Page History

IAMUCLA This Week: January 12, 2009

A Welcome Message from Albert

Ahoy!

First, I'd like to wish everyone a happy new year. I'd also like to welcome you to the first issue of the "IAMUCLA This Week" e-newsletter. 2009 is an exciting year for the IAMUCLA program. We are making the final transition from ISIS to Shibboleth. The UCLA Logon ID is rolling out to a even wider population. The Enterprise Directory will be going through another growth spur as we add rich role and group membership data. Authorization management capabilities will finally begin to appear in the IAMUCLA services.

To keep everyone updated on what's happening, we are making a number of changes to our support service. We are introducing a new weekly e-newsletter called "IAMUCLA This Week". A new support email mailbox at iamucla@ucla.edu will help to reduce lost/mis-routed support requests. We have established an explicit support schedules so you'll know who to contact and when. Finally, we are going to be broadening our outreach channels to bring you timely updates.

IAMUCLA This Week

Starting with this issue, the IAMUCLA team will be publishing a weekly e-newsletter called "IAMUCLA This Week". We will use this e-newsletter to announce IAMUCLA-related events such as system maintenance, training sessions, and presentations. If you need assistance with IAMUCLA services, the newsletter contains a current support coverage schedule so you'll know who is available to answer technical questions on any given day.

A New Support/Contact Mailbox

It took a while, but we finally have a support email address. We will be using this email address to field all general supported related email inquiries. To make sure your requests are handled in a timely manner, please send them to iamucla@ucla.edu.

New Email Discussion List

As we continue to roll out IAMUCLA services while winding down ISIS, time has come for us to move on to a new email discussion list that better reflect our current service. Therefore, we are migrating the current isisdev-l email discussion list to a new list at iamucla-user@lists.ucla.edu.

We will automatically move everyone on the current isisdev-l list to the new list. You will not need to re-subscribe. However, you may wish to double check the settings in your email software to make sure you can receive posts from iamucla-user@lists.ucla.edu.

More Information about the iamucla-user discussion list.

IAMUCLA is now on Twitter

Do you twitter? IAMUCLA is now on Twitter. Follow us at http://twitter.com/iamuclanews

If you are not familiar with Twitter: Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets). Twitter users can exchange tweets in a wide variety of ways, including cell phone text message, instant messages, and of course via the Twitter web site.

Revised Shibboleth Implementation Support Hours

Starting January 12, 2009, the Shibboleth implementation support team is setting up daily "office hours" to help campus IT staff integrate applications with Shibboleth. Each day on Monday through Friday from 1PM to 5PM, one member of the implementation support team will be on-call to answer your questions. We will post the weekly on-call schedule in this newsletter on the IAMUCLA web site at https://spaces.ais.ucla.edu/iamucla. This week's schedule is listed in latter section of this post.

We at IAMUCLA are looking forward to a busy, exciting, and fun year as we bring new services to you. We are always looking for ways to improve our services. Help us improve. Comments? Please let us know at iamucla@ucla.edu. Thanks!

// Albert Wu
// Manager, Middleware Infrastructure
// UCLA AIS

System Announcements

Reminder: UCLA Spaces (the IAMUCLA web site) Maintenance Schedule

The web server (spaces.ais.ucla.edu) on which the IAMUCLA web site is hosted is scheduled for maintenance each Thursday from 4 to 6 pm. During this time, you may experience intermittent issues accessing the site. We will announce any prolonged outages in individual announcements.

This Week: No maintenance is expected on spaces.ais.ucla.edu

Reminder: IAMUCLA Systems Patch Schedule

Remember: IAMUCLA applies critical OS level patches to its core servers (ISIS, Shibboleth, Enterprise Directory, ED Web Service) on the 3rd Tuesday of each month at 6PM. For the most part, the redundant servers mean that applying these patches are transparent to the users. We will inform everyone of any unusual update scenarios in individual announcements.

This patch window is only used to apply urgent security and other critical OS-level patches. IAMUCLA still deploy enhancements and new services according to AIS's Sunday-only implementation policy.

Shibboleth Implementation Support Hours

For the week of January 12, 2009:

Contacting IAMUCLA

Web Site: https://spaces.ais.ucla.edu/iamucla
Email: iamucla at ucla.edu
Follow us on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/iamuclanews
Coordinator: Lawrence Lu