Samuel Bras has joined the ITS department as the new Systems Administrator I.  Samuel will be located in the lower level of Menard Hall, room 0043, and can be reached at 6-2262 or samuel.bras@llcc.edu.  Welcome Samuel!

Over the past several months ITS has been involved in extensive planning toward the replacement of our existing phone system and accompanying infrastructure. The project is being implemented in three phases with the majority of phase I complete. We are excited to announce that phase II of the project has begun this week.  We are working with Dell on this second phase of the project, which will include the installation of the campus and regional infrastructure, followed by the transition of the ITS staff (to work out the bugs) and the regional staff phones. The initial deployment is expected to last six weeks and will provide transitioned users a contemporary phone system that will offer improved features and increased reliability. Once phase II is complete, we anticipate adding additional departments to the system in a timely manner. We will have more information to send out on this project in the near future and will be working closely with the regional sites for input and feedback during this upcoming phase.

The phone systems replacement project is being implemented in three phases: Phone system phases

Several users have reported getting an email, appearing to be sent from the LLCC helpdesk, asking the user to click on a link to confirm their account for upgrade. This email is NOT from our ITS department and is a phishing attempt to acquire users logon credentials. Please disregard this message and delete the email. If you have already given your information, you should login to web advisor and change your password.

Phishing is a common identity theft method used by fraudulent parties.   NEVER send your personal information including passwords, user IDs, credit card numbers or a Social Security Number via email.  Passwords should NEVER be shared with ANYONE in any form.

To learn more about “phishing”, follow the links below:

• http://www.webopedia.com/DidYouKnow/Internet/2005/phishing.asp
• http://www.microsoft.com/protect/fraud/phishing/symptoms.aspx

Information and Telecommunication Systems (ITS) does not solicit passwords or any other personal information via e-mail.  If you receive an e-mail message that appears to come from ITS that requests this type of information, please forward it immediately to hd@llcc.edu.  Do not reply or click on any links.  Again, these e-mails are often hoaxes (“phishing” e-mails), part of identity theft and fraud scams.

Thank you for your patience,

ITS

Demand for Internet bandwidth at all LLCC locations has greatly increased this semester. Our Internet bandwidth is currently being maxed out for most of the college’s daytime operating hours resulting in slower than normal Internet speeds.  While typical web pages load with little delay, streaming video, such as YouTube, will likely suffer noticeable performance issues.

We have been working with both the ICN, our Internet service provider, and AT&T over the course of the last year to increase our Internet bandwidth.  A new fiber optic connection is being installed this week, which should double our bandwidth, and is expected to be ready for use in 4-6 weeks.  Further additional bandwidth should be available to the college later this fall as we upgrade our telecommunications infrastructure with AT&T. This upcoming telecommunication project will also provide a secondary path to the Internet, providing us with fault tolerance in the event one of the two pathways goes down.  In the meantime, please expect to experience slower than normal Internet connectivity on campus and plan accordingly.

While we are working to increase our available bandwidth, we would like to ask you to restrict recreational use of streaming sites in order to free up additional bandwidth for academic purposes.  Thank you for your patience as we continue to improve LLCC’s network infrastructure.

Student email accounts are currently being migrated to Office365 in the Cloud.  Students will notice an updated interface and several enhancements, such as 25GB of storage and the ability to send larger file attachments. More information about the new LLCC inbox on Office 365 can be found HERE. While accounts are being migrated there is a temporary three-step log-in. Once the mailboxes are migrated, which is expected to be completed by today, the login process will be simplified.