Projects
Our professional project and process managers provide leadership and guidance for University and IT projects.
Through consulting, managing and monitoring selected projects, we facilitate progress in order to meet our customers' expectations for project scope, costs, schedule and final deliverables. For help or general inquiries, please contact Urmi Roy.
Below is a list of the major projects being worked on by ICIT. Projects have been selected because they are either of interest to the campus or will have a significant impact on the university community. This list represents only a portion of the active projects.
Current Major Projects
Project Summary
Effective July 1st, 2018, the UW System merged UW Colleges' 13 two-year campuses with the UW System's four-year comprehensive and research universities. Per the restructure, UW-Rock County has become part of UW-Whitewater, going by the name, UW-Whitewater at Rock County.
The objectives of this restructuring include:
- Maintaining and expanding access to higher education by offering more general education and upper-level courses at the integrated branch campuses.
- Identify and reduce barriers to transferring credits within the UW System Maintain affordability by continuing current tuition levels at the branch campuses post-merger for general education courses.
- Further standardize and regionalize administrative operations and services to more efficiently use resources.
- Leverage resources and shared talent at our institutions to get more students into and through the educational pipeline, better aligning the university to meet Wisconsin's projected workforce need.
As part of this system-wide restructure, ICIT has several projects and initiatives in development designed to help UW-Rock County students, faculty and staff transition into the UW-Whitewater ecosystem. The goal of these initiatives is to provide organizational effectiveness through reliable technology & customer-focused service. This means creating a consistent experience for all UW-Whitewater at Rock County students, faculty and staff.
Current initiatives include (but not limited to):
- Merging UW-W at Rock County students into the UW-W lifecycle.
- Developing the UW-W at Rock County website. (Completed)
- Transitioning email accounts, shared data and network files to to UW-W.
- Transportation to and from UW-W and UW-W at Rock Country campuses. Transportation is provided by two buses which include built in Wi-Fi networks. (Completed)
- Learning Management System support for UW-W at Rock County through Canvas.
- Emergency Communication through the InformaCast App. (Completed)
- IT Security training for UW-W at Rock County faculty and staff. (Completed)
What's Next?
ICIT will continue to provide high-quality support and customer service throughout the restructuring process. The goal is to complete the restructure transition by summer 2019.
Project Summary
In the Spring of 2018, ICIT and UW-Whitewater launched a partnership with Involvio. Involvio is a mobile application designed to aid students with regards to campus resources, local events, calendars and academic success. The goal of the project is to help students become more organized and involved with the UW-W community, make campus resources readily available and create a student success network. Involvio will be able to leverage numerous campus resources and integrations including the Canvas Learning Management System, campus calendars, student organizations and Webex. Involvio will help students stay more organized and aid in their overall success at UW-Whitewater.
The official UW-Whitewater App is now live and being piloted by several learning communites on campus.
What's Next?
The UW-W App will be integrated by community-based learning instructors through campus-provided iPads. Additional functionality will continue to be added to the UW-Whitewater App including; an event check-in function, attendance tracking and one-touch video for virtual office hours. The UW-Whitewater App will have a planned, campus-wide rollout in the Fall of 2019.
Project Summary
In the Fall of 2018, ICIT began work on The PeopleSoft Fluid User Interface Project. Fluid User interface is a tile-oriented design that will significantly enhance the "classic" experience of PeopleSoft. Fluid pages will scale gracefully from large-screen devices such as laptops and desktops down to the reduced viewing space of tablets and smartphones without code modification. The information presentation and layout is adjusted dynamically to conform to the dimensions of the user's device. The Fluid User Interface design approach gives developers just this type of control over the user experience. This new technology moves away from pixel-perfect page layout and provides greater flexibility with the improved use of cascading style sheets (CSS3) and HTML5.
The goals of this project are to provide an enhanced rebuilding experience for all PeopleSoft users including applicants, students, instructors, advisors and staff. Additionally, the fluid interface will allow for new branding integrations and provide a smoother and more user-friendly experience while working in PeopleSoft.
What's Next?
Testing of the fluid user interface is currently underway with a "Go Live" date set for October 2019.
Project Summary
In an effort to increase enrollment and promote the brand of UW-Whitewater to prospective students, UW-W student Chris Skrandzius, working alongside ICIT created a project targeting search engine optimization through Google Maps. The project's purpose was to claim official UW-Whitewater locations when searching through Google. By claiming these locations, people are now able to review and rate specific locations on UWW's campus such as dorms, departmental buildings, dining centers and events. These search engine optimization features will allow current and prospective students, faculty and staff to get an accurate view and depiction of the UW-Whitewater campus and brand.
Update: Claimed locations have been built-out to include professional photographs with the addition of 360° panoramas to aid in the discoverability and navigation across campus locations. Locations continuously receive updates for location details, such as building hours, as well as Google Postings to help promote campus activities and events directly on Google. Listing locations have been expanded to additional map directories such as, Apple Maps, Waze, and Bing.
What's Next?
The next step of the project is working to have a consolidated location management system to update details across multiple map directories.
Project Summary
In the Fall of 2017 ICIT transitioned from the print management client Pharos to PaperCut. The initial rollout of PaperCut focused on student-facing printing in all general access labs. PaperCut is a simplified printing solution that provides a wide variety of reports including environmental impact and user print data. PaperCut has provided a stable print management system and has cleaned up older issues left by Pharos.
The transition of PaperCut to the student print management software was completed in the Summer of 2017.
What's Next?
The next step will be to transition the faculty print management software from iPrint to PaperCut. The implementation is planned for Summer 2018. www.uww.edu/icit/services/printing-students#tab_Description
Project Summary
In the fall of 2017, ICIT introduced Citrix Virtualized Applications. Citrix is a tool that provides easy access to virtual applications across campus. These applications can be accessed from anywhere and they eliminate the need to download an entire virtual desktop. Citrix provides a streamlined process for instructors and students to access course software during class time without the need of a physical lab. Students and instructors can access the virtual library of apps from their own computers for easy and seamless collaboration. To get started, please go to: https://www.uww.edu/icit/services/virtual-lab
What's Next?
ICIT is currently working on adding additional apps to the virtual suite. These would include Adobe Creative Apps such as: InDesign, PhotoShop and Illustrator.
Project Summary
The goal of this project is to successfully transition from UWW's current Learning Management System (LMS) Desire2Learn, to Canvas. The Canvas LMS is an online learning platform used to deliver online courses and enhance traditional, face-to-face, and hybrid/blended courses. Canvas will provide "anytime, anywhere" access to course materials, such as syllabi, readings, and multi-media files, as well as course tools such as electronic drop boxes, ePortfolios, online quizzes, and grades. The current timeline for the transition points to Fall 2018 as the earliest opportunity to migrate courses to Canvas. For more info, please visit the Canvas Transition Portal.