Eight teams, thousands of fans and millions of TV viewers all focused on the University of Arizona's McKale Center last week as NCAA March Madness rolled into Tucson. But before the first sneaker screeched on the court or the first ball whooshed through the basket, UITS staff worked for eight months to ensure fans around the country and around the world could follow all the NCAA action.

When UA researchers share with their peers around the country, the data flows can become quite large. Computational graphics? Virtual reality? Video? Telepresence? High performance computing? This data needs large bandwidth if it’s not going to slow to a crawl.

UITS Telecommunications Systems Technicians Michael Urquidez and John Owen (and an uncredited Lorne McKenzie) appeared in a photo in today's Arizona Daily Star. They were featured in an article on McKale Center's preparations for the NCAA Tournament. Check out the photo here!

The weekend of March 12 and 13, the Classroom Technology Services staff will be heading to the Festival of Books on the UA campus to use their skills to help volunteer with over 1,500 others. Many will meet famous authors as they set up microphones and electrical equipment for authors who will be hosting panels and Q&A sessions. This is no small event; the Festival of Books hosts an enormous author lineup, and is expected to bring over 80,000 participants in its two-day run.

UITS is implementing a temporary halt to the UAConnect activation and migration process beginning today, Friday, March 11, at 5 p.m.

There have been calendar and email performance inconsistencies for those on UAConnect, and UITS has Microsoft  staff onsite to work with us on outstanding issues to determine their root cause and ultimate resolution. In the meantime we want to halt new migrations to decrease the number of new support issues we are creating.

As campus faculty and staff migrate to UAConnect, UITS Workshop and Training Team member David Garcia has been leading new UAConnect users through features in Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2007's Calendar for the past five months.

Now the material he covered through in-person sessions is available online in interactive sessions in UPK training—this may be familiar if you've done training in any of the Mosaic systems in UPK. The online version even offers an additional tutorial, on setting the Global Address List default.

Thank you to everyone who participated in Guidance Committee meeting #13!

PowerPoint presentation: Guidance Committee meeting 13, Mar 1 (PDF, 742 KB)
Meeting Notes: Guidance Committee meeting 13, Mar 1 (PDF, 111 KB)

Our next meeting will be held at 2:30pm, March 24 in the Santa Rita Room at the SUMC. We hope to see you there!