Dear colleagues,

I am writing to let you know that the ITCP mailing list and blog are being retired. For many years, they served as a way to share updates on IT initiatives and developments across Indiana University. While this has been a helpful resource for many, their role has been replaced by other established communication channels.

UITS continues to explore strategic opportunities to enhance how we share information across the university.

Thank you for your past engagement with ITCP communications.

Sincerely,
Jacob

Jacob Farmer
Director, Support Infrastructure
University Information Technology Services
jpfarmer@iu.edu

IT Colleagues,

Beginning Sunday, October 5, 2025, the UITS Support Center will be adjusting its hours. Phone, E-mail, and Chat support will now be available daily from 7am to 11pm. In-person support will remain unchanged.

For Phone support, during these hours, calls will be answered as usual. After-hours (from 11pm to 7am), callers will hear a message directing them to use the AskIT Chatbot to ask questions/search the Knowledge Base (go.iu.edu/askit), or to submit their IT request via the webform (go.iu.edu/ithelp).

If you have any questions, please contact the UITS Support Center.

Sincerely,

IT Community Partnerships on behalf of the UITS Support Center

IT Colleagues,

The IUanyWare team plans to perform annual system maintenance in the early hours of Friday, August 15, starting at about midnight and ending around 6am. This periodic reset improves application, desktop, and storage performance. The maintenance will require a reset of all user profiles. Individualized settings will be lost in the reset.

For tips on exporting personal application settings prior to the reset and a list of affected applications and settings, see About the IUanyWare user profile reset.

Clients may notice the first login following the reset taking a bit longer to process than usual. They will also see prompts to reconfigure some applications and may wish to manually restore some preference settings.

The IUanyWare team will post a notification on their login page and an IT Notice on status.iu.edu. If you have any questions, please contact your campus IT Support Center.

Sincerely,

IT Community Partnerships on behalf of the IUanyWare team

IT Colleagues,

On Saturday, July 19, between 8am and 12pm EST, Instructure (Canvas) will be performing a regularly scheduled monthly release in the IU Canvas instance. There is no downtime expected for this maintenance.

Included in this release are:

• New Features
  • Discussions: Manage Threaded Replies in Legacy Type Discussions
  • Files: Redesigned Files Page (delayed from the June release)
  • User Settings: Dyslexia Friendly Font
• Accessibility
  • Enhanced Experience for Assistive Technology Users
• Analytics
  • New Analytics Default Status Update
  • Deprecation of Legacy Course Analytics

Full release notes may be found here.

Sincerely,

-IT Community Partnerships on behalf of Teaching and Learning Services

IT Colleagues,

Service Management Technologies (SMT) will deploy the new version of IUware on Thursday, July 17, 2025 at 10am. The new site will maintain the current look and feel, but with a more accessible, responsive design. The administrative section has also been overhauled to address many of the issues and limitations of the current version.

SMT has launched a fully functional beta of the new site, available here: https://iuware-beta.uits.iu.edu. SMT has also provided a page with detailed information about the update: https://iuware-beta.uits.iu.edu/Windows/List/74/Titles/150.

The update is expected to be seamless. At 10am on Thursday, July 17, DNS Admin will update the CNAME records for the IUware production URLs to point to the current beta site. There may be a brief period of downtime while SMT updates site settings in Azure, but the new site should be fully operational shortly after the DNS changes take effect.

There are a few things to be aware of:

• Product Keys – New product keys will be unavailable until unassigned product keys are imported into the new database.

• • SMT will start importing unassigned product keys on the afternoon of July 17th. This process will likely take an hour or two to complete and only applies to unassigned product keys. Assigned product keys will be imported and in place when the new version of IUware goes live.

• Existing Content – Everything that is currently publicly available on IUware will be available on the new version as well.

• • SMT will import all active and published titles and packages, along with their supporting content, to the new IUware site. However, archived or draft titles and packages, and their supporting content, will not be imported. Exceptions can be requested both before and after the release.

• Title & Package URLs – Direct title and package URLs will change for the new version of IUware.

• • The new site will support legacy title and package URLs, so existing links should still work. However, if you have URLs to specific titles or packages in your documentation or on your websites, you should plan to update them when it is convenient.

If you have questions or would like additional information, please reach out to iuware@iu.edu.

Sincerely,

-IT Community Partnerships on behalf of Service Management Technologies (SMT)

IT Colleagues,

We’d like to bring your attention to the following information from the University Information Security Office (UISO):

Overview
The UITS Admin Staff VPN [1] has changed how it handles traffic to external resources so that outside vendors may restrict network access to an external IP range. Prior to this change, UITS Admin Staff VPN connections to IU resources would use an IP from the IU VPN internal IP address pool, while connections to outside resources leveraged the public IP address provided by your internet service provider (ISP) [2].

Action Required for IP Restricted External Connections
For UITS Admin Staff VPN connections to outside vendors [3] with IP restrictions, the vendor must update their firewall to allow the external IP range. Please note that most vendors do not restrict access by IP address, but if you are unable to connect to an outside vendor while on the UITS Admin Staff VPN, you will need to contact the vendor for assistance.

Action Required for IP Restricted Internal Connections
Owners of internal IU resources that restrict network access to UITS Admin Staff VPN will continue to allow the internal IP range for their data center [4,5] and system’s local firewalls.

Adding Users to the UITS Admin Staff VPN
If your department or team does not already have an Access Control Management (ACM) group [6,7] for the UITS Admin Staff VPN, your IT manager may submit a request to add a group via the UITS Admin Staff VPN Request Form [8].

Support
Please contact uiso@iu.edu with any questions.

Sincerely,

-IT Community Partnerships on behalf of the University Information Security Office (UISO)

[1] https://servicenow.iu.edu/kb?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0023005
[2] https://servicenow.iu.edu/kb?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0023102
[3] Examples include SaaS, databases, web databases, vendor administration, etc.
[4] https://servicenow.iu.edu/kb?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0023192
[5] https://servicenow.iu.edu/kb?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0023054
[6] https://gm.acm.iu.edu/
[7] All UITS Admin Staff VPN groups must be created in ACM, synced with Active Directory, flat (no nested groups), and contain only staff.
[8] https://iunetworks-fireform.eas.iu.edu/online/form/authen/vpnadminrole?_gl=1*106mxhr*_ga*NDI2MDgxNjQwLjE3NDY2Mzk0NTk.*_ga_61CH0D2DQW*czE3NTE0NjMwMjUkbzY4JGcxJHQxNzUxNDY0MTgzJGoyMyRsMCRoMA

IT colleagues, 

In April of 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division passed new rules governing the accessibility of web content and mobile applications provided by State and Local Governments, which stands in addition to the requirements for desktop applications already in place under Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act and Indiana Code 4-13. 1-3. Indiana University is required to comply with these new rules, which will take effect on April 24, 2026.  

We are writing to help ensure you are aware of these coming changes and to share that the Assistive Technology and Accessibility Centers and the Digital Inclusion Office are here to assist with navigating these new rules, especially as it relates to reviewing tools for accessibility prior to purchase. For any tools that are flagged as requiring an accessibility review, your constituents will receive instructions on how to complete our intake form. Your constituents should submit once they have acquired a completed Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) known as an Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR) from the supplier. 

If needed, we may contact you once your request is received and ask you to obtain a Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Toolkit (HECVAT) from the supplier as well. To learn more about the review process, we recommend checking out Product Accessibility Review (PAR) quick reference guide for requesters. 

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at atac@iu.edu for clarification.
 
–IT Community Partnerships on behalf of Assistive Technology and Accessibility Centers