Microsoft Office now free for CI students & employees

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We're pleased to announce that CI has begun providing Microsoft Office 365 Pro Plus for all faculty, staff and students at no cost via the Microsoft Campus Advantage program. 


This agreement between CI and Microsoft allows us to provide current CI students, faculty, and staff with the latest full version of Microsoft Office on their home computers. Included in the Office 365 Pro Plus offering is a 1TB OneDrive for personal file storage needs. 

To get the software and begin using Office 365, you'll need to register yourself via the Office365 Portal provided by Microsoft. Start by using the link below

Because Microsoft's software is provided directly to you for your home computer or device, support for this product will be provided directly from Microsoft. While the T&C Help Desk can answer general questions, they cannot assist you with the configuration of your personally-owned computer or device.  CI does provide free self-paced, video-based training on Microsoft Office for CI students & employees through Lynda.com. 

Also, please note that it is not appropriate to store confidential university data in Microsoft OneDrive. 

Have further questions? Please contact the T&C Help Desk at helpdesk@csuci.edu or call 805-437-8852.

Happy birthday, dear web site!

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Our little darling just turned one! On Saturday, August 15, CI's mobile-friendly responsive web site celebrated its first birthday, and we sure are proud of it.

It's been a great first year, and here's what we have to show for it:

13% increase in pageviews of the CI web site overall
27% increase in pageviews of the About CI page
41% increase in pageviews of the Academics page
65% increase in pageviews of the Visit Campus and campus tours pages
69% increase in pageviews of the main Admissions page (Admissions & Costs)
145% increase in pageviews across all Admissions pages
468% increase in pageviews across all tuition and fees pages
1421% increase in pageviews of the Student Life page

...and other significant increases across academic and administrative web sites...

...and a 29% decrease in our bounce rate across all primary CI web site properties...

...and a 39% decrease in exit percentage across all primary CI web site properties.

What do all these stats mean? They mean that more people are visiting the CI web site, and people are engaging more deeply with our web content.

If that wasn't enough, our web site was also recognized with 3 awards:

2014 Collegiate Advertising Awards Silver Winner in Website Design
2015 CASE District VII Award of Excellence (Bronze) for Institutional Web Sites (PDF)
30th Annual Education Advertising Awards Merit Award for www.csuci.edu 

Not too bad for a young university in Camarillo!

Since we launched, we've continued to make incremental improvements. Some highlights include:

  1. Establishing a rapid, rotating refresh cycle for the banner images on the CI home page.
  2. Changing the home page banners from static images to clickable images. We'll be keeping track of how this change in functionality increases our visitor interaction.
  3. Working closely with our Enrollment Management team to develop and deploy a new consolidated "Calendars" page, which combines events, important dates and deadlines for prospective and incoming students.
  4. Integrating new videos to help prospective students, parents and visitors to get to know CI.
  5. Migrating all but 3 of our academic program web sites to our new mobile-friendly, responsive web site design, including subsequent re-designs of the Anthropology, Chicana/o Studies, and Nursing web sites.
  6. Upgrading our Google Analytics to use Google Tag Manager to help us better manage our web analytics. 
There's still a lot more that's in progress:
  • Migration of our Giving, Extended University and Library web sites to our new mobile-friendly, responsive design
  • An updated electronic campus tour and viewbook
  • Updates to the Housing and Dining web sites
  • Migration of CI-developed web applications that are still using our legacy web framework.
How did we get here? A fantastic team of web professionals and student assistants worked with our entire campus community to turn ideas into reality, and our strategic partner Stamats helped us to identify and document an effective and long-lasting web and social media strategy. Check out last year's web site preview for more detail about the principles that guided the creation of our web site.

Please join me in celebrating the 1st birthday of the new CI web site, and I encourage you to share any comments or suggestions in the comments here (or via email to peter.mosinskis@csuci.edu).





Apple patches security flaws with new versions of iOS, OS X

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Apple has packed patches for dozens of security flaws into the new versions of its iOS and OS X operating systems.

The company noted Tuesday in a security advisory that just-released version 8.4 of the iOS mobile operating system contains more than 20 fixes for vulnerabilities that could lead to remote code execution, application termination and the interception of encrypted traffic, among other issues.


Read more about these updates here.

Updated T&C web site

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We're pleased to announce that on Monday, June 29, the Division of Technology & Communication web site re-launched with an updated look and feel. Thanks to the Web Services team, the new T&C web site uses CI's new mobile-friendly, responsive web framework to make it easier to navigate on smartphones and tablets.

The new design also integrates a T&C-specific "search" bar on all pages of the site.

Feel free to contact Peter Mosinskis, Director of IT Strategy at peter.mosinskis@csuci.edu with any comments, questions or suggestions for the new site.

IT Maintenance on 6/20, 8am to 5pm - many services unavailable

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From 8 am to 5 pm on Saturday, June 20, 2015, access to certain T&C services will be unavailable due to scheduled maintenance.

Affected services (both onsite and offsite) include employee e-mail, webmail, University Library online services, Live Scan, credit card processing, Teale Access, building controls, VPN, internal websites, wireless or any other services requiring to communicate outside campus.

During the maintenance, the following services will be available from offsite:

CI's main site (www.csuci.edu) (with the exception of some features, such as the Account Activation/Reset within myCI);
CI Learn;
CI Records;
CI Financials;
CI Docs;
Dolphin Mail (student email);
DOCK Online;
Lynda.com;
CI Sync;
CSYou; and

myCI.

The campus phone system is expected to be functional and email will be queued during the maintenance.

This outage is necessary so that Technology Infrastructure engineers along with AT&T consultants can upgrade the external border firewalls.

During the outage, concerns or questions can be directed to Herbert Aquino @ 805-437-8550.

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

Reminder: Major Network and Systems Downtime Scheduled for Tomorrow 5/30/2015

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In order to take the next step in our ongoing network upgrade process, we will need to shut down major services between 8am and 8pm on Saturday, May 30. During that time, all campus telephones as well as wired and wireless on the campus will be completely unavailable. In addition, all faculty and staff email services will be suspended during that time. (Email will be queued and will be delivered to your mailbox in the hours after services are resumed.) MyCI (other than email), CI Learn, CI Records, and other major services will be available, but only from off campus. 


We have scheduled this essential project during a time that we expect will cause as little inconvenience as possible. If, however, you have any concerns regarding this outage please contact Carlos Miranda (carlos.miranda@csuci.edu) or Herb Aquino (herb.aquino@csuci.edu) and we will help you work around the outage if possible.

Thanks for your support as we work hard to improve the speed and reliability of the campus network.

Celebrate International Password Day!

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There are all sorts of days to celebrate during the year such as Mother's Day and Father's Day, and even some more off-the-wall days such as National Fried Chicken Day, Talk Like a Pirate Day, and a personal favorite, National Pancake Day.  But today is an extra special day that should be added to everyone's calendars.  Today is International Password Day!

International Password Day gives us all the opportunity to stop and reflect on what makes a good password, and how we can best protect our work and personal data by using strong password concepts.

To help you along, there's even a website dedicated too helping you figure out what makes a good password, how to deal with keeping track of the never ending list of passwords, mobile device passwords, and even some funny stories about password catastrophes!

Please take the time in joining your information security team in making every day a strong password day!