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Campus-wide desktop upgrade project to enable everyone with the latest Office tools
Apr 22nd, 2019

Windows 7 and Office 2016 will be reaching the end of support in 2020. As a result, Microsoft will stop sending updates for Windows 7 in January 2020, and the ability to read your email and access OneDrive documents from older versions will be blocked by Microsoft in October of 2020.

IT Services and departmental computer technicians are working on a plan to upgrade approximately 3,000 desktop computers to bring them into the Modern Desktop. With everyone using consistent technology, the entire campus will be more secure and positioned to fully use the latest Microsoft tools to collaborate with faculty, staff, and students. This upgrade will allow the UWindsor community to reimagine communication with Office 365.

This estimated 14 month project will roll out department by department, with education and support customized as necessary. To help us plan for the best support for you and your colleagues, we ask that every employee complete the readiness survey.

Take the First Step: Fill Out the Readiness Survey

For more details, visit the IT Service Web Page (www.uwindsor.ca/itservices). If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us through the IT Service Desk at extension 4440.

IT Services to perform daily maintenance during semester break
Apr 22nd, 2019
man appearing to work on microchip

Maintenance of information technology systems will result in outages to some services in the early-morning hours from April 23 to May 5. IT Services selected this period because it is a time of reduced student activity and reduces the impact of service outages.

IT Services will use daily service windows to perform deferred maintenance and make required system configuration changes. The maintenance activities and affected systems will be announced via the IT Services System Status feed — and, if needed, targeted e-mails to affected parties. All services will be fully available each day by 8 a.m.

Critical or broad-reaching system changes are scheduled for the regular Thursday maintenance windows, while minor and less disruptive changes will occur Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday. IT Services is aware that there are still some academic activities occurring until Apr 26 and will take care to avoid impact to those events.

Anyone who has a special event scheduled during this break requiring the affected services to be operational before 8 a.m. must contact the ServiceDesk at 519-253-3000, ext. 4440, so that IT Services can conduct maintenance activity around the event.

Y2K20 Project Update: April 2019
Apr 17th, 2019

The pre-planning stage is wrapping up in the next four weeks and we are on-track for the first departmental rollouts in late May. The deployment will go  department-by-department with planning meetings with key people in each department, followed by a customized plan for each department that will include training presentations and demonstrations as required.

  • The campus-wide Readiness Survey for all faculty and staff is ready to go.
  • Technical presentations have been presented to campus technicians and staff in IT Servces
  • Demonstration computers are setup for the various use cases (single user, multiple user (shared), classroom computer, lab computer) at IT Services to help with technical training and testing
  • Daily News article and campus-wide faculty+staff email to be sent
Microsoft's new Azure for Students program offers development tools and cloud resources
Apr 16th, 2019

Microsoft has changed their Imagine Program (formerly known as DreamSpark) for computer science, math and engineering students. The new Azure for Students program provides:

  • Credits for cloud-based services including virtual servers, storage, Kubernetes containers, databases, AI and machine learning API's and more
  • Access to software tools such as Visual Studio, SQL Server and the Windows operating system

You must have a current, active Azure for Students subscription in order to access the Software Developer Tools. You can download this software in the Education Hub after you have activated your Azure account.

Learning material can be found in the Azure portal and at Microsoft Learn and lynda.com which are also free for UWindsor students.

Windows 10 May 2019 update is rolling out
Apr 16th, 2019

The Windows 10 1903 update will be reaching most users in late May and June of 2019 and is one of the regular semi-annual updates to Windows 10.  The update will be automatically downloaded and installed as per your computer's update settings.

Here are the highlights..

A new Light Theme is available that will change the colour of the taskbar and other elements to a lighter colour.  Windows 10 has had Dark Theme available for a while, but now you can lighten up the bottom black bar.

Focus Assist supresses distractions while you are duplicating your display. A new rule is available that will disable notifications while the current app is in full screen mode.

Search is being separated from Cortana.  When you search in the taskbar, you will now be searching only in files on the PC and will not be given Internet recommendations. Cortana, Microsoft's digital assitant can still be accessed by a separate icon.

Windows Sandbox is a new secure environment that allows you to run apps without making changes to your files. Sandbox works like a built-in virtual machine running Windows 10, but every time you close it, all changes that you make are automatically removed. You may use it to run any executable file to block it from interacting with the underlying operating system. In other words: what happens in Windows Sandbox stays in Windows Sandbox.

And more...

  • The Start menu is being streamlined (faster, less colour, and smaller with less tiles)
  • More functionality to view contents of the clipboard