Recently, email messages have been sent out to the community requesting that you click on a link. These “phishing” emails are fraudulent messages that are designed for you to provide information which should not be divulged.

A copy of one of the emails in question has been included below. Although it initially appears to be convincing, it does contain a few telltale signs of a phishing attempt. We have created the following webpage to further assist you with determining if a message is legitimate:

If you believe that you have provided your information to a phisher, please change your NETID password by visiting identity.fdu.edu as soon as you can. If you need assistance, please contact the UTAC (University Technical Assistance Center) at 973-443-8822.

Begin Example:

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Sent: Tuesday, February 11, 2020 4:29 AM
Subject: [External]RE: Technical Support 

To whom it may concern,

We are currently running upgrade on all active account, in order to complete upgrade automatically you are required to initiate upgrade manually by visiting the HR WEB PORTAL. Upgrade will take effect from Monday 10 from 1200 to Wednesday 12 by 2300.

All account failed to upgrade within this period will be classified as inactive and this may result to account deactivation/closure.

Thank you,

System Administrator.

The issue with connecting to FDU IT resources from off campus has been resolved. At this time, users from on and off campus can successfully connect to FDU resources.

If you have any questions in regards to this matter, please contact the University Technical Assistance Center (UTAC) at (973) 443-8822.

Our community is currently experiencing issues accessing certain FDU IT resources from off-campus.  FDU IT is aware of this issue and we are working towards a resolution. All services which use FDU Single Sign On are affected, including Webadvisor, FDU Email, and WebCampus. 

We will send an additional communication as soon as this issue is resolved. Thank you for your understanding.

Office 365, like Gmail, has a spam filter that automatically places certain email in a Junk Email Folder. This folder should be checked on a daily basis. On occasion, some messages, including messages from professors, campus clubs and FDU academic departments can get caught in the spam filter and wind up in the Junk Email folder. Since these messages are automatically deleted after 10 days, it is imperative to check the Junk folder regularly and move the legitimate messages to your Inbox.

Thank you for your attention to this matter. If you have any questions, please contact our University Technical Assistance Center (UTAC) at (973)-443-8822.

While we successfully migrated our student email accounts to Office 365 last week, some members of our student community are still attempting, unsuccessfully, to check their FDU email via the Gmail app on their mobile phone.  This has created a challenging scenario as we cannot inform them to access their email through Office 365.

Many faculty and staff interact with students daily. Please keep an ear open for students expressing that they are unable to access their FDU email. Please inform them to cease using the Gmail app and download the Outlook mobile app or use webmail.fdu.edu from a browser.

For assistance with configuring the Outlook mobile app, review the link below or call our University Technical Assistance Center at (973)-443-8822.

I am pleased to announce that our team has completed the initial Office 365 migration and, at this time, over 95% of our 11,000 student e-mail accounts are successfully ported to Office 365. 

All FDU students can continue to use Webmail.fdu.edu to access their FDU email as usual.  The majority of account holders will immediately see the new Office 365 interface. If you see the Gmail interface, feel free to continue sending mail as usual and we will have you ported over as soon as possible. We anticipate that all remaining accounts will be ported to Office 365 by Friday evening.

As always, please contact our University Technical Assistance Center at (973)-443-8822 if you have any questions.  

In recent weeks, University Systems and Networking has been keeping our community apprised of our planned migration of student email accounts. The time is now upon us and as of January 8^th at 7AM Eastern, students logging into Webmail.fdu.edu will be directed to their new mailbox hosted on Microsoft’s Office 365.  All email, contacts and calendar data will automatically be carried over from student’s existing Google account.  

Our team will begin the migration at 5PM Eastern tomorrow night. As the migration is being completed, students may experience a delay in receiving their email, which is a normal part of the migration process. Additionally, some students have experienced delayed delivery as we have prepared for the migration this week. This was an unexpected outcome and we apologize for the inconvenience. We anticipate that all pending mail will be delivered by noon Eastern on January 8^th.

The Office 365 platform has a fantastic cloud storage solution, called Microsoft OneDrive, for all of your file and document storage going forward. However, to provide temporary access to your existing Google stored files, we have created GSuite.fdu.edu. By logging into this site with your FDU NetID username and password, you will have access to your existing Google Docs and Google Drive data. It is worth noting that “Email” will be an amongst the applications accessible on GSuite.fdu.edu. However, this is just an archive of your old email. It will not be possible to send or receive email via Gsuite.fdu.edu.

We look forward to unveiling this new set of tools to our student community. Since the migration is finally upon us, I have included the previous Tech Alerts below to ensure that everyone is fully up to speed with this major IT project. As always, our Technical Assistance Center is available at (973)443-8822 to answer any questions that you may have.

On Saturday December 21st, between 8AM and noon eastern time, University Systems and Networking will be completing a second and final round of software upgrades to our core network equipment. For the duration of this period, all users on the Metropolitan and Florham campuses will experience a full outage of network services. This includes access to the wired and wireless internet, as well as access to New Jersey based FDU resources such as network drives, FDU email, VPN, and Blackboard. Online grading will also be unavailable for the duration of this upgrade.

Users on the Vancouver campus will still be able to access the Internet via a wired connection. However, access to New Jersey based FDU resources and the FDU wireless network will be unavailable for the duration of the upgrade window.

We understand the inconvenience that network downtime can cause for our community. As always, we attempt to schedule this work at times that will be minimally intrusive for the majority of our users.  Thank you for your understanding and please reach out to our Technical Assistance Center at (973) 443-8822 if you have any questions.

With the holidays approaching, FDU IT has a simple security request for our faculty and staff members. When you leave for the holiday break, please shut down your desktop and/or laptop computer left on campus. If you have access to additional computers within your department such as lab computers or conference room computers, please power those down as well. 

As we have chronicled in a recent Tech Alert, online scammers have been aggressive as of late. As such, leaving your computer powered on, connected to the network, and unattended for an extended period can lead to a few potential pitfalls. It is always good practice to power down your machine when it is not in use. However, this is especially helpful when the University is shut down and we are unable to catch and resolve issues as rapidly as usual. 

Thanks for helping us to keep the FDU network secure and have a joyous holiday break.

As we mentioned in our November 18^th Tech Alert, University Systems and Networking will be migrating student email accounts to Office 365 for the Spring 2020 semester. We can now announce that this migration is scheduled to occur on January 7^th, 2020.

Once the change occurs, students will still log into their FDU student email account via webmail.fdu.edu with their NetID username and password. However, once logged in, students will immediately notice that the previous “Gmail” interface has been replaced with Microsoft’s Office 365. Once logged in, an app launcher will appear in the upper left hand corner of the screen. When you click on this icon, which will look like 9 small dots in the form of a square, you will have access to a suite of cloud based Microsoft applications including:

• OneDrive for file storage 
• Word for word processing 
• Excel for spreadsheets
• PowerPoint for presentations
• OneNote for collaboration

Please note that any documents on Google Drive will remain accessible to students for a period of time. However, you should begin using Microsoft OneDrive as your permanent solution moving forward. 

We look forward to bringing this exciting new platform to our student community and we will send another alert closer to the migration. Thanks for reading and enjoy the holiday break.