The Microsoft Office 365 suite provides our community with a rich and diverse set of web-based productivity applications.  To ensure that you get the most out of this powerful suite, University Systems and Networking has created a new online directory of Office applications. It can be accessed by visiting the FDU IT homepage and selecting “Office 365 Suite” under Common Resources, or using the link below:

The directory presents a description of each application within the Microsoft Office 365 suite. Many of you are familiar with stalwart applications such as Outlook and Word. However, you may not be aware that you have access to useful tools such as Microsoft Planner to create plans and organize tasks within a team, or Microsoft Bookings to schedule and manage appointments.

From each application’s “More Info” page, you can click “Microsoft Office 365 Portal” to go straight to the application. You also have the option to view a wealth of training and documentation from Microsoft and, in many instances, Fairleigh Dickinson University. For example, if you are interested in learning more about Microsoft Excel, you will have access to Microsoft training videos as well as FDU produced training sessions from our Lunch and Learn series.

The Microsoft Office 365 applications are also available via the FDU Software Catalog at it.fdu.edu/software. The Software Catalog is a web-based directory allowing our community to easily view all the software programs available to us. To use the catalog, simply select your “user type” of student, faculty, or staff and you will be presented with a list of software options that are either free, available for purchase at an educational discount, or accessible through FDU Anywhere.

Thank you for your attention. In addition to rolling out new technologies, we are always eager to get our community properly acquainted with some of the great tools already available to us. If you have any questions, please contact our University Technical Assistance Center at (973)-443-8822.

As mentioned in previous communications, the new Self-Service portal is now live and WebAdvisor is no longer active.  Registration for summer and fall 2022 will be completed using Self-Service.  You can access the site by navigating to selfservice.fdu.edu and you will need to login using your NetID credentials.  A shortcut has also been added to the Fairleigh Dickinson University home page.

A recorded training and step-by-step tutorials are available at:

Self-Service Training

Use the following Zoom links to attend a live Self-Service training session

• April 4 at 7 PM EST: https://fdu.zoom.us/j/95874021388
  
• April 5 at 12 PM EST: https://fdu.zoom.us/j/92518476747
  
• April 7 at 7 PM EST: https://fdu.zoom.us/j/97115492919
  
• April 8 at 2 PM EST: https://fdu.zoom.us/j/96870708061

We will also be providing live support during priority registration. If you encounter any issues, you can join a live Zoom session beginning April 11^th at 8am. This live session will be active 8am-5pm each day during priority registration.

If you have any questions or encounter any issues, please email selfserviceadmin@fdu.edu.

We have successfully completed our GL Chart of Accounts conversion. Access to:

• Colleague
• WebAdvisor
• Self-Service

has now been restored.

If you need to submit an expense report using Chrome River, you will continue to see the old GL structure.  This should be resolved in the next few days.

If you have any questions, please email selfserviceadmin@fdu.edu.

After an almost 20-year partnership, the University will be ending its agreement with our third-party IT help desk provider this month. As of Tuesday morning, March 22 at 7AM EDT, the University will be utilizing the services of a new call center and a new ticketing system.

My team has been working with our new provider for several months to prepare for this cut over. Users will continue to call (973)-443-8822 or email fdutac@fdu.edu to report issues and the new help desk will maintain the same 7×24 hour operation which you are accustomed to. All unresolved open tickets will be moved over to the new system when the cutover occurs. While we aim to make this a seamless transition, users calling into the help desk will be interacting with an entirely new team of call center representatives which may ask new or different questions.

While we are excited to be working with an outstanding provider with extensive experience in higher education, we also recognize that that there will be a learning curve as they familiarize themselves with our community. Your patience during this transition is greatly appreciated.

Colleague, WebAdvisor and Self-Service systems will be down for maintenance beginning Thursday, March 17^th, at 8pm EDT.  The systems to be available by Sunday morning, March 20^th.

If you have any questions, please email selfserviceadmin@fdu.edu.

We are pleased to announce that the new Self Service portal will go live on Monday, taking the place of WebAdvisor. You can access the site by navigating to selfservice.fdu.edu and you will need to login using your NetID credentials. A shortcut has also been added to the Fairleigh Dickinson University home page.

A recorded training and step-by-step tutorials are available here:

Students

We are also providing additional live Zoom trainings as follows:

Spring 2022 Student Training Schedule

• March 11 at 3 PM EST >
  
• March 21 at 7 PM EST >
  
• March 24 at 11 AM EST >
  
• March 30 at 3 PM EST >
  
• April 4 at 7 PM EST >
  
• April 7 at 7 PM EST >

If you have any questions or encounter any issues, please email selfserviceadmin@fdu.edu.

After an almost 20-year partnership, the University will be ending its agreement with our third-party IT help desk provider this month. As of Monday morning, March 21, the University will be utilizing the services of a new call center and a new ticketing system.

My team has been working with our new provider for several months to prepare for this cut over. Users will continue to call (973)-443-8822 or email fdutac@fdu.edu to report issues and the new help desk will maintain the same 7×24 hour operation which you are accustomed to. All unresolved open tickets will be moved over to the new system when the cutover occurs.

While we aim to make this a seamless transition, users calling into the help desk will be interacting with an entirely new team of call center representatives which may ask new or different questions. While we are excited to be working with an outstanding provider with extensive experience in higher education, we also recognize that that there will be a learning curve as they familiarize themselves with our community. Your patience during this transition is greatly appreciated.

Online disinformation, including phishing scams, are a pervasive reality in our daily lives. Although awareness of these scams is always needed, there are historical moments in which we need to display increased vigilance. New reports show that the United States is among countries targeted by cyber security attacks linked to the Russian aggression in Ukraine. This news, compounded by the recent uptick in phishing attempts that our community has already been experiencing, makes it an ideal time to discuss important trends and concepts related to online security. 

Our implementation of Cisco Duo multi-factor authentication (MFA) has been a substantial improvement to the security of our systems. However, if your account password is ever compromised, hackers can attempt to circumvent the second factor of authentication by entering your account information and hoping you approve access via Cisco Duo. Luckily, this is an easy scam to avoid. MFA push notifications, text messages, and email messages arrive nearly instantaneously upon your login attempt. If you receive a notification at any other time, please assume it fraudulent, do not approve the second factor authentication and change your password immediately. 

There are also certain payment methods that should immediately raise a red flag. For years, the predominant one has been gift cards. If a banking institution or co-worker is asking via phone, email or text for you to buy gift cards, many of you know to assume it is a scam. However, you may not be aware that cryptocurrencies are becoming the new payment method to be leery of. If someone is attempting to sell you cryptocurrency or is requesting payment in cryptocurrency, please take an extra skeptical eye to the request. 

The [External] tag is a helpful tool for detecting phishing attempts to your FDU email account. When receiving email from a non-FDU account to your FDU email account, the subject line is prepended with “[External]”. If you see an email which claims to be from an FDU account but is tagged as “[External]”, please do not reply. 

Through reading our alerts, you have heard us ask for attentiveness when we see an uptick in cyber security threats on our network. This time, the uptick is nationwide and has the potential to increase further. As a result, we ask that you please keep an eye out for these red flags when using the FDU network and also in your personal life. As always, we highly recommend brushing up on our recently revised online tutorial at Spot a Phishing Scam. It will provide you with solid baseline understanding of popular phishing attacks, how to report phishing attacks to us, and how to proceed if you have replied to one.

We greatly appreciate your attention to this issue. OIRT perpetually implements new rules to limit the spread of these messages on our email system. However, the best individual measure that we can take is to ensure a well-informed community. As always, our University Technical University Technical Assistance Center is available at (973)-443-8822 to answer any questions that you may have.

On the evening of March 3^rd between 11:30PM and 1:30AM, University Systems and Networking will be performing network switch maintenance on the Metropolitan Campus. Only users located in the following areas will experience intermittent loss of wired and wireless internet access as we service the switches in your building. 

• Dickinson Hall
• Bancroft Hall
• Becton Hall
• Edward Williams Hall
• The Rothman Center

This work is being conducted outside of regular business hours and does not affect off-campus users. Accordingly, we expect minimal impact to our community. If you have any questions, please contact our University Technical Assistance Center at (973)-443-8822. Thank you for your attention.

Once per month, Microsoft sends a security update which is a mix of helpful security fixes, application updates and improvements. As an enterprise Microsoft client, FDU has the ability to test these updates and push them to our community after they have been deemed ready for our users. This month, Microsoft launched the Windows 11 operating system as part of the monthly update. Since they are eager for users to adopt the new OS, Microsoft began sending the option to upgrade to Windows 11 directly to FDU Windows computers. 

If you receive the option to upgrade to Windows 11, as shown below, we ask that you choose to “Stay on Windows 10 for now”. In addition to some reports of data loss and application issues, there is the potential for conflicts with FDU specific services and features. The University is actively testing Windows 11 and as soon as we are ready to support the new OS, we will send a follow-up alert with further information as to how to upgrade via self-service.

Barring special releases which are out of our control, we work tirelessly to ensure that these patches are distributed without impacting the community. Thank you for your understanding.