Issue 30, December 21, 2021

Best wishes for a wonderful Winter Holiday and New Year!
The UTHSC Help Desk will be closed during UTHSC’s Winter Break and New Year’s holidays.

In our last issue, we shared that the antiquated UTHSC telephone system would be replaced with Voice over IP (VoIP) with RingCentral in 2022.

How Can You Get Ready?

Ensure your work address and phone number are accurate for the new phone system rollout. Ensuring the system has your correct work address and phone number is essential for other processes that rely on the accuracy of your contact info, too! Visit the Updating Your Work and Personal Information article for instructions to verify and update your contact information.

What Makes RingCentral So Great?

• Eliminates directory lookups: All employees automatically will be in your RingCentral contact list. It works just like your cell phone!
• Works on multiple devices: Make calls from your computer, cell phone, iPad, etc.
• Protects your personal phone number: All of your calls will look as if they are coming from your work number, regardless of the device you use to make or receive a call.

ITS’s Telecom team will be rolling out RingCentral in batches over 2022. You will receive communications with specific details before your move.

Watch for more information!

Don't forget to create your Out of Office message for your email:

• Set a different message for external responses or only respond to internal emails. Office 365 will allow you to customize your internal and external responses.
• Be vague about your whereabouts. Simply state that you are unavailable and will respond as soon as possible.
• If you don't want a stranger to know about your plans, don't put them in your Out of Office reply and merely indicate you will respond when possible.
• Check out our TechConnect article for creating your Out of Office message.

As you may know, our email forwarding policy has recently changed. We will be honest – we don’t recommend you forward your email to another account. But, realistically, we know some people have two, three, maybe even four “official” email accounts and we do want you to get your UTHSC emails.

It's important to know if the email account you are forwarding your UTHSC account to is within the approved domains. UTK manages a list of approved and not approved domains for the UT System. To view this list, you will be required to log in using your NetID and password. It will display your Active Directory Information. Click on View Forwarding Domains from the menu on the left. The domains in green are approved. Those in red are explicitly denied. Any domain not listed on this page is also denied.

View the TechConnect article on Forwarding UTHSC Email to Another Email Account for more information!

Microsoft has some excellent FREE training courses we recommend. As UTHSC faculty or staff, you have access to all Microsoft 365 apps listed. Students may or may not have access to these apps.

Introduction to Scheduling With Microsoft Bookings
This course introduces you to how Microsoft Bookings helps you simplify how you manage and schedule appointments. Register

• Jan 03 - 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
• Jan 24 - 11:00 am - 12:00 pm

Introduction to Microsoft Outlook
Join us for a free, 60-minute workshop for a hands-on, interactive experience with Microsoft Outlook. Find out how to use Outlook to organize your life and improve your communications experience. Register

• Jan 06 - 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
• Jan 10 - 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm

Microsoft Word Basics
Get started by learning to navigate Word, make impactful documents, and review your content with ease. Register

• Jan 05 - 11:00 am - 12:00 pm

In this Microsoft Outlook tutorial, Simon Sez IT looks at getting started using Microsoft Outlook 2019. This comprehensive Outlook course for beginners covers a lot in 3+ hours of video.

The holidays bring on more targeted social engineering attacks than any other time of the year. In the context of cybersecurity, social engineering is the art of human manipulation. It is designed to manipulate people into performing actions against their own interests or divulging confidential information. Phishing is a form of social engineering. Most social engineering attacks have four common traits – arrive unexpectedly, have a sense of urgency, are the first time request for action, and are against your best interests.

Not every message with these four traits is absolutely a social engineering scam. Our email inboxes, voice mail, and postal mailboxes are full of unexpected requests. That is life. But when these four traits are present, you need to confirm the request using some other guaranteed-to-be-safe method before performing it. Think before you act.

Asking and answering four questions can help you avoid becoming a victim. If they are present, you should go out of your way to confirm the request using an additional, more trusted method before performing any action.

In each issue, we feature one of our amazing ITS team members. We learn more about Renetta Bell with our Systems Development team in this segment.

What is your role and how long have you been in ITS at UTHSC? I have been at UTHSC for 4 years, all within the Banner DevOps division of ITS. For all that don’t know, Banner is UTHSC’s Student Information System. Until recently, my role was as an IT Analyst III, where I started handling mainly all Bursar-related Banner issues and development, but over time, I have assisted many other functional departments and colleges. I have now transitioned into the Team Lead position as of November 2021.

What is a day in the life of Renetta like? A day for me is never the same. Some days I can be working on putting out “fires” and figuring out why something is not working. Some days you can find me scrambling to work on an urgent report request. Some days I am sitting at the computer working on development tasks that can improve the user’s productivity and efficiency. There are even some days I can actually sit down and get done what I originally planned for, but no matter what kind of day it is at work, I love doing it.

What is your favorite thing about working at UTHSC? What I like most about working at UTHSC is the people. I can honestly say I see why UTHSC is consistently ranked among the best places to work in Memphis. To me, you can’t find a better workplace in Memphis than UTHSC.

What’s something most people don’t know about you? Something most people don’t know about me is that I love watching international television series, with British series being my absolute favorite. Also, I am originally from Jackson, MS, but have been in the Memphis area for 8 years. I will forever call Jackson my home no matter how long I have been here.