Issue 55, May 2, 2023

UTHSC Information Technology Services generates this communication to educate and inform our campus community about available technology tools, training opportunities, news, and events to help you and the university achieve excellence in patient care, education, research, and community service.

Dan Harder has been selected to serve as the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s chief academic technology officer and deputy chief information officer. His last day at UTHSC is June 30.

In the interim, Dan and his senior leadership team, led by Vikki Massey, already are transitioning many of his duties and meetings with key campus leaders. The leadership team’s goal is to provide continuity and stability to the ITS department and campus while continuing to execute our current infrastructure plan and above all, provide excellent service and support to the university.
 
We will miss Dan and his strong leadership and wish him well in his new position.

Governor Bill Lee signed Senate Bill 834/House Bill 1445 into law recently.  This new law prohibits Tennessee public higher education institutions from allowing access to social media platforms operated or hosted by a company based in China on the institution’s network.  The law applies to internet services an institution provides through a hard-wired or wireless network connection and is effective immediately.

This includes TikTok or other social media platforms like WeChat, Sina Weibo, Tencent QQ, Tencent Video, Xiao HongShu, Douban, Zhihu, Meituan and Toutiao that are operated or hosted by a company in China.

Please help ITS welcome Quincy Moton to our Service Desk! He joins us from Asurion, and we are so happy to have him here at UTHSC!

Quincy's training for the next few weeks but will be answering phones soon, so be sure to give him a warm UTHSC greeting when you talk to him!

RingCentral is our new UTHSC communications solution replacing our old, antiquated telephone system. It offers excellent benefits like making calls from your desktop, laptop, or personal cell, and it helps us avoid outages.

But, with new systems come changes, which often result in questions, so we have developed a RingCentral FAQs TechConnect article that we update frequently.

What kind of questions do we answer in the FAQs?

Have questions about RingCentral? Check out the RingCentral FAQs article. And if you have a question we missed, let us know in the article feedback. We will get it added!

If you have ever inherited a Qualtrics survey/form from someone who has left the university, you may know that you must contact ITS by submitting a TechConnect service request to have your email added to the survey/form for access. What a pain!

To prevent this, share your regularly used surveys/forms with someone else within your area. To add someone to your survey/form:

1, Open Qualtrics.
2. Click the survey drop-down menu to the right of the survey on which you want to
    collaborate.
3. Choose Collaborate.
4. Type the person’s NetID or name in the box in front of the User and Group Address   
    Book.
5. Select the person.
6. Click Add.
7. Click OK.
8. Click Save.

Learn how to restrict access or remove someone from the survey/form in our TechConnect knowledge base article, Qualtrics: Sharing Access to a Survey/Form.

REDCap is a secure web platform for building and managing online databases and surveys. REDCap’s streamlined process for rapidly creating and designing projects offers a vast array of tools that can be tailored to virtually any data collection strategy.

REDCap provides automated export procedures for seamless data downloads to Excel and common statistical packages (SPSS, SAS, Stata, R), as well as a built-in project calendar, a scheduling module, ad hoc reporting tools, and advanced features, such as branching logic, file uploading, and calculated fields.

Check out the TechConnect REDCap article for more information and support details.

Do you ever need to share documents with colleagues outside the UTHSC domain? For example, do you need to share a file with someone at Regional One Health, Le Bonheur, or a clinic? SharePoint offers a secure way to share files with those outside the UTHSC domain.

Ready to get started?

If you don’t have a SharePoint site, you can set one up by following the step-by-step instructions in our Create Your Own SharePoint Site article.

If you already have a SharePoint site, learn how to share with external colleagues through our External Sharing with SharePoint article.

Remember that you are ultimately in control and assume responsibility for how you store and share university data. Review the Data Security standard before sharing any data.

Working together is easier with Microsoft Teams. Tools and files are always available in one place that’s designed to help you connect naturally, stay organized, and bring ideas to life. Learn how to make the most of channels, chat, and connected apps to improve communication and deepen collaboration across teams of all sizes.

Take this Microsoft online training to learn more about working one-on-one in Teams, creating a collaborative workspace, and accomplishing more together with Teams and channels.

We often hear of the term “spring cleaning,” when we go through belongings and organize our house and lives. This is also the perfect time to take an annual review of your digital life. The following seven simple steps, taken once a year, will go a long way toward ensuring you can make the most of technology, safely and securely.

ACCOUNTS: Review each of your accounts. Using a long, unique password for each account ensures that if one account is compromised, your other accounts are still safe. Can't remember all those different passwords? Don’t worry, no one can. You can use a password manager to securely store all your passwords and make your life far simpler and more secure. Enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) when possible, especially for your personal email or financial accounts. This is the single most important step you can take to secure any online account. If you have any online accounts, you have not accessed in over a year, it could be time to delete them.

PROGRAMS & APPLICATIONS: Keeping your devices and software updated and current ensures you have the latest security features installed and known vulnerabilities are fixed. Make sure you have automatic updating enabled on all your computers, mobile devices, and even smart home devices. Also, delete any unused programs or apps on your mobile devices and computers. Some apps require large amounts of storage, can introduce new vulnerabilities, and may even slow things down. The fewer apps you have, the more secure your system and your information remains. Many devices show you how long it has been since you've used an app. If it has been a year since you last used the app, chances are you don't need it anymore.

FINANCES: Verify that your bank accounts, credit card accounts, investments, and retirement accounts are configured to alert you whenever a transaction is made, especially for unusual sign-ins, large purchases, or money transfers. This will make it so that you are always notified when a financial transaction occurs, and you can spot any fraud or unauthorized activity right away. The sooner you identify fraudulent activity, the sooner you can stop it and the more likely you can recover your money. An additional step you can take, if needed, is to implement a credit freeze, which can be one of the most effective ways to protect your identity.

DISPOSING OF DEVICES: Over time you may find yourself collecting old devices you no longer need - perhaps an old smartphone or smart home device. If you dispose of any of these devices, first wipe any personal information from them. Most devices have a simple wiping function that securely purges all personal information (or reset to factory default) before disposing of the device.

BACKUPS: No matter how safe or secure you are, at some point you will most likely need backups to recover your important information or migrate your information to a new device. Set your devices to automatically back up to the cloud. Creating and scheduling automatic backups allows you to recover your most important information.

PARENTING: If you are a parent or guardian, this is a good time to review any parental controls settings you have in place for children. As children get older, you will most likely need to update these controls settings.

SOCIAL MEDIA: Review privacy settings on your social media accounts – these are a goldmine of personal information. Review your accounts to check that you are not sharing sensitive information such as your birthday, phone number, home address, banking information, or geo-location in personal photos.

Spending just a couple of hours a year taking these steps will go a long way toward protecting you, your devices, and information.

Oops, didn't mean to remove that photo? To recover deleted photos and videos from android mobile phone gallery or google photos app:

If you are a scroller, you may find yourself going to the bottom of an app, then spending time scrolling back to the top. Scroll no more - here's an easy way to return to the top of any app (even Safari).

1. Open any app, and simply tap the top of the iPhone screen at the time or battery
     indicator.

2. Tapping here should return you to the top of the app immediately. Ensure you are
     tapping at the time or battery indicator level. If you tap below that level, it won't return
     you to the top.

Do you remember when a mouse only had one button? You can thank Microsoft for the two-button mouse!

The company released the first mouse with two buttons on May 2, 1983. However, the two-button mouse was unsuccessful initially, with only 5,000 of the 100,000 made being sold.

By 1985, Microsoft had significantly improved the mouse, and it became the computer standard.