The switch to a tiny but mighty compute stick is saving departments time, money and hassle when it comes to powering digital signage across campus.

The Drupal Digital Signage Service was rolled out campus-wide as part of the OneIT Web Hosting Project, one of 16 TIER efficiency initiatives in information technology. Expanding use of Drupal to digital signs saves time and money several ways, including convenience and ease of use.

Lance Bolton, senior IT director of College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Technology Services, has received the 2016 Information Technology Leadership Award in recognition of his exemplary contributions to the university’s IT community.

When it comes to informed decision making, having reliable data is paramount. But, because simply collecting data isn’t always enough to facilitate a decision in a timely manner, University of Iowa Information Technology Services has initiated an efficiency project aimed at putting the UI’s robust amount of data in a format that can quickly be analyzed.

Benefits of the Office 365 upgrade include a 50 times larger email storage capacity — nearly eliminating the need to delete messages to create inbox space — and one terabyte of cloud file storage through OneDrive so employees can access files from anywhere, sync across all devices, and share files and folders with co-workers.

ACE (Assessing the Classroom Environment) Online allows students to complete the evaluations at a time and place that works for them—on a mobile device in class, at home, or in a computer lab. Faculty will benefit from easy, online access to the data from their current and future course evaluations. The new tool reduces paper waste and requires significantly less staff time to administer. It is forecast to save the university $350,000 per year.

Professor Claudio Margulis describes his positive experience consolidating his research clusters from the Chemistry server rooms to central facilities. The project team is working through a list of roughly 1,000 servers on campus, aiming to consolidate over 46 server rooms and closets to a significantly smaller number of centrally governed, managed, and supported multi-tenant data centers.

A high-volume purchase of identical PCs resulted in significant per-unit savings. By "buying in bulk" 1,000 Dell PCs with the same configuration, the UI saved over $90,000.

Migrating servers to a central facility addressed a retirement gap in the College of Dentistry and freed up staff to work on projects that are important to the college. Dentistry was able to look strategically at the salary line and where they could add the most value to the college. They re-purposed the retirement budget line to hire a new application developer, who has focused on key projects, like a lab information system for dental pathologists, and systems to track externship placements and courses taken for certifications.

A OneIT project team comprising technology professionals from various campus units reassessed the Large Scale Storage service for both research and business users across campus. Thanks to advances in storage technology, they were able to decrease the cost of large-scale storage from $60 per terabyte per year to $40 per terabyte per year. The service also offers 30-day online self-restore backup snapshots, file replication, and off-campus access to files.