As manager of the Extended Technical Support (ETS) Team in the University of Iowa’s Information and Technology Services—Enterprise Services, Shawn Potter always looks for ways to free up ETS professional staff to spend time on tasks that are key to the department’s mission. And, thanks to the OneIT End User Support Project (EUS), which focuses on increasing the efficiency of end-user support by implementing the new service model, he’s been able to do just that. 

Managing door access at the College of Engineering used to be a complex and time-consuming endeavor involving both technical and administrative staff. Even without its new annex, the college had 177 doors with electronic access control. The Iowa One Cards of nearly 3,000 students, faculty, and staff had to be manually provisioned to swipe into the appropriate classrooms, labs, conference rooms, and offices. 

Responding to peak workload periods became a bit more manageable when the Division of Student Life adopted the new OneIT shared service model for end user support. The change means the division’s technology experts are now part of a larger team of IT support professionals who help each other out to meet the needs of customers—especially in high-demand times.

Nearly all UI websites are now on the same content-management system, Drupal—and using common technology yields a host of benefits, like cost savings, greater expertise, and sharing custom modules.

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.

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.