ACCS-VA 2020

The ACCS-VA Desktop Support Special Interest Group (SIG) offers an opportunity to connect, collaborate, and communicate with the desktop support community at colleges and universities throughout Virginia. This association of desktop support professionals focuses on issues surrounding the support, delivery, and management of endpoint information technology services for our customers. The Desktop Support SIG offers opportunities to reach out for support on specific desktop support topics as well as gain insight on common issues. The SIG membership can share our experiences and discuss the upcoming trends we have come across as well as how to respond.

At a large university, all IT service requests were triaged through the university's information center. While this setup was effective in routing the requests to the correct IT departments, it prevented IT teams at different departments or colleges, known as the distributed IT (DIT), from directly communicating with the IT service providers. To improve efficiency and time to solution, a template was created to facilitate the DIT teams in escalating certain requests directly to IT service providers. A pilot study indicated that this template approach needed improvement as one fifth of the escalations were unnecessary and there was a lack of consistency in utilizing the IT service management platform, including documenting work performed and reason of escalation. The pilot study further suggested training is necessary to improve the effective use of the escalation template.

Design thinking, an iterative process in developing understanding of users, challenging assumptions, redefining problems, and identifying alternative strategies and solutions, has lately been adopted in designing training solutions. In this session, the presenters will introduce the concept of design thinking and how they utilized the design thinking process to design a training solution to improve the effective use of an escalation template among the DIT teams.

Capture the flag (CTF) competitions are a great way to assess student learning, foster interest in technical topics, or help your workforce test their skills and develop new ones in a fun, competitive environment. In this interactive session, we will introduce different types of capture-the-flag competitions and describe how to use them in the classroom or the workplace to drive interest and enhance learning in cybersecurity topics. We will give participants the opportunity to register for a CTF hosted by the Virginia Cyber Range, then examine some example challenges and demonstrate tools that you can use to solve them. Finally, we will direct participants to free (and other) CTF frameworks that they can use to upload their own challenges and host their own CTFs. Session participants will be able to continue playing the CTF competition for the duration of the conference and beyond! Bring your laptop and come ready to learn some new skills!

We'll take you through our journey in creating a rewards program centered around phishing reports. We'll discuss how we entice our users to report phishing and how successful we've been in our campaign. We'll also talk about the challenges we faced and lessons learned.

We are witnessing a new evolution in traditional Research Computing and High-Performance Computing (HPC). With augmented speed and capacity of CPU and GPU computing and more mature frameworks, the ideas of training a complex model and having a mechanism to provide inference resources at lower cost is a reality today. In this talk, we will discuss emerging technologies in Machine Learning, Artificial intelligence, and how they relate to existing HPC architectures. We will also discuss how higher education institutions are leveraging the appropriate infrastructure to provide cutting edge resources to PI's, graduate and undergraduate research teams.

We will have a three speaker session. UiPath/WWT will open up with a quick introduction of ourselves and RPA Then, W&M Assoc. Dean Kurt Carlson will discuss the Mason School of Business Partnership with UiPath to teach their students how to manage both a human and digital workforce of the future. Then, a representative from VT's Vice President for Finance division will present on how they are deploying RPA in production and why.

Putting technology in the hands of those who need it. Everyone needs a computer to get through college, but not every student can afford it. Using resources available to us, we've been able to allow check outs of laptops, all-in-one desktops, and hotspots for 48 hour or semester check out that allow students to get the support they need to succeed in school. Learn how we made it work through the efforts of the Library, IT department, faculty, staff and students.

There are more than 35 merchants that receive and process payments for a large university. Although there are protocols in place to protect sensitive, protected, or confidential data a plan should be in place to report a breach that allows for a quick response from the IT Security Office and Bursar's Office to minimize the exposure of the data. Collaboration between departments is paramount for the best results in case of a breach. To ensure everyone is familiar with the procedure for a Payment Card Industry Security Incident a tabletop exercise is used to learn where the procedure is strong and where it could be improved.

The purpose of this session is to share the journey of the Desktop Support Group at Old Dominion University through many different productivity tools and communications methods before we settled onto Microsoft Teams and never looked back. We'll talk about how we structure our Microsoft Teams, how we use it, some tips and tricks, as well as what we see in the future.