Ag IT Matters

November 21, 2024

Microsoft has announced the end of life for Windows 10, effective October 14, 2025. In response, Ag IT has launched a project to upgrade compatible college PCs to Windows 11 over the coming months.

December 8, 2023

Upgrading your mobile device? Avoid account access issues by making sure you have a second method of authenticating with 2FA before you upgrade.

August 11, 2023

A new feature will be added to your Outlook and Edge (Microsoft’s browser) to help streamline your Outlook and browser experience. Microsoft is helping you keep your email right there with you, during your browsing experience.

June 20, 2022

On June 22, 2022, the Penn State Learning Resource Network (LRN) will be transitioned to a new login experience.

June 8, 2022

Your Ag IT teams want to work with you throughout the entire lifecycle of your computer.

May 27, 2022

Support for Internet Explorer (IE), Microsoft’s legacy web browser, will end on June 15, 2022.

May 3, 2022

With the semester coming to an end, Ag IT would like to offer several IT-related reminders and considerations before diving into summer vacation season.

April 25, 2022

Ag IT has launched a new Computer Setup Request form on our website.

March 30, 2022

Over the upcoming weeks, Ag IT's Cyber Hygiene journey will focus on Ransomware.

March 9, 2022

Ag IT's Systems and Infrastructure Team Lead Roger Tharp is known throughout the Ag Community for his talent, dedication and hard work 'keeping the lights on' for our College, Extension offices and research centers. What the Ag Community may not know is that Roger similarly devotes dedication, time and talent to THON - the largest student-run philanthropy in the world.

March 4, 2022

Through our partnership with Penn State’s Office of Information Security (OIS), Ag IT would like to remind the Ag Community to continue practicing good cyber hygiene to keep our accounts and technology safe and secure. Recent history has demonstrated that cyber-attacks are more likely to occur when global conflict exists and maintaining a heightened level of awareness is more important now than ever.

February 17, 2022

As part of our Cyber Hygiene journey, Ag IT will begin deploying restart reminder pop-ups through BigFix, our computer management software, the week of February 21, 2022.

February 4, 2022

Regularly restarting our computers is a foundational component of good cyber hygiene. However, restarting is something that is often an “I’ll do that later” task. Ag IT recommends restarting your computers at the end of every work week and we want to help make remembering to do it as easy as possible.

February 1, 2022

Ag IT is embarking on a Cyber Hygiene journey, and we ask that you join us! Through this partnership, we will create and sustain a more secure computing environment within our College. Following is a high-level overview of our campaign to improve cyber hygiene in 2022.

October 11, 2021

Ag IT staff often have opportunities to work innovative technology with faculty, researchers, educators and staff in our College. Today we highlight the work IT Consultant Jill Paige and Systems Administrator Travis Waltz are undertaking to assist researchers store and share photos taken on Raspberry Pis.

October 1, 2021

It is with delight that Ag IT announces the conclusion to our Box data migration project. According to our records, we believe all accounts owned by College faculty and staff, including Box Non-person Accounts (NPAs), have migrated to OneDrive and/or SharePoint.

July 26, 2021

Data storage has been a frequent topic of conversation within the College and Penn State. This conversation recently expanded with an announcement that Penn State IT will begin phasing out the storage of recordings in Zoom Cloud beginning August 16, 2021. Instead, we will navigate to Kaltura to access recordings initiated through Zoom.

June 4, 2021

Darren Clapper, Ag IT Systems Administrator, put pen to paper recently to provide a personal account of technological improvements and advancements made in recent years at the Ag Progress Days site.

May 21, 2021

The College-wide rollout of GlobalProtect is complete and faculty and staff should use it instead of Cisco AnyConnect as your virtual private network (VPN).

April 19, 2021

Spring is in the air (mostly) and your summer helpers/ interns will soon be arriving to your County offices. With advanced planning, you can best be assured that your interns and program assistants will be able to use the computers and other IT resources on their start date or soon after.

March 24, 2021

In November 2020, the University announced that our current virtual private network (VPN) software, Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility VPN client, would be replaced with a new VPN client called GlobalProtect. This change will affect both University-owned and personal computers that remotely connect to secure Penn State resources (examples include the VoIP portal, SIMBA, LIAS - Library Access and security Enclaves).

March 23, 2021

Ag IT is hosting Box Migration Information Sessions via Zoom in March and April. Details for each session are provided below. Please reach out to Ag IT for the Zoom link. We hope you can join!

March 8, 2021

In response to recent security breaches in Zoom meetings, the Penn State Zoom team has prepared specific guidance on what we can do before and during meetings to prevent unwanted guests from joining and mitigate disruptions if they occur. Zoom security is critical and it will take our collective actions to protect ourselves from these unwarranted attacks on members of our University Community.

March 5, 2021

After January's pause in Box to OneDrive migrations, the work is scheduled to restart in April

February 15, 2021

Penn State's Office of Information Security introduces Lifetime Passwords for Penn State Accounts

January 27, 2021

College-wide Box to OneDrive migrations have been temporarily paused until April 2021.

December 16, 2020

Although Penn State is officially closed for the Winter Break December 24, 2020 through January 4, 2021, we know that many of your offices will be open and many of you will still be working during that time. If you have a service outage in your office, Ag IT staff will be there to get you back into service!

December 16, 2020

Although Penn State is officially closed for the Winter Break beginning on December 24, 2020 and reopens on January 4, 2021, we know that many of you will still be working during that time. If you have a service outage in your office, Ag IT staff will be there to get you back into service!

December 4, 2019

These new video doorbells allow you to have a little extra assurance about who is on the other side of your interaction. When the doorbell rings and your video doorbell shows you a guy dressed as a 1940’s gangster, you know something is fishy even if he is telling you that he is the UPS delivery man. But we don’t have that yet in email, so when you get the ring from the email box from somebody claiming to be the UPS delivery staff, you can’t see the familiar uniform or the classic thief costume. Whether at the door or at the email box, don’t let the thief in!

December 4, 2019

If you get a new smartphone over the holidays you may not want to wait for the new year to talk to your colleagues in Ag IT to get the phone set up to send/receive Penn State email. Even though it would give you plausible deniability..."Huh? I didn't see your December 23 message until January 2!!"…you would also be out of the loop for messages that you may want to see. Never fear – configuring email is easy on a new phone!