BITS Newsletter - Employees

Wednesday, July 2, 2025
BITS Newsletter

We hope everyone is enjoying their summer! BITS is looking forward to having many new students on campus for Golden Eagle Orientation throughout July. The following outlines some information that you may find helpful.

Hardware - Equipment Moves & Surplus

See what facilities’ lead time is, and don’t forget to let BITS know if you move offices or change who is using a computer!

It is important to let BITS know if you move offices or change which computer you use on campus. This allows us to make sure your information is correct for your assigned devices, which impacts emergency response and device replacement eligibility. Please place a ticket here if you are moving, include your old office, new office, computer service tag, and phone extension.

Phone Project Update:

BITS continues its work on the SUNY Teams calling project. The project is currently in Phase 1 of the implementation plan and working through the presented complications before moving to Phase 2 and then the rest of the campus. As BITS moves through the different phases of the project, communications will be sent out directly to those involved.

Update on Campus Wi-Fi Upgrades!

Staff and student employees from Systems & Networking and Telecommunications are diving into the second year of our campus-wide Wi-Fi access point replacement project!

This year brings a few extra challenges — from navigating around power outages and hardware delays to coordinating with asbestos testing. Because of this, some of the work may be rescheduled for the winter months.

As always, we’re doing our best to minimize disruptions. Building coordinators will be notified ahead of time if any work is scheduled in their area. If there is an outage, it’ll be brief and limited to the specific access point being upgraded.

Thanks for your patience and support as we continue improving your campus Wi-Fi experience!

Upcoming Network and Systems Maintenance 7/7/2025-7/11/2025

Please be aware BITS will be performing necessary maintenance and updates during the second week of July that may impact some services from 6 am-8:00 am (8:30 am on 7/7 and 7/10) each morning that week. During these times, please expect intermittent internet connections or VPN Connections. A more detailed schedule of what to expect will come soon!

Blue Light Project

The campus emergency Blue Lights have been undergoing updates and modifications over the last 3 months. BITS and the vendor have been working together to make the modifications, and as of today, there are still 13 of the 52 left to complete. The expectation is to have the project complete by September.

Monthly Security Note

Gen A.I. is being adopted to solve a number of challenges in many organizations. It’s important to remember that providing sensitive information to an unapproved solution is an unauthorized disclosure.

For example, submitting a roster of students and student information to consumer ChatGPT for the creation of an A.I. summary would be a disclosure to OpenAI. Such a summary can be very useful: average GPAs, total majors, geographic distribution, and more. Gen A.I. is a powerful tool for quickly and easily making sense of information. But now the information has been disclosed to an unauthorized party.

For more information on this topic, see this article: Employees Enter Sensitive Data Into GenAI Prompts Far Too Often

Windows 11 Update

BITS will begin rolling out the Windows 11 24H2 Feature Update to all qualified Faculty and Staff devices over the summer. This in-place update is necessary to keep systems secure and running smoothly and will be deployed gradually through August. Users may experience one or more restarts, and the update can take up to 90 minutes to complete. Files and applications should remain intact, but we recommend saving work frequently and backing up important data. For the smoothest experience, please leave devices powered on and connected to the internet when possible.