Information Technology Services (ITS)
EIS projects & initiatives
Migration to Teams Phone – COMPLETE!
The migration of over 11,000 VoIP phones to the Microsoft Teams Voice solution was completed in August 2024. This new service will save departments over $500,000 per year in telephone line costs and will allow staff and faculty to make and receive phone calls through the familiar MS Teams application both on their Windows or Mac workstation as well as their MS Teams compatible smartphone. Click here for more information.
The remaining ~1,500 lines, including Call Centre, fax, and other use cases that are not well suited to MS Teams Voice will be supported through a new vendor agreement with a separate VoIP provider. An RFP is currently underway to select that vendor.
Tri-campus WiFi RFP & technology refresh – ONGOING
An RFP was completed in early 2021 to select a new wireless infrastructure vendor to replace the legacy campus WiFi solution, which was selected over 10 years ago. This multi-year project will see the legacy infrastructure replaced and provide a faster, more reliable WiFi service across all three University campuses. Back-end controllers have been acquired and installed. Work continues to replaced the nearly 13,000 wireless access points in over 250 buildings across three campuses. As of September 2024, approximately 6,600 Aruba access points have been deployed. Click here for more information.
Research data centre – COMPLETE!
The renovation of the old data centre space in the McLennan Physics building is complete as of July 2024. The purpose of the new research data centre is to provide a professionally managed and physically secure co-location space for research computing equipment that is currently distributed across many different University buildings, often in facilities that lack expansion capacity, adequate physical security and/or power and cooling. This project was a collaboration between ITS and the Faculty of Arts & Science’s IITS team. Click here for more information.
Other projects and services
In addition to the above major projects and initiatives, the Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions group works tirelessly to provide fast, reliable and cost effective network and server hosting infrastructure and services. This work is an ongoing process of continuous improvement, which often goes unnoticed by the community because our primary objective is to make these improvements with little to no interruption in service.
You can find information on the full suite of services that EIS provides on the EIS website.