It has been a while, but we have a few small updates that are in preparation for the next version of myUMBC. These are mostly procedural/administrative changes to get things more inline with some larger changes in the pipeline.

• Community Spotlights limited to Institutional and Student Org groups - Spotlights are a useful and popular way to promote things to the campus, but they're almost too popular. Because each spotlight is approved by multiple people, a huge amount of time is spent validating that only the appropriate groups are submitting them. We've limited the ability to post Community Spotlights to only student orgs and institutional groups to make it easier to identify these groups.
• If you don't have a group for your department or student org, you should get one. It's quick and easy. Start a Group
• Make sure everyone who needs to post spotlights is an admin of the group.
• All groups are still free to post News, Events, Discussions, and Media.
• Image Permission - when posting an image to myUMBC, it is important to only use ones that you have permission to repost. You are now asked to confirm this permission before you can upload images.
• Rich Content in Notifications - Your email notifications from myUMBC now include the full post and richer formatting. No more having to log in to myUMBC just to read something.
• Notifications OFF by default on new posts - myUMBC was generating a LOT of email to people, which sorta goes against one of our core goals to minimize the number of times you're interrupted throughout the day. Now, if you're posting something important that you want people to know about, put a check in the Send Notifications checkbox.
• Group Access changes - We've disabled the ability to change the access level of their groups to and from Private. This is to ensure that content and conversations made within groups retain intended audience.
• Category Deprecation - There is a little known feature in Groups called Categories. We would strongly encourage people not to use this feature because it may be removed in a future update. It is still enabled so that anyone using the tool has a chance to stop.

It is with mixed emotions I am writing to announce that Patrick Simon, Business Analyst/Developer in DoIT’s Business Systems Group, will be leaving UMBC to become a consultant with Accenture. His last day on campus will be Thursday, August 15^th. 

Patrick has been with UMBC since 1998, starting as a student employee and then hired full-time as a programmer to assist with the Student Information Legacy system and Y2k efforts. In 2003 Patrick joined the BSG technical team supporting the PeopleSoft Finance system. After a very successful three-year tour he took his new skills and moved over to the technical team focused on the implementation for the PeopleSoft Student Administration system.

Patrick has been instrumental in the success of many projects at UMBC. Some recent projects include an automated process for Admissions Posting Decision, which he co-presented at the most recent Regional PeopleSoft Users Group in June 2013, Online Transcript Request system from AVOW, and web-based front-end solutions for UMBC’s Request Tracker (RT) system.

Patrick is another DoIT staff member with a UMBC success story. While working full-time he completed his Bachelors in Information Systems, got married and now has four beautiful daughters, and somehow managed to achieve an MBA from University of Maryland University College in 2011.

I have truly enjoyed watching him grow into the professional he has become. Please join me in congratulating Patrick on his past and future successes.

Sincerely,

Joe Kirby

Asst. VP, Business Systems Group

Division of Information Technology