New reports for Sponsored Accounts (formerly known as Grants Reports), Funds 1253 and 1263 are now available in REX Finance.  The reports are in a user friendly format with features that include drillable expense detail such as voucher information and payroll bi-weekly data by employees.  We thank those of you who provided input on data and report layouts that would be most useful and are confident the reports will meet your needs.

The reports available are:

o   Department Summary 

o   Detail Report 

o   Actuals Only

o   Project Detail

o   By Award

o   By PI

A full description of reports is attached.

Effective March 12, 2018, access to REX Finance will be available to all campus faculty and staff.  In order to best understand report navigation, it is critical that users view the documents and the video tutorials located on TAP. Alternatively, you may register for an instructor led session of REX Finance Report training.

If you have any questions regarding REX Finance Reports, please contact Julia Golbey  (golbeyj1@umbc.edu).  

As part of our ongoing commitment to security, the Unix Infrastructure group will be conducting its quarterly system patching on Friday, March 16th and Saturday, March 17th.  While many of the systems will be patched without any service disruption, there are some systems which require the downtime of key services.  The schedule below outlines which key services will be offline and for how long.

Friday, 3/16/2018 between 5pm and 8pm (most systems will only be down for a short period during this time): 

• The web hosting environments (virthost and jabba) will be partially unavailable (pages will be available but any database calls will not work)
• Access to Cyrus and UMBC Webmail (accounts not migrated to UMBC Gmail)
• All mail will be queued up and delivered after the server is patched
• Expected to be unreachable from 5pm to 7pm
• All HFS (user) servers will be offline
• Certain software licenses will be unavailable (autodesk, cadence, idl, schrodinger, xilinx, mathematica)

Saturday, 3/17/2018 between 10am and Noon(most systems will only be down for a short period during this time):

• myUMBC lite page will be up resulting in reduced myUMBC functionality
• Wiki will be unavailable
• The sites (wordpress) web hosting environment will be unreachable

Please let us know if you have any concerns or questions.

Thanks!

Tim Champ

Manager of Unix Infrastructure

UMBC DoIT

On Thursday, March 15th starting at 2pm LDAP-Master and Webadmin will be taken down for system maintenance.  During this time account creations and password changes will be unavailable.  Account authentication and logins will not be affected during this downtime.  

The maintenance window will allow staff to apply needed security and application updates.  The outage window is expected to last two hours with services being restored by 4pm on Thursday, March 15th.

During the outage window account creations will be queued and then processed upon restoration of services.  If you have any questions or concerns, please contact our Technology Support Center at x53838.

Note that this report will only be accessible to users authorized to see reports in the Details folder.

DoIT is now providing NVivo, a qualitative research software package equivalent to SPSS, Stata, SAS, or R. This software is available to all faculty, staff, and graduate students. It allows the user to import, code, and arrange data for methodologically rigorous and scalable analyses. This acquisition aligns with efforts to support UMBC's strategic plan, including the objective to "vigorously promote a campus culture of multidisciplinary collaboration and multidisciplinary research, scholarship, and creative activity."

Professor Anne Brodsky of the Department of Psychology, who also serves as Interim Director, Maryland Institute for Policy Analysis and Research (MIPAR) and Special Assistant for Social Science Research with the CAHSS Dean's Office, has been conducting qualitative research since arriving at UMBC 20 years ago. She believes this procurement is "great news for UMBC researchers and students" and access to NVivo "will further promote the excellent qualitative and mixed methods scholarship being done across the Social Sciences, Humanities, Arts, and STEM fields at UMBC as we work to further our understanding into some of the most important and exciting questions of our time."

If you are considering qualitative or mixed-methods research, or you are currently gathering qualitative data, this might be just the tool you're looking for to systematize your analytic strategy.

NVivo can be downloaded at https://wiki.umbc.edu/display/faq/Software

Curricular Interdependency Matrix