Enterprise Services

UCInetID Password Management

December 1, 2011 by Lyle Wiedeman

Your UCInetID is your key to online services at the University of California, Irvine. Many online services, including SNAP, WebFiles, Webmail and OIT Mailbox Services, EEE, WebReg, and numerous others, require you to use your UCInetID and password in order to log in.

You should never share your password with anyone, or write it down anyplace it might be observed. So, what can you do in the event you forget your password?

OIT provides a self-help system for resetting a forgotten password and choosing a new password. (You may not choose a previously used password.)

To reset your password, go to the Activate web site and select “Reset my Forgotten Password” at the bottom. The reset page will begin by asking for your UCInetID, your birthdate, and the last four digits of your Social Security number.

This will then take you to a page where you will answer the question you selected at the time you last activated your UCInetID. Then choose a new password. If you are unable to supply the authentication information, OIT can reset your password. Call the Help Desk from a campus phone or visit our walk-in Help Desk in Aldrich 115 with photo ID.

Staff and faculty of the UCI Medical School need to work with the HAIS help desk (x43434 on campus or 714-456-3333 at the Medical Center) to change a UCInetID password.

More information on UCInetIDs and identity management can be found on the UCInetID FAQ.

License Microsoft Sofware with MCCA

December 1, 2011 by Bob Hudack

Do you need to update Microsoft Office or Windows? Mid-year UC-MCCA enrollments are due December 9th.

Popular Microsoft software is available at reduced cost to UCI through an agreement between UC and Microsoft, the “Microsoft Consolidated Campus Agreement” or MCCA. More information on MCCA can be found in a previous IT News article.

MCCA runs on a fiscal year cycle, with orders for the next July 1 fiscal year being placed in early May. But we now have a special pro-rated mid-year enrollment opportunity for licenses that will be newly deployed on January 1st. MCCA enrollments are usually coordinated at a department or unit level, so consult with your local IT support or purchasing office to see if your unit is participating in MCCA.

This special mid-year enrollment opportunity ends on December 9th. If your unit is not yet participating, contact Bob Hudack at x46759 or rjhudack@uci.edu for help in determining if this program is appropriate for your unit.

Email Disk Management Tips

July 28, 2011 by Lyle Wiedeman

Many faculty and staff, especially those filling multiple roles, find their increasing use of email and email attachments makes it difficult to do University business and remain within their disk quota limits.

While the ideas below won’t apply to all people or all situations, being aware of these strategies should prove useful to many.

Empty your trash

Depending on the program you use to access your email, deleting messages may not actually get rid of them – they may accumulate in your Trash folder and take up space you could use more productively. If you have messages in your Trash folder, your email program will offer an option to empty it. Example: in Thunderbird, select “Empty Trash” from the File menu.

Check your drafts and sent-mail folders

There are many circumstances in which partially-written messages are saved to a “drafts” folder. You should check that folder periodically and delete messages that you no longer need.

Email programs save copies of every message you send. While many of these messages constitute an important record, it may prove worthwhile to discard messages beyond a certain age or with little long-term value.

Watch your spam

UCI gets a large volume of unwelcome commercial and malicious email and central UCI systems test and repel millions of messages a day. As a complement to this filter, each account has settings for spam (see My Email Options) which defines a threshold for considering a particular message to be spam, and may quarantine it for inspection and discard. If you have a spam folder, examine it and empty it regularly.

Ask for more space

If you have already checked that you haven’t lost space to spam and deleted mail, your University role may simply require more space than the default quota provides. Contact the OIT Help Desk (oit@uci.edu, x42222) to review your particular disk usage and quota options.

Partition your usage

If you have multiple University roles, consider directing email for each role to a separate account. Quotas are applied to accounts, not people, and this may provide all the additional space you need, or at least protect one account with modest use from the email associated with another. Group UCInetIDs are available for a small monthly fee which can be used (for example) as mailboxes for deans, directors, and chairs.

Use local storage

Most email programs offer the option of creating “local” folders – i.e., the ability to store email messages on the machine you are sitting at. The advantage of this is vastly increased storage, but it has the downside that email stored in local folders can not be accessed from other computers.

The most common phenomenon that creates large mail storage is email attachments. Messages, even those with HTML and a few images, take up little space. Large documents, high-resolution images, sound files and videos consume your mail storage when they’re associated with your email as attachments. Consider storing your attachment as a local file and deleting the email that carried it. If you want access to these documents from multiple computers, consider storing them on OIT’s Webfiles service.

OIT is ready to assist you in assessing your usage patterns and needs, and matching them to available options.

Blogging comes to UCI

March 30, 2011 by Sylvia Bass

OIT offers a campus-wide blogging service to all faculty, staff and graduate students called “Blogs@UCI“.

Blogs, short for “Web logs”, are a popular method for communicating with the Internet community. Often taking the form of serial essays, blogs attract like-minded people to read and discuss topics of common interest.

OIT’s blog service offers a quick and convenient local alternative especially suited for connection to the UCI community and oriented toward University business.

Built on the WordPress blog technology, the same technology used to publish IT News, Blogs@UCI uses UCInetIDs for authentication, and offers copious assistance in the FAQ and help files.

Many UCI blogs have already been created. Here are a few examples of what others are publishing using Blogs@UCI:

Between the Lines – The Official Blog for the Humanities Department
CannonFodder – Assistant Dean Charles Cannon’s perspective on the UC Irvine School of Law
iMedEd Initiative – Use of iPads and Medical Apps by the UCI School of Medicine
Cosmology for the People – James Bullock’s Cosmology and The Universe Blog
Main Street UCI – Stories and photos about experiences on Main Street UCI a.k.a Ring Mall

Currently, only faculty, staff and graduate students can create blogs. Undergraduate students interested in a blog can work with a faculty or other University sponsor.

POP or IMAP – Which Protocol to Use?

January 5, 2011 by Lyle Wiedeman

Using email generally requires three components: a “mailbox” (a computer or “server” to which mail is delivered, and where mail is stored until acted upon), a mail reader (the method you use to access, read, and manage email, which might be a program such as Outlook or Thunderbird, or might be integrated into your Web browser – Webmail), and a method of moving information (messages and commands) between the two.

Fifteen years ago, the most popular of these methods was the Post Office Protocol (POP). POP worked well for the habits of email readers then, and may potentially still offer benefits now. Today, many more people use the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP). IMAP is better suited to the volume of email exchanged today and the connectivity and mobility of today’s readers. Your choice between POP and IMAP will probably be determined by the difference in how each protocol approaches message storage.

POP is designed to work like a postal mail box: mail is dropped off, but it is expected that you will empty the mailbox and be responsible for the mail thereafter. The definitive copy of each email message is on the computer you use to read mail. This is ideal if you are always using the same computer, and especially if you are not always on line.

IMAP uses a different idea. The definitive copy of each message is kept on the server. This provides two advantages. First, no matter what computer you are using, or what kind of email reader, you are shown the same picture of your mailbox. This makes it very easy to move among computers, but requires each one to have Internet access to manage your mail. Second, central storage makes it possible for the central IT organization (OIT in this case) to maintain backups of everyone’s email.

But it also means that every email user is sharing the storage space of the mailbox system, and it is possible to fill up the amount of space allocated to your account. Webmail requires IMAP; it operates as if there is no local storage.

So, consider what your email habits and needs are. Most people will find that IMAP offers the most flexibility, fastest service, and least bookkeeping. If you’d like help analyzing your email needs, please call the OIT Help Desk.