Voice and Data Services

Conference Calls with UCI Phones

May 22, 2009 by Brian Buckler

Conference calls make a cost-effective alternative to traveling to meetings. UCI’s phone system supports conference calls for 3 to 8 people, including up to 6 off-campus participants. For larger groups, commercial options such as QWEST are available.

For faculty and staff with a Cisco IP phone, even more flexibility is available with “meet me” conference calling. This kind of conference call can support up to 16 users, any number of which can be off campus. Once one or more parties have joined the call, the originator can leave the conference without disruption. However, since this requires a special-purpose extension to be reserved for the conference, please call Telephone Customer Service (x4-5123) at least a day in advance.

Phone conferences can be enhanced with tools that allow on-line sharing of documents and desktops. A systemwide agreement has recently been concluded with ReadyTalk, and other products are on the way.

PSearch: NACS and ICS Collaborate

May 22, 2009 by Brian Roode

Faculty and staff now have a powerful new tool for finding contacts through UCI’s online phone directory. PSearch melds the directory data NACS maintains with state-of-the-art database research from the lab of ICS Professor Chen Li.

PSearch allows users to enter whatever information they may happen to have (first name, last name, department, phone number, etc.) and PSearch will offer any entries in the campus phone directory which match. PSearch is error tolerant (you can find people with only an approximation of the spelling of a name) and real time (results are displayed and refined as you enter information.)

PSearch represents a collaboration between NACS and ICS. Professor Li’s team offered the intelligent database search technology, and NACS offered the data and our user-interface experience. Key contributors on Professor Li’s team include PhD student Rares Vernica at UCI and Guoliang Li, a visiting researcher from Tsinghua University, China.

PSearch is only one potential use of Dr. Li’s “type-ahead search” technology featured on his TASTIER project web page. Future uses may involve other campus-wide or even UC-wide data sets. This new technology makes it possible to simultaneously support full-text (google), quick-link, and directory searches in a single query as exhibited by the search box on the ICS home page.

Spam Tagging – Your Friend in a World of Spam

April 24, 2009 by Brian Roode

NACS employs many techniques to maximize the quality of the campus email system, and in particular to limit the amount of junk email (spam) faculty and staff receive. Known spam senders are automatically blocked, for example, and campus mail gateways require adherence to email standards (which spammers often ignore) before email is accepted for delivery.

Beyond that, email delivery is a balancing act between reliability and convenience on the one side, and security on the other. It is annoying to receive junk email, but it is unacceptable to block a message which was wanted.

One feature of the campus email service that helps achieve this balance is the mail-scanning service which rates every incoming message for the likelihood that it is junk mail. This assessment is recorded in special “header” lines in the delivered email of the form “X-UCIRVINE”.

Sometimes a message comes from a dubious source. Those messages get a header line “X-UCIRVINE-MailScanner-From:” Other times the content of the message matches patterns associated with spam. These messages will get a line “X-UCIRVINE-SpamScore:” with a number of copies of the letter ‘s’ proportional to the number of suspicious elements in the messages.

These lines are not normally displayed by email readers, but users can configure the programs to look for these lines and file away such messages in a spam folder for later assessment at their convenience. For users of NACS’s Enterprise Services email, this spam filter is easily activated with “My Email Options.”

Only messages coming to UCI from off campus are subject to this analysis. Intracampus email is delivered directly.

NACS tunes the rules that characterize email regularly, incorporating each new trick developed by spam senders into the mail scanner.

Faculty and staff working from home (sending email from off campus) should consider using Webmail, the VPN, or configuring their email software to use the authenticated campus mail gateway (smtp.uci.edu) to avoid the possibility that your email might be scanned, flagged, and isolated.

DMRnet Keeps You Up

April 24, 2009 by Allen Schiano

NACS and AdCom have jointly developed a network infrastructure for units with mission-critical computing services. “DMRnet” (short for “Dual Modular Redundant Network”) allows you to create twin servers and to locate them separately in the NACS and AdCom Data Centers.

With this arrangement, an interruption in service (power, network, etc.) at one physical location can automatically transfer services (fail over) to the server in the other location. Users of your critical services will see no interruption.

DMRnet was designed and developed in response to the need to have UCI’s main web site, www.uci.edu, continuously available. The upcoming Student Portal will be the latest client of the DMRnet system.

NACS staff are available to consult with interested departments on the options, cost, and fitness of DMRnet for your particular need. DMRnet is intended only for the most critical campus services.

Secure Instant Messaging

March 26, 2009 by Andrew Laurence

NACS has introduced a new component of our communication and collaboration services: Instant Messaging (IM).

This service allows real-time communication between two or more people. You can type brief messages back and forth, ask and answer quick questions, share links, and transfer files. In addition to person-to-person communications, it can be used to host a group “chat room”, to assist help desk or reception activities, or for contact between faculty and students.

As this service is designed for and operated at UC Irvine, it has many advantages over commercial IM services:

UCInetID Identification — Your instant messaging ID is the same as your campus login: UCInetID@uci.edu. With the UCInetID system you always know with whom you’re speaking; no need to guess or verify whether an instant messaging handle actually belongs to your coworker.
Spam-Free — NACS Instant Messaging is not accessible by commercial instant messaging systems. In addition, you must authorize senders before they may send messages to you.
Security — All transmissions are encrypted using SSL/TLS.

NACS offers documentation for selected instant messaging clients for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

For additional information and connection instructions, please see http://www.nacs.uci.edu/computing/im/

Conference Calls with UCI Phones

PSearch: NACS and ICS Collaborate

Spam Tagging – Your Friend in a World of Spam

DMRnet Keeps You Up

Secure Instant Messaging

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