Greetings. It is my honor to share the University of Maine System 2022 State of IT Report with the community. Last year’s report focused away from the University’s pandemic response and presented key initiatives that have the potential to significantly improve services to the community now and into the future. We will continue with this same focus for this year’s report. In particular, we would like to highlight the following initiatives:
- Repaving MaineStreet: The Repaving MaineStreet initiative was launched in earnest in 2022. This project is intended to re-engineer our current MaineStreet environment serving all community members with a particular focus on improving student access to academic programming opportunities across the University of Maine System while enhancing usability and self-service functionality. $16.5M has been invested to support this initiative to cover the initial licensing costs, staff augmentation, and consultation services to help drive key outcomes, including the transition of our core HR and Finance functions to cloud-enabled tools. Throughout the project, a focus on establishing greater data coding consistency to help drive process efficiency and enable the University to fully leverage the core capabilities of the future state enterprise systems.
- Managed Print Services: In 2022, an RFP was conducted to identify a Managed Print Services partner to help the University of Maine System to update and optimize our aged fleet of multi-function (print/copy) devices (MFD). The UMS awarded the managed print services contract to Xerox, which has completed the system-wide assessment of the current MFD fleet, providing campus-specific recommendations on the number and placement of devices to optimize the fleet. We are targeting to initiate rollout of new Xerox equipment beginning in January 2023, with full-fleet replacement completed by April 2023. With this new fleet, the UMS community will have expanded access to high-throughput color-capable devices with collating, stapling and duplexing functionality. In addition, the future state environment will support on-demand print release from any device located anywhere across the UMS.
- Introduced last year, the rollout of Multifactor Authentication (MFA) has continued to help address the ever-growing landscape of cybersecurity risks. MFA promotes secure, authenticated access to core enterprise data systems using a secondary login token issued via smartphone or a standalone token generator. The success of the initial pilot of MFA has enabled UMS:IT to accelerate the rollout to an expanded audience of users across the University.
As was noted in last year’s report, the success experienced during the initial stages of the initiatives listed above, alongside the other projects described in this report, has been the result of the key partnerships and strong collaborations established between the UMS:IT team and our University colleagues across the system. We look forward to continuing these relationships and collaborations as we advance these critical initiatives in 2023 and work together to pave the way for a new technological environment designed to support the success of our constituents.
With appreciation of your support and engagement –
David Demers