Schedule: 2022

Dr. T. John McCune, Fredonia

Bringing SUNY Technology Professionals Together. The Computing Officer’s Association (COA) is comprised of technology professionals within the State University of New York. The representative areas include those who implement, support, and manage the technology systems on the 64 campuses as well as administrative and support organizations throughout SUNY.

COA’s purpose is to promote professional development and collaboration of all members. COA does this by facilitating the sharing of information between its members. COA also coordinates statewide as well as regional conferences and forums that provide information and training to the membership.

All SUNY attendees are welcome to this meeting.

Mr. Peter Grizzaffi, Farmingdale State College

Recurring CIO General Session Open only to CIO’s and their designees.

Mr. Brett Southard, Farmingdale State College

TOA – Communication and Collaboration Services, Wiring and Infrastructure, Networking, Cable TV, Emergency Notifications, Cell Services

Come join us for our Spring Business Meeting.

Interested? Want to know more about SUNY TOA? Join Us!

Kelly Larrivey, SUNY Onondaga Community College
EdTOA Vice-Chair Chris Taverna, SUNY Fredonia

Annual EdTOA General Business Meeting. Old Business, New Business, position voting, etc…

Closed to Non-EdTOA members

Mr. Shady Azzam-Gomez, Suffolk CCC

SUNY CCIO Community College Sector meeting

Mr. Steven Maniscalco, SUNY Oneonta

CCIO Comprehensive and Tech Sector Meeting

Mr. Scot Beekman, SUNY Broome

Opening Remarks and Welcome

Mr. Sean Moriarty, SUNY Oswego

The SUNY Tech Strategy Forum 2022 was held on May 31 in a hyflex fashion at SUNY Oswego. The forum is designed to be an interactive day designed to discuss the future of technology within SUNY. This program is directed toward focussing the CCIO group on understanding the direction SUNY is moving and further collaboration among institutions. We are looking for areas where we can focus on working together to achieve overall success.

This year focused on CCIO priorities as we come out of the pandemic. Facing new realities around staffing, security, and risk, the group is looking for ways to collaborate and achieve more together.

A distinguished panel of CIOs will discuss outcomes and directions forward from the day’s deliberations.

Mr. Kevin Stillman, System Administration

Update on the Unified Communications Initiative. The UC Initiative is in support of SUNY’s Digital Transformation, the project seeks to create common System-wide communication capabilities (voice services, video/audio conferencing and the underlying networks) utilizing a common communication networks. Today each SUNY campus has independent telephony, network, conferencing and other communications solutions with varied providers. Through Unified Communications SUNY campus can begin to move toward using a common set of communications solutions (telephony, conferencing and network) that can be centrally supported.

Dr. Lisa Stephens, University at Buffalo
Mr. Brad Snyder, SUNY Cortland
Dr Rebecca Frazee, San Diego State University

Campus faculty and staff are frequently called upon to provide context and advice when classroom facilities are designed or renovated. Several years ago, SUNY launched FLEXspace: the Flexible Learning Environments eXchange which has evolved into a respected, well-adopted community of practice and open educational resource/repository. Recently, EDUCAUSE made an investment in this community-driven portal to integrate the Learning Space Rating System (LSRS), a quantitative measure of active learning potential within learning spaces, including metrics for inclusion.

The FLEXspace Integrated Planning Pathway (FLIPP) helps senior leadership make investment decisions by engaging faculty, AV/IT technologists, librarians, instructional designers and facilities planners in collective recommendations when tasked with advising/planning new facilities.

This presentation describes the FLIPP pathway which has proven successful at multiple colleges, universities and K-12 environments. The goal is to empower advisory groups with diverse perspectives and expertise to follow a step-by-step process that creates internal group alignment prior to meeting with external contractors and consultants. This alignment results from adopting and prioritizing core pedagogical values within budgetary constraints, including definition of acceptable alternatives when preferred solutions are potentially limited by resource or environmental constraints. Participants will leave with knowledge of FLIPP and how to navigate these freely available tools (FLEXspace and LSRS), to adopt and guide these efforts on campus.

Mr. Paul Hebert – External ISO, ITEC
Rio DiGennaro – Network Analyst, SUNYNet Technology Services

A review of Zero Trust Access (ZTA) approaches in SUNY

• Introduction to ZTA
• What security controls ZTA addresses for campuses
• How ZTA works and what is different from current security access methods
• How ZTA works with different authentication methods like SUNY Federation and Azure AD
• Comparison of ZTA approaches from different ZTA vendors

Mr. Bill Grau, SICAS Center

Update on SICAS projects and all things SICAS.

Mr. Edward Brunet, Jr, Stony Brook University
Ms. Kimberly Bell, Stony Brook University

The team and I have discovered a two fold application for the Zoom Room program. When faculty or students do not feel safe in public among people during the pandemic, this tool can be deployed by Universities’ IT departments easily as a COVID response for teaching classes outside the walls of the classroom. This tool allows faculty to facilitate online instruction to large groups more effectively using multiple screens in a large format. This eliminates the distraction of faculty juggling online instruction from their homes on a small laptop and increases interaction with students like they would have had in person with their class. The second application is a boardroom style application that we have stumbled upon and works well for larger style meetings. Overall, Zoom Room is a fantastic tool for large meetings to organize discussions both in a virtual classroom or boardroom vs using a personal zoom account.

In this presentation we will talk about the use of the Zoom Room as an inexpensive way to bring life back into the classroom as a remote/hybrid solution.

• What it is like to present in a Zoom Room Classroom
  • Use case example: first-year seminar session
  • Broader pedagogical implications
  • Break out rooms & polling experience
• Accessibility for people with disabilities
• Cost effective for smaller schools
• Technical challenges/requirements
  • Audio requirements / split audio
  • Explain the 3 screen setup
  • “Meet Now” Zoom Room host vs “Schedule” Zoom Room co-host
  • Up-cycled equipment
  • Integration of Google resource calendar

Richard Potts, State University Construction Fund

This presentation will provide a general State University Construction Fund update and will also discuss new code requirements for elevator communication systems, mass notification systems and emergency responder radio communication systems.

Denise Burbey, Corning Community College
Joe Massa, Fashion Institute of Technology
Mrs. Stephanie Thomas, SUNY Empire State College

Get some great ideas on how your campus can leverage Adobe Acrobat Sign to make everyone’s work easier. Hear from your colleagues on how they use Sign to:

• create a simple and flexible signing experience
• mistake proof forms and processes
• shrink the time it takes to get documents signed and filed
• save money and trees by reducing paper
• eliminate the frustration of tracking documents and reminding people to sign them

Mr. Mike Notarius, SUNY Information Technology Exchange Center (ITEC)

In this session we will present what ITEC has been doing, is doing, and will be doing to be best positioned to assist your campus in their IT journey. We will also be sharing thoughts on how we can “Do IT Better Together” while sharing some of ITEC’s innermost secrets…

Lesley Bidwell, SUNY Oneonta
Mrs. Odette Fung, University At Albany

Whatever happened to that SUNY-wide RFP for TV service? Several TOA members are involved and will provide a status update. We’ll follow that with a roundtable discussion of how campuses are handling TV service while we wait for the RFP process to conclude.

Ms. Krystal Perlman, SUNY Brockport
Mr. Doug Kahn, SUNY Suffolk
Dr. T. John McCune, SUNY Fredonia
Mrs. Deborah McClenon, SUNY Oneonta
Mr. Ryan Swan, SUNY Oneonta

Interested in seeing what other schools are using for their ITSM tools and how? Come to COA’s ITSM show and tell to discuss some of the pros and cons of the different tools along with how they have been implemented by each campus! We plan to cover tools including ServiceNow, TeamDynamix, Jira, and others.

Ms. Kim Scalzo, System Administration
Brian Digman, System Administration

Attend this session for an update on SUNY initiatives, organizational changes, other general updates from the SUNY Office of the Provost and Office of Information Technology.

Mr. Peter Grizzaffi, Farmingdale State College
Mr. Rich Richard, Farmingdale State College
Mr. John Durkin, Farmingdale State College

As the nation’s cyber defense agency, CISA stands ready to help Colleges & Universities prepare for, respond to and mitigate the impact of cyberattacks.

Join us to understand how a maintaining a strong partnership with CISA can help your school stay vigilant and respond to current and future cybersecurity threats.

• Latest Intelligence & Guidance
• Recommendations for Corporate Leaders & IT
• Steps that you should be taking to keep your school safe and secure
• Tools, Templates and Resources that CISA has available for free to help you enhance your School’s Cybersecurity Program.

Ms. Kim Scalzo, SUNY System Administration

Attend this session for an update on SUNY’s online learning activities. This session will include an update on activities of the past year as well as plans for the coming year, including the status of the SUNY Online Degrees at Scale initiative. We will also address how SUNY Online services are evolving in support of the SUNY Digital Learning Environment, and how the landscape of online learning has changed within and outside of SUNY after two years of the COVID pandemic. Come with your questions about how SUNY Online can support your campus online learning initiatives!

Andrew Tucci, Binghamton University
Jared Bosket, Binghamton University

In Winter of 2021 / 2022, Binghamton University underwent a campus-wide network migration process to improve the AV control system environment. Join us for a discussion on how that project came to be, Goals, lesson’s learned, etc…

Ms. Kris Lynch, SUNY Center for Professional Development
Ms. Christa Glassman, SUNY ITEC

The pandemic brought higher education a number of challenges along with a number of opportunities and successes. The Lessons Learned or “Blameless Retrospectives” part of the project management process is very valuable in preparing for future projects and ensuring a higher level of success. This session will use this process to look in the rearview mirror and talk through what our campuses might do the same and/or differently if we were to experience an event of this magnitude again. Our panelists and moderator will provide an example of how to accomplish this task so that campuses can use the process in their own projects/programs and benefit from it.

Mr. Joseph Hoot, ITEC

Come hear the latest updates related to ITEC journey into a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC). What technologies / solutions are we looking at and why? If we build it will they come? Come to this session to hear the latest in our SDDC journey but also understand how we got to where we are, where we are going and why.

Mr. David Ecker, iCREATE
Andrew Kirsch, Stony Brook University

We have entered a new normal with how work is performed each day. Some campuses allow remote work while others don’t, with is disappointing. Stony Brook has some colleagues working at home while others are in the office. We have to adjust to this new world to keep people connected. We haven’t gotten it right yet but are trying to figure out a solution. We have instituted Kahoot sessions, open time at lunch to have a discussion, and happy hour via Zoom/Teams.

Besides our efforts to keep people connected using virtual social events, we’re finding that adjustments need to be made in how work is done. What are some of the challenges associated with conducting virtual meetings? How can we achieve the benefits of “management by walking around” when there’s no office (or campus)?

We want to lead a discussion on how others have adapted. What has worked? What hasn’t? Is there an idea of how we can work across campuses to develop a way of keeping everyone connected?

Mr. James Onley, Brockport ITS

There I was a newly hired IT Security Analyst in a meeting with the campus IT Director and the campus CIO. We had received some guidance from our insurance company that we needed to have some items addressed related to our cyber risk in order to get a good rate on our insurance. One of those items was an IT Security Program. Inside I was very happy because I know the campus needs that and this requirement from the insurance company was going to be more motivating than the SUNY requirement and all the regulatory requirements which had already existed for some time. After all there is really not much consequence to not following the SUNY or regulatory requirements. A campus is less secure as a result, but if they don’t get targeted and never have a significant incident then it’s a moot point.

Unfortunately it’s becoming less moot. The risk of campus impact from cyber security incidents is rising and the need for campus IT security programs is only becoming critical. Having large gaps between institutional process and departments that are not addressed or not having enough political capital to address major security vulnerabilities are very real symptoms of operating without a campus wide program.

In this presentation I certainly don’t present myself as an expert. But I would like to contribute information and thought processes behind some of the progress we have made at SUNY Brockport for consideration and to help add more fuel to future conversations.

Ms. Eileen Wirley, Monroe Community College

Join our panel discussion to hear about how teams from Monroe, Geneseo, Plattsburgh and Oneonta are tackling our Portal needs. We will talk about our objectives, successes, challenges and lessons learned from defining, deploying and maintaining our portals.

Mr. Kevin Stillman, System Administration

Discussion about adoption of Public Cloud (Amazon Web Services, Azure and Google Compute Platform) throughout SUNY and an update on University-wide strategy discussions with there providers.

Mr. Mark English, SUNY Oneonta

Coffee Hour: A Round Table EdTOA Discussion (CHARTED) – Main Topic: Birds of a Feather Flock Together to discuss current technology trends in educational technology. All related topics are on the table for discussion.

CHARTED is typically held as an online meeting on the 2nd Thursday of every month. Come to see how the CHARTED events are run. Please remember to bring your coffee, or whatever other beverage you would prefer to have.

Mr. William Kramp, ITEC
Mr. Scott May – Associate Director of Computing Services, SUNY Delhi

Privileged Access Management (PAM) has become a very important topic this year the with cyber insurance renewals. Delhi and ITEC have adopted the use of 1Password as a Password Manager to help improve the security of their passwords. Scott May from Delhi and Bill Kramp from ITEC, will describe how they are using 1Password to help their organizations. This session will not focus 100% on 1Password, but will explain how password managers (e.g., 1Password) could be used to meet many of the requirements for Privileged Access Management (PAM) without purchasing a commercial PAM tool.

Mr. Harry Cargile, System Administration

The SUNY DLE Implementation of D2L’s Brightspace is underway with Cohort 1 campuses delivering pilot courses this summer and Cohort 2 campuses engaged in planning for pilot courses to be delivered this fall. During this session, the SUNY DLE Technical Team will provide an update on the strategy, benefits, and status for each aspect of the technical implementation, including what the single-instance, multi-tenant environment looks like, the SUNY Global ID, authentication, SIS integration, and integration of tools. Please join us to hear how the project is going and come with questions for the team.

Cara Thompson, SUNY Oswego

This presentation will highlight the use of Virtual Reality as a creation tool. In the spring semester of 2022, 12 students from Graphic Design, Interaction Design and Human Computer Interaction participated in a semester long exploration of virtual reality as a creation tool using the Oculus Quest 2 and Gravity Sketch. We created environments, printable 3d objects and videos to document this journey. The class took place mostly within collaboration spaces within VR. Additionally, the class was part of the Gravity Sketch student ambassador program.

John Kaftan, ESF
Aaron Rounds, ESF

Show and tell session on how we configured DUO for our Azure environment and how we authenticate Fortigate VPN against Azure to create a MFA VPN.

Customized VPN web portals offer ease of use and for increased security. VPN client allows network access when needed.

Mrs. Tanasee Conner, The College at Brockport
Mr. Stephen Cook, The College at Brockport

SUNY Brockport has completed the design phase with Toshiba as part of the SUNY print management initiative. We will discuss what steps Brockport did to prepare for this journey along with how we worked with Toshiba to create a new design that reduced the number of campus printers from over 1,000 to less than 200 devices.

Mr. William Kramp, ITEC
Mr. Paul Hebert, ITEC

This session will provide an update to ITEC’s Security Program efforts and explain ITEC’s new Security Service. Bill Kramp will provide information about ITEC’s security efforts that support the hosted and managed services while Paul Hebert will explain the new security services being offered to campuses.

Eric Grignon, SUNY Empire State College
Jeff Kurto, SUNY Empire State College
Tom Hippchen, SUNY System Administration
Stephen Cook, SUNY Brockport

This session is a roundtable session which brings the pilot campuses of Brockport and Empire State along with System Administration as panelists to share their experiences through the process to date as well as attempt to answer questions campuses have about the initiative.

Mrs. Deborah McClenon, SUNY Oneonta
Ms. Krystal Perlman, SUNY Brockport
Mr. Shawn Plummer, SUNY Geneseo

In our M365 Collaboration Group discussions this year, a theme amongst participants about wanting to learn more about how SharePoint and Teams are being used on our different campuses. This open forum provide a time/place for us to share what we’re doing, what we’d like to do, and maybe some nifty resources we use. Questions and conversation are a must for this open forum.

Ms. Kris Lynch, SUNY Center for Professional Development
Dr. T. John McCune, SUNY Fredonia
Mr. Paul Chauvet, SUNY New Paltz

Come join us for a fun evening of virtual games! Using the Zoom platform, your hosts, T. John McCune (SUNY Fredonia), Paul Chauvet (SUNY New Paltz), and Kris Lynch (SUNY CPD) will be hosting multiple Jackbox games (https://www.jackboxgames.com/) including trivia games, Pictionary style games, and more. Participants will need a smartphone/tablet or a computer with a separate monitor to participate. We will also host a room for socializing only with no games happening in that room.

This year we are adding in more fun with a little mixology! The Game Night team will be providing some recipes for some fun cocktails and mocktails that we have crowdsourced from our STC participants so that we can enjoy a nice libation with our games and conversation. Recipes will be sent out before the conference so that participants can gather any needed ingredients to make the drink of their choice.

Mrs. Sue Chichester, SUNY Geneseo
TJ Meyers, SUNY Plattsburgh
Mary Hand, SUNY Adirondack
Steve Maniscalco, SUNY Oneonta

Join this panel discussion with participants from Geneseo, Adirondack, Oneonta, and Plattsburgh to discuss approaches to building, testing, and maintaining an effective disaster recovery plan.

Mr. Kevin Stillman, System Administration
Ken Runyon, System Administration

Update on the various initiatives and services around Cybersecurity across SUNY.

Mrs. Deborah McClenon, SUNY Oneonta
Ms. Krystal Perlman, SUNY Brockport
Mr. Shawn Plummer, SUNY Geneseo

M365 Collaboration Group Birds-of-a-Feather – an open session to talk about all things M365.

Matt Tamburello, ITEC

ITEC will provide the latest updates on our Banner hosting services. We will discuss current initiatives as well as upcoming enhancements to the environment. We will also share the benefits of hosting Banner at ITEC from an availability, services, support, and security point of view. In this session you will understand it is not what we do, but who we are and how we do it that provides you the quality Banner service you receive from ITEC.

Christopher Weber, Buffalo State College

An overview of holistic, interpersonal, and technical best practices for providing support with classroom technology. Session will cover suggestions for how to approach problems, being resourceful, on-site troubleshooting, post-incident forensics, remote troubleshooting, and utilizing device management dashboards. This session is targeted towards support technicians and their supervisors. Its intent is to help technologists find ways to work more efficiently and collaboratively while maintaining an optimal mindset toward the stresses that may come.

Mr. Robert Mackay, Stony Brook / Doit
Mrs. Gail Levy, Stony Brook / Doit
Mr. Paul Masem, Stony Brook / Doit

Stony Brook currently has a on premise VoIP system and has made the decision to move VoIP into the cloud with Cisco Webex Calling. This will be a short talk on how and why we came to this decision. Hopefully this will lead to a open discussion on moving telephony services into the cloud.

Mr. William Kramp, ITEC

This session will explain the Security Incident Response (SIR) process developed by Bill Kramp (ITEC ISO) and Ted Phelps (former SUNY CISO) since 2020. This SIR process has been used several times recently with the log4j, WSO2 and other security incidents involving notifications from SecureWorks and CrowdStrike. I will try and explain and provide what details I can about the process and how it was used with the recent events. We also use they incidents to help update or create Security Response Playbooks to improve our efficiencies in responding to incidents.

Ms. Kris Lynch, SUNY Center for Professional Development
Lisa Raposo, SUNY Center for Professional Development

The SUNY CPD invites you to join them to learn more about the newest iteration (10 years!) of the SUNY Learning Commons. Earlier this year, our system-wide collaboration space, SUNY Workplace, was replaced by the Communities (formerly Yammer) app nestled inside Microsoft Teams. While the space is different, many features are the same and our commitment to creating a SUNY-wide knowledge base while supporting the growth of Communities of Practice across is only enhanced by leveraging the Microsoft stack. This session will provide an overview of the Communities App, as well as the Teams environment.

Mr. Don Erwin, ITEC
Mr. Fion MacCrea, ITEC

ITEC started down our IT Service Management (ITSM) journey many years ago adopting ITIL and sharing our travels through ITSM with SUNY. We have recently been revisiting our Service Catalog and IT services to be better aligned with the demands from the SUNY community. In this session, ITEC will share the latest evolution of our IT Service Catalog describing the approach and the makeup. We will also discuss and provide examples of the IT Services we are providing for campuses.

Mrs. Deborah McClenon, SUNY Oneonta
Ms. Krystal Perlman, SUNY Brockport
Mr. Shawn Plummer, SUNY Geneseo

This panel will discuss using Azure Authentication for SSO – experiences and challenges will be shared, and questions and conversation promoted.