2017 Fall CIT Extension (CITx)
CITx is a half-day extension event connected to the Continuous Improvement in Technology (CIT) conference held in the Fall and Spring semesters. The goal of CITx is to empower Illinois State's IT professionals by providing them the latest IT news from around campus, opportunities for social networking with their colleagues, and round-table discussions.
The Fall 2017 CITx event was held in the morning on Friday, November 17, 2017, in the State Farm Hall of Business. The next CITx event will be held on April 13, 2018.
IT News - Fall 2017
The IT News session featured several speakers, updating the ISU IT community on projects, new initiatives and changes that are relevant to all. The IT News session at Fall 2017 CITx featured opening remarks from Shari Zeck, Interim Dean of Milner Library.
Redbirds of a Feather - Fall 2017
Following IT News, attendees broke up into discussion groups on topics chosen by the IT community. Recaps of those sessions follow below.
PowerShell on Parade (SFHB 132)
Facilitated by Adam Listek
Recap: Listek facilitated a great discussion on the benefits that PowerShell has brought to Student Affairs IT for many different automation tasks. Because most, if not all, attendees at the session already had some hands-on experience with PowerShell previously, he presented examples and showed off source code for scripts that were already in production and walked through both the programming logic behind the script as well as explaining their real-world results alongside the goals they were able to accomplish using this platform.
PowerShell is a great tool for managing file retention and data backups, managing version repositories, automatic JSON data retrieval (currently used with the StarRez system at Student Affairs IT), and includes API hooks for various popular tools (ex. Microsoft Teams to post automated alerts). PowerShell is powerful, fast, and easy to develop with, and once learned is easily readable by a human. A somewhat recent development in the .NET world is the announcement that Microsoft is releasing PowerShell 6.0 on the PowerShell Core platform, which will allow PowerShell to run on MacOS and Linux in addition to Windows. When considering PowerShell to develop automated tools, be aware that it can be inefficient at times with large data sets and there are situations where using a tool like Ansible can make more sense.
If you would like to learn more about PowerShell at ISU or if you have questions of your own, a Powershell channel has been created in the ISU IT Staff group in Microsoft Teams.
IT Security (SFHB 148)
Facilitated by Kevin Crouse, Seth Pheasant, Matt Lindstrom, Tom Heintzman, and Dan Taube
Recap: A panel comprised of staff from the Information Security Office led a wide-ranging discussion on topics of interest in the IT Security space. Much of the discussion centered around the classic problem for IT staff in trying to help their users understand why they should want to be secure and how to do it, even when it comes at the cost of convenience. The traditionally open environment of a higher education institution does not make that job any easier. IT staff in the session shared stories of users offering their passwords to them in order to more quickly or conveniently resolve a problem, for example – blending security with openness is a real challenge for IT staff and IT security staff alike.
The group also discussed some current and new security initiatives at ISU, including PII scanning, PCI environment changes, and tagging of suspicious emails. The upcoming compliance requirements for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will govern data protections for European Union residents and for ISU’s students, faculty and staff while in a European Union nation, was also discussed. Those rules go in to effect in May 2018, and changes will be required at ISU to comply.
Growing Your IT Career (SFHB 149)
Facilitated by Dean Plumadore and Jason Mays
Recap: Career growth and advancement can mean different things to different people. This group discussion focused on talking about finding the things people are good at, feel good at doing, and becoming a part of your organization. The discussion group included a diverse range of people from different work experiences and at different points in their careers.
The facilitators started with some questions everyone should spend time answering first when thinking about growing their career: Is what you're doing your job or is it your career? Is what you're doing now what you want to do for the rest of your life? Is I.T. your chosen field? Do you want to move towards a management role or not? There are no textbook answers to these questions. Deciding what you like to do and what you feel good at doing are personal questions that only you can answer for yourself.
The group also spent time discussing career growth as making sure that you are moving your organization forward with the value you bring as a worker. To do so, you must make the effort to understand your organizations goals, initiatives, and culture. If you can do that, then you can make sure the things you concentrate on align with the organization. Understanding why you were hired, why you with your skillsets were chosen to fill the roll you currently have, can also help clarify what you should be concentrating on doing for your organization. The lifecycle of a career and identifying where you are in that lifecycle can help give further direction for growth. At the beginning of any career, you are still learning how to apply what you've learned through school or training in order to add value to your organization. You don't begin fully producing for your organization until the middle of your career. At the end of your career, the focus tends to become giving back to the organization and to your field, teaching and mentoring the next generation of workers the knowledge and wisdom you've gained over the course of your own career.
The group wrapped up discussions with longtime ISU employees sharing what's worked for them in growing their careers at ISU and included the following advice:
- Understand that there's a lot of stuff you don't know about even if you have been here awhile and try to find out more about things you don’t know when you discover them.
- It's your responsibility to want to do more. Find something that needs doing and begin working on doing it. For the most part things will not fall in your lap, you have to go out and find them.
- Try learning something new every day, no matter how small or seemingly trivial.
- Once you learn something, give it away! Our institutions motto "Gladly we learn and teach" is not just for the students and the faculty.
- Understand your organization and department and their goals and challenges beyond just the IT-related things.
Intro to Regular Expressions… Just Enough to Make You Dangerous (SFHB 131)
Presented by Nathan Stien, facilitated by Tim Walsh
Recap: This session was not a typical Redbirds of a Feather discussion session, but a formal presentation as an introduction to regular expressions. Regular expressions, or regex, are a set of languages to query text and to optionally return substrings. They are used almost universally across all programs and languages, though each implementation can be slightly different. The presentation covered all the universal basics of the language. This included finding exact matches, wildcards, nonword characters, characters sets and capturing groups. Demonstrations were done on regex101.com which can switch between several regex engines. One real world use case example was to blank all credit card expiration dates from a database. This was done via the SQL command REGEX_REPLACE, where a traditional UPDATE had a high likelihood of failing. There were also several more general examples on extracting strings from a large body of text.
