What is a unified environment?
“An environment utilized by all AgriLife employees that provides a common set of enterprise IT services and solutions in a highly collaborative, efficient, effective, and secure manner to conduct business both internally and externally with partners and customers.”
One State. One AgriLife. One IT.
What are the benefits of a unified IT Environment?
Reducing Operating & Support Costs
As previously noted, we have identified up to $3.45M in annual savings that can be obtained through the unified IT strategy. By consolidating various IT tools, services, and processes we remove duplicative costs that exist in many of the decentralized IT operations within the college departments today.
Additionally, AgriLife IT is rolling out Microsoft Phone Service throughout the state which is estimated to save approximately $1.2M annually along with deprecating third party applications that are provided for in Microsoft licensing adding an additional $550K in annual savings.
Enhanced Collaboration
Once all agency and college personnel are on the same environment all interactive and collaborative applications will be connected via one directory. This provides for real time presence, collaborative file sharing, direct email delivery, and highly interactive video, chat, and applications integration to enhance workflows and overall business function efficiency.
Efficient Communications
Via a single directory, email platform, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Phone environment Agrilife employees will have access to the latest in collaboration and unified communications technologies.
Email will be directly delivered within the same Microsoft portal reducing email delivery issues that were consistently manifested within the TAMU email system. Microsoft Teams provides not only video and text interaction but also provides 1000’s of interactive applications, much like your cell phones, providing a rich environment for work function automation and interaction.
One example is a Team Bot that provides an interactive knowledgebase for various topics that could be updated by a group or all employees within a department or team.
Optimized Security & Compliance Management
By consolidating all AgriLife employees in one environment the reduced complexity and reduction in multiple services and applications allows for more efficient and effective focus on security and compliance requirements.
All AgriLife Email is protected by various layers of security, providing for automated encryption of emails with sensitive information, real time alerting to IT for various threats.
File sharing through OneDrive and Teams are monitored through real time policies that protect sensitive data. Monitoring for large scale file deletions are also monitored and alerted to our security team.
Most importantly, AgriLife IT is one of the few TAMU system entities who is backing up our entire Office 365 environment. This includes all email, calendar, Teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint data.
Agile, Efficient, Mature Services & Support
In September of 2020 all IT staff were centralized within AgriLife IT. During this process our department was reorganized with a special focus on redistributing workloads for our IT support staff. Additionally, through this centralization process we were able to take the expertise of various staff and allocate them for use across the entire organization vs. just a single department where their expertise may have been rarely used or needed.
We also have a continuous training and certification requirement for all our IT staff. Each year all our staff are required to receive training or certifications to continually improve their skills and capabilities. This benefits our customers by having the most skilled and efficient staff we can provide. Recently centralized IT staff from the college will begin advanced skills training as soon as the migration of the college is completed.
Student workers are only used in our back office. As a commitment to our professional service delivery, student workers are not utilized in our operations to interact with our customers directly. Unlike TAMU IT, we want you to have direct access to our professionally trained IT staff. We do value the benefit of interacting with student workers and do utilize them in our TechBuy team to build computers and facilitate order processing under direct supervision by our TechBuy managers.
What are the Components of the AgriLife Unified IT Environment?
Most importantly we wanted to present what the unified IT environment offers in terms of services. There are a couple of major aspects of the AgriLife IT environment.
They are:
100% Cloud Based Environment
This means you can conduct most of your work from anywhere in the world on any device. Over the last 6 years AgriLife IT has worked to move all IT services into redundant cloud-based service providers like Microsoft. This allows you, our customer, to be able to access your services from any device anywhere in the world. This of course does not include services you will still require TAMU to provide to you such as library services, student portal, Canvas LMS or campus VPN services.
Self Service IT
Most of the services users can activate and configure themselves through our interactive online IT services management portal known as AgriLife People. Here you can add email aliases to your account, activate VPN service at AgriLife centers around the state, generate a new Microsoft Team, create shared mailboxes, and activate administrative access to your computer when needed. Once you are migrated into the AgriLife IT environment please take time to familiarize yourself with our AgriLife People system and update your profile and contact information.
Internal Technology Procurement
AgriLife hosts an internal store where employees can procure computers and a variety of peripherals for their business needs. Known as the TechBuy Store users can order computers and receive on average within 2 days on their desk fully ready for use. Our staff are also HP certified warranty repair technicians. This means we can fix most warranty repair tasks here in our shop vs sending off to HP, saving both you and our staff time and money.
Our store managers can also provide consultation for that special computer configuration you’re looking for and obtain quotes from vendors and make the order when you are ready to proceed.
Click here to read an overview of the TechBuy offering and value it can bring to you.
State-Wide Support & Services Approach
AgriLife IT operates at an enterprise capacity. This means we provide the same support and services to all our customers across the state. Our procedures and standards are practiced the same assuring the same overall experience for all our customers.
We have a quality commitment to both the support and services we provide by practicing a continuous improvement approach to what we do. Dozens of support metrics are monitored daily in our support operations and our engineers have a variety of automation and alert monitoring tools to maintain services at the highest level.
Our approach to customer satisfaction is based on monitoring hundreds of data points, and consistently seeking feedback from our customers through various surveys and forums.
3rd Party Partnership Management
AgriLife IT has a large array of vendors and partners we work with. With these connections we can quickly assess and acquire IT technology solutions to meet our customer’s needs. Through our partnerships with other organizations within the TAMU system we are able to assist in developing solutions for our AgriLife employees when working with other TAMU system entities.
Some Interesting Numbers…
Being a part of the college under the flagship university most would think they are being provided the highest level of IT services within the Texas A&M System. Unfortunately, this is not the case as seen through annual IT audits and reviews conducted by various entities.
Sadly, most of the IT services provided by the University are decades behind in standards both in terms of services, security, and automation. You may not realize that your IT support team for the college must manually create all your email accounts, file server access, and computer setup. Additionally, large amounts of effort are being expended by them to backup servers, workstations, and documentation required for security and compliance requirements. In the AgriLife environment this is all automated.
This has negatively impacted the College and until the recent Covid pandemic this reality was mostly unknown by most end users.
This has driven the goal for AgriLife to provide the leading edge of technologies to our employees.
This is where AgriLife IT is best positioned to provide these high-end services, as we have spent the last 6 years fine tuning our operations and understanding of leading edge cloud-based IT technologies above and beyond others within the TAMU system.
Here are some interesting metrics about our environment.
AgriLife IT currently hosts and manages the majority of employees within AgriLife including providing email and Office 365 services to TVMDL. Once the college migration has completed, we will support a total of 5,500 employees and just under 9,000 workstations.
This will make the AgriLife IT environment not only the 3rd largest IT operation within the Texas A&M System operating in over 290 locations in multiple time zones, but also the most complex and complicated.
What does this mean to you?
You might be thinking, “That all sounds great, but I am doing just fine the way I operate today.” And, you might be right, in general. However, we have had several users who have migrated in recent weeks with our testing. Comments we have received show that users were basically unaware of the vast areas of technologies that they have not been exposed to while utilizing the limited services provided by TAMU or within their individual departments.
While we realize that the centralization of IT support staff has not shown an overall drastic improvement in support service since September of last year. This issue is based on the fact that the service model and process provided by TAMU IT or within the departments are highly outdated or inefficient. Only after the migration of your data and services to that provided by AgriLife IT will users begin to experience faster service, self-service options, and the entire positive impact that our AgriLife IT team can provide.
At the high level after your IT services have been migrated to AgriLife IT you’ll experience these benefits:
- Conduct Business Any Time. Any Place. Any Device. 100% Cloud Based
- Enhanced and unified IT support anywhere in the world
- Self-serve IT services and software installation Any Time. Any Place.
- Centrally managed workstations (patching, disk cleanup, compliance management)
- One Directory for all AgriLife eases employee communication (email, phone, file sharing)
- Centrally managed/ automated AgriLife Email Distribution Lists (Entity, Department)
- Enhanced IT software solution support and opportunities (Power BI, Power Automate, Forms)
AgriLife IT New User FAQ
Jump to questions about…
If you don’t see your questioned answered below please email ITANSWERS@AG.TAMU.EDU and we’ll address it as soon as possible.
Migration Process & Scheduling
You’ll receive an email with a link 2 weeks prior to your scheduled department migration, to schedule your individual migration appointment.
If you are not available, we still need you to fill out the indicated form on the appointment email so that we can find an alternate time to migrate you.
Note that those not migrated during their department’s migration week will be migrated sometime during the summer and we cannot promise a specific timeframe as all our resources are currently focused on the current schedule through August 31st.
Note that this may be several weeks out, based upon current workloads with pre-scheduled migrations.
Please note you will not receive an appointment request email until 2 weeks PRIOR to your department’s schedule migration.
Do I need to schedule an appointment to be migrated?
Each of the college departments provided IT services to these types of jobs differently.
The rule of thumb is the following:
If either of the following apply, you NEED to schedule an appointment:
1. You were issued an email box using Exchange (and you use Outlook to access) to perform your work functions within the department (not Google Mail).
2. You were issued a computer workstation to use in an office setting (not lab) and you log into the system to conduct your work duties.
Those with a Mac or multiple office computer systems, and/or large email boxes may take longer.
Systems with pre-existing issues may need to be rescheduled for a later time and will take considerably longer to migrate.
Pre-existing issues include:
•Computer hard disk is almost full
•Corrupted software installations
•Corrupted user profile
•Pre-existing registry and permission issues
•System is too old to be migrated
1. Your TAMU email alias is set to forward to your new AgriLife Email box.
2. Your email and calendar information are then migrated (this can take up to half an hour or overnight depending on the scale of email messages in your account.
3. Your computer is renamed to meet standard naming conventions (if applicable).
4. Your system(s) is/are checked for any pre-existing issues.
5. Your profile (which consists of your desktop and application icons and other elements) are migrated on your computer to a new profile that is joined to the AgriLife computer domain.
6. Your Microsoft Office 365 software is updated to the latest (if applicable). Microsoft Teams and OneDrive are installed and configured on your system.
7. Your AgriLife AgNet account ID is provided to you and our technicians assist you with resetting your temporary password.
8. You are provided with a card that has links on how to contact the AgriLife IT help desk along with links to our New User orientation guide that we provide to you as a new AgriLife IT customer.
9. Items 3 – 6 are then repeated for each computer you have assigned to you.
Additionally, a host of self-serve IT service capabilities including:
• gaining administrative access to your computer
• creating email aliases
• requesting a Microsoft Team
• requesting creation and/or access to a shared email box
In the weeks after your computer migration, AgriLife IT will begin to manage upgrades and patches on all operating systems and centrally managed software applications. This will lessen the amount of down time you may experience today waiting for updates to install during business hours.
Lastly, with our world-wide remote management capabilities, we’ll be able to provide support to you better and faster, reducing wait times and other overheads that currently plague COALS IT operations.
Google Mail is not HIPPA compliant and does not adequately protect sensitive information.
You can continue to still use all other Google applications provided through your TAMU NetID login.
Files
What will happen to them during the migration?
Any files you have on Google Drive can stay where they are.
However, we highly recommend copying your Google Drive files to your AgriLife OneDrive, so that you can experience all the rich collaboration features that exist in all the Microsoft applications and interfaces.
Click here to watch our training session on these features.
Will I still have access to them after the migration?
However, we will be working with each department to migrate file server data to either Microsoft OneDrive or Microsoft Teams (if shared files,) as a part of the overall migration process.
This will allow you to access your files from any device anywhere in the world.
You will no longer be required to use VPN to access a file server from off campus.
Logins
Your TAMU NetID will still be used to login to certain TAMU non-federated applications.
See the table below:
96% of daily accessed services will use AgriLife AgNet IDs.
AgriLife Unified IT environment does not prohibit access or utilization of current TAMU services.
Microsoft Teams
The Owner of the team would need to coordinate with all the members of the Team and with AgriLife IT to schedule a time to perform a data migration.
This would require the Team and data to be “frozen” from changes while the migration occurs.
If you are a Team owner and want to migrate data from one Team to another, please send an email to itanswers@ag.tamu.edu for more direction.
How to I access both until the migration is completed?
To easily access both the Teams in TAMU and AgriLife environments at the same time:
1. Login to the AgriLife environment with your AgriLife Account in the Teams desktop app on your computer.
2. Open up the Teams application via your web browser (teams.microsoft.com) for TAMU with your NetID account.
This will allow you to see chats and access full Teams features in both environments. Another option is to have the Team owner in the TAMU team to add your AgriLife Account (firstname.lastname@ag.tamu.edu) as a member of the Team.
This would allow you to access the TAMU Team from your Teams app on your desktop while logged in with your AgriLife account.
How do I do this?
2. Once logged in go to YOUR ALP > MANAGE MY IT SERVICES
3. From there, scroll down to the CREATION REQUESTS
4. check Microsoft Team and then hit CONTINUE
5. On the next page, enter:
• your Team Name
• Description
• which type of Team template you need
6. submit your request
To learn more about self-serve IT requests with AgriLife, click here to see our training video.
Migration Schedule for Departments
[ai1ec cat_name=”Coals Migration”]
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