By Ana Ruiz Brictson | Staff Writer
Baylor’s Information Technology Services (ITS) released a new platform that provides to-the-minute status updates for students, staff and faculty about the technology infrastructure and systems that power the university.
After nine months of work starting up the program, on Feb. 1, Baylor ITS made it possible for anyone to look at the university’s most common systems’ status.
“What we tried to do was we were looking to source an application where we could kind of make a one-stop shop where Baylor University students, faculty and staff would be able to go to one location and find out if something was not working,” senior director of client technology support Micheal Johnson said.
According to Johnson, their team sourced a number of different applications, looked for peer reviews and talked to other universities to find out what they were using before planning with StatusHub — the cloud-based service the university contracted with.
Johnson also said historically, Baylor had several places where people would turn to look for the information this new platform now provides. Before, people would get email notifications or had to call specific phone lines to obtain the information.
Associate director of learning systems John Lowe said in an email that Baylor’s new system status site brings system outage and maintenance information from across the web into one location.
“Instead of visiting Box’s status page to see if Box is down, or visiting Zoom’s status page to see if Zoom is having trouble, everyone at Baylor can visit https://systemstatus.baylor.edu to see the current status for almost all of the major systems and services used at Baylor,” Lowe said.
According to Johnson, a week after launching the system, the platform currently has 50 subscribers.
“Our hope is that over the remainder of the semester and next semester, students really adopt this site, bookmark it, subscribe to it and use it as kind of as just another tool, you know, to help support them at the university” Johnson said.
