Projects
Project Year 2023/2024
Avaya To Zoom Transition
Transitioning from Avaya to Zoom for a modern, adaptable, and reliable communication experience. This change ensures seamless integration, a user-friendly interface, improved collaboration, cost-effectiveness, and accessibility. Steps in the migration incl
ude transferring phone numbers, setting up conference rooms, creating user accounts, and integrating existing tools into Zoom. Below are the high-level benefits and advantages of the project:
Seamless Integration:
Zoom provides a modern communication platform that seamlessly integrates with existing tools and systems, ensuring a smooth transition and minimizing disruptions.
User-Friendly Interface:
Zoom's user-friendly interface simplifies the user experience, making it easy for users to adapt to the new system and collaborate effectively.
Advanced Features:
Zoom's advanced features, such as video conferencing, screen sharing, and real-time messaging, enhance collaboration and productivity among team members.
Cost Savings:
Zoom's subscription-based pricing model offers cost savings compared to traditional communication systems, with the added benefit of regular updates and new features.
Project Achievements:
- Successfully transferred all phone numbers from Avaya to Zoom, ensuring uninterrupted communication for users with redundant network connectivity and effective load balancing.
- Conference rooms were configured with Zoom's video conferencing equipment, enabling seamless collaboration and communication.
- User accounts were created and managed efficiently, ensuring that all users had access to the new system and could easily collaborate with colleagues.
- Integrated existing tools into Zoom, providing a cohesive and user-friendly communication experience.
Manage Print Services
Manage Print Services aims to build a hybrid print and scan environment that is efficient, optimized, secure, and long-lasting within the UOS environment. Hybrid Workspace Solutions increase security, improve efficiency, and manage print resources by centralized access-based solutions, enabling effective and productive ways to print from anywhere in workplace settings. Below are the high-level benefits and advantages of the project.
Optimized Print Resources:
MPS optimizes print resources, lowering supply and maintenance costs while delivering predictable budgeting.
Secure Printing:
Secure Printing via implementing access-based solutions that require authentication before releasing print & scan related jobs i.e., documents remain secure and unprinted until the user authenticates via card/mobile reader, PIN, username/password, or any combination.
Enhanced Productivity
Streamlined workflows, centralized management, and proactive maintenance increase productivity while reducing downtime.
Sustainable Print Environment:
MPS decreases paper consumption, enhances energy efficiency, and contributes to a more sustainable print environment.
Project Achievements:
A hybrid print environment was achieved via the project that supports both on-the-move printing, allowing users to print from any location or device on the campus.
MPS solution provided the university with a long-lasting print and scan environment by ensuring scalability, upgradability, and durability.
Print and scan environment was integrated seamlessly with existing security infrastructure, enhancing overall security.
Dolphin Imaging Software
Implementing the Dolphin Imaging Software at College of Dental Medicine in the Master Program clinics. The software helps the clinical workflow effectively to serve patients and provide treatment with a high level of efficiency and accuracy. Implementing this software in the clinics is considered a turning point for the workflow within the clinic.
Riayati Integration with Axium
The main goal of this project is to integrate the Axium software and Riayati systems to enable the seamless exchange of patient information across the hospitals in Northern Emirates. This integration will allow to send specific patient information to Riayati (MoHAP) database. Mirth Engine used to send patient information in a specific format as messages. Thus, Healthcare providers will have access to the most up-to-date patient information, which will allow them to provide better care, and make it easier for healthcare providers to share patient information, which will improve efficiency.
Mipacs Database Migration
MIPACS Software, is a platform commonly used in the medical field for managing and analyzing medical images such as X-rays, CT scans, MRI scans, and ultrasounds. The main purpose of this project is to move MiPACS database and application from old server to new one. After doing configuration and testing on test environment we successfully implemented in production as well.
Romexis Database Migration
Romexis is primarily used in the field of dentistry and provides a wide range of features for managing, analyzing, and processing various dental images and patient data. It supports multiple imaging modalities commonly used in dentistry, including panoramic, cephalometric, 3D cone beam computed tomography (CBCT), intraoral, and extraoral images. The main purpose of this project to migrate Romexis database.
Tdoc Application Version Upgrade
TDOC CSSD software is a specialized application designed for managing Central Sterile Supply Department (CSSD) operations in healthcare facilities. CSSD is responsible for cleaning, sterilizing, and distributing medical instruments and equipment to ensure they are safe for patient use. TDOC CSSD software streamlines and automates various tasks within the CSSD workflow, including inventory management, instrument tracking, sterilization cycle monitoring, and compliance documentation. This project allowed us to upgrade the TDoc application from v15 to v16.
Upgrade Of Crystal Repotrt Tool
Crystal Reports is used to create and produce reports from a variety of data sources. It enables users to produce interactive reports with intricate formatting and data visualization features. Crystal report is integrated with aXium to allow users to get their respective reports. This project allowed us to upgrade SAP Crystal Report version to 2016 and, we moved the crystal report to new server 2019 from and old windows 2017 machine.
Project Year 2022/2023
Banner Realization
Implementing modernization to the university’s primary administrative information systems. It delivers a fresh user experience, many new tools, and significantly improved capabilities across all Banner components, driving new efficiencies so you can focus on student success.
Several Security Project such as Web Application Firewall, Network Access Control, Data Leakage Prevention and Banner Access Management are merged together in this Security Program and released recently:
MFA is enabled for all staff so that even if password is compromised UoS data and access is secure.
Web application Firewall
Data leakage prevention
Digital Certificates
Digital platform enabling the issuance, attestation, and exchange of digital records for all levels of education. Implement blockchain technology for education starting with graduation certificates. This digital platform enables the issuance, attestation, and exchange of digital records for all levels of education. It has three main areas: Publisher, Passport Application, and Verification Portal. Below are the high-level benefits & advantages of the project:
Immutable Authenticity and Integrity:
By preventing tampering and unauthorized changes, blockchain ensures the authenticity and integrity of certificates, fostering trust and lowering the likelihood of fraud.
Enhanced Security and Decentralization:
The decentralized structure of blockchain increases data security, while dispersing records throughout a network reduces vulnerabilities and single points of failure.
Efficiency and Accessibility:
The platform enables fast verification, expedites administrative operations, and improves global accessibility, saving universities and students time and resources.
Institutional Technical Leadership:
Embracing blockchain technology demonstrates institutional technical leadership, contributing to data privacy compliance and environmental sustainability efforts.
Project Achievements:
Fully automated the certificates generation and the Ministry of Education attestation.
Automation of verification processes and optimized administrative workflows result in time and resource savings.
Offering digital-verified certifications allows reaching a global audience while also providing a unique advantage.
One Gate Portal
One Gate Solution for students, faculty and staff in UoS to access their personal info,academic details, UoS.
Disability Solutions Balackboard Ally
Anthology Ally works seamlessly with your Learning Management System (LMS)to gauge the accessibility of your content. Ally provides guidance and tips for lasting improvements to your content accessibility.
Studiosity
With Studiosity service, students upload their file for same-day writing feedback throughout the semester.
Network Enhanced Services
Network Traffic Engineering Successful Implementation of New Core Switches Project.
Docusign
University of Sharjah adopted this solution to automate a very important purchasing.
Assets Repository
Build an inventory & centralized database of all IT assets to manage IT assets effectively with better control by categorizing & organizing them into custom asset groups to store, monitor all IT assets in the inventory easily throughout their entire life cycle from procurement to disposal. Below are the high-level benefits and advantages of the project:
Get Comprehensive Visibility:
By aggregating data from all sources that know about IT assets, the project provides comprehensive visibility into the IT infrastructure.
Quickly Find and Triage Alerts:
Contextualized and historical data for any IT asset allows for quick finding and triaging of alerts.
Constantly Track Containers and Devices:
The project enables constant tracking of containers, virtual machines, and other devices that frequently enter and leave networks.
Project Achievements:
- Successfully uploaded non-financial information for all user assets in the system.
- Uploaded all the IT infrastructure information.
- Improved Asset Lifecycle Management.
IT Service Management
New End user management with Self service portal and mobile application with Al assistant.
Project Year 2021/2022
Sharepoint Upgrade 2019
University of Sharjah has migrated in-house SharePoint-OnPrem from 2013 to SharePoint 2019 with features and updates to existing
features in SharePoint Server 2019 with the capability of cloud integration.
Housing Application
Faculty housing application is a workflow based application where faculty can submit their request to housing committee for changing and requesting new house. In addition, this application has housing clearance process as well, which has several stockholder to approve the clearance, initiate by HR department .
Performance Appraisal
As part of the Human Resources Department’s plan to implement a new Performance Management System in the coming years, the IT department developed a performance review or evaluation that evaluates an employee’s skills, achievements, and growth. The appraisal incudes the period from 1st September and ends on 31st August of each academic year.
Enterprise Services Management
ServiceDesk Plus now brings you enterprise service management (ESM), which extends the best practices of IT service management (ITSM) to other business functions, such as Human Resources, Admin, Finance, and Facilities
With ESM, you can now:
Create a service desk instance for each business function within your organization
Implement specific, customized service management workflows for each instance
Use pre-built templates and catalog, custom made for each business function
Create a centralized ESM portal and provide employees role-based access to specific or all service desk instances
Banner 9 Student Self Service Ssb
Improved Student and Faculty Experience
Student Advising Profile
saves times for students and advisors, enables personalized advice for better academic decisions
Attendance tracking
empowers faculty, saving time for registrars and financial aid
Faculty Grade Entry
streamlines grade processing including the ability to enter grades via spreadsheet
Registration
- More intuitive, saving time for registrar and the IT office
- Seamless integration with Ellucian DegreeWorks
- Enables advisors to better plan their student's success
- Better visibility into course demand for registrars
Multi Factor Authentication
MFA is an authentication method that requires more than one verification method to sign into the Office 365 portal. The University of Sharjah has enabled Azure MFA on your Office 365 account for this purpose. Azure MFA is Microsoft's two‐step verification solution. When you log into your Office Portal (Office 365 account) from outside the County network you will be required to enter your username and password as well as a verification code.
Cisco Meraki Wifi
Cisco Meraki Wi-Fi 6 is a certified wireless technology, which is covering the whole University of Sharjah Main Campus and Branches as well. Wi-Fi 6 providing the faster speed and excellent coverage to the University Students, Staff, Faculty and Guests. Provision of indoor and outdoor Wi-Fi 6 is contributing seamless internet experience to the University users with end-to-end visibility.
wifi6 Guide
UoS Virtual Labs
Within the strategic plans of the Information Technology Center and our endeavor to improve our technical services, we are pleased to present to you the new “UoS vLabs”, which makes it easier for students to access licensed academic programs from anywhere and at any time.
Easy access to virtual laboratories from any place or device
Laboratories are available seven days a week, 24/7
Ease of use of licensed academic programs for all students
Hyflex Classrooms
Along with the rising demand for collaboration comes the need for designing and equipping learning spaces with meaningful AV solutions, we have upgrade the university classrooms and Labs with Hybrid solution that features interactive displays, VC, Projector, Audio system and Control system, combines the best practices of traditional face-to-face class and online learning.
Virtual Court Lab
Virtual Courts is a concept, aimed at reducing the presence of litigant or lawyer in the court and for adjudication of cases on a virtual platform. The concept has been evolved in order to efficiently
utilize court resources and to provide litigants with an effective avenue to settle petty disputes, here at university of Sharjah we have implemented two virtual Court Labs to enhance the student Experience and follow the world latest method of hearing.
Data Center Renovation
The University of Sharjah is a comprehensive academic institution with a distinctive learning style and a global vision. It is pioneer in academia, scientific research and the arts in the UAE and the GCC region. All programs are accredited by the UAE Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research. Some programs such as Engineering, Communication, Science and Business have attained international accreditation.
It is clear that even without the recent increased dependency on digital infrastructure brought about by COVID-19, the demand for services from data centers will continue to increase. The vision of university of Sharjah is to have well-organized, high speed network cables with top-quality solution that scales up to support our future growth and give us the best value of performance. In addition, one of the main goals of Data Center renovation project is to avoid Cable Congestions. To enable Tracing and Port Mapping, a structured cabling infrastructure is essential. This will help to easily trace where each component of the cabling system and solve any issues that the data center might experience.
Monitoring and the visibility of Real Time Reports for our Datacenter Operations is one of our major objectives. The ability to track, analyze, and generate real-time reports will enable to make well informed decisions, a richer and deeper insights into the data center operations and performance metrics.
Project vision includes:
- Process for organizing cables.Improving the efficiency of processes.Creating proceduresDocumentation for ongoing improvement.
- Diagram for the existing equipment and all types of connections for each RACK.
- Maintenance manual explaining the addition and modification of DC equipment / racks.
- Cabling based on ISO management standards in order to manage our data center to the highest professional level.
Ultimately, the data centers renovation is a continuous process to minimizes the risk of downtime and also enhances the overall efficiency of the data center.
Data Loss Prevention
As a long-standing educational institution, we create data storage and sharing every day and every year. Increasing the amount of data makes it imperative for us to properly mark and protect this data, which is critical to our business.
UOS ITC is pleased to assist users with the introduction of Data Loss Prevention (DLP) technology to help them know, protect, and prevent data loss, and most importantly not affect their movement and productivity.
DLP is using data labeling or classification to Public, Internal & conditional. End user can label their data on outlook or office app. These labeling will enable users to apply the required protection such as encryption or privileges that will not allow unauthorized users from accessing their data. or even share it with others by emails or even printing. This feature is coming soon, and it will support you to protect your confidential information.
Identity & Access Management
The Identity and Access Management (IAM) program objectives are developing and maintaining governance over the university’s critical services and systems by engaging with stakeholders and business owners, defining, communicating and enforcing access policies, and controlling risks by managing identity life cycles of entities such as people, services, and robots.
IAM has many streams including but not limited to the following:
- HR
- Alumni Account Management
- Banner Access Management
- Active Directory Management
- Dental Management System (AxiUm)
Web Application Firewall
Web application firewall exclusively check and protect any breech on UOS critical public facing web services. Dedicated Web application services firewall has capability to detect user behavior and transaction patterns. More sophisticated rules are being planned soon.
Policies & Procedure
University IT established 34 policies and procedures. These are based on ISO 27001 and ITIL based standrads. This ensure sufficient governance for IT services. For Example Change management is now formalized with specific approval process. Access management, Email security, Web development etc are now with proper policies. IT is working to establish detailed procedures. Regular Sessions maked IT admin familiarizes.
UoS Backup Storage Solutions
Objective:
Find a new modern, high available and secured backup solution that fulfill the operation needs. New solution should be protected against ransomware attacks.
Scale up servers' coverage to include all UOS servers with different type of criticality and a better RTO & RPO.
Risks to be mitigated:
Cover all UOS servers.
Geographical Offsite location (Cloud)
Improve RTO & RPO.
Ransomware Protection.
Disaster Recovery
The Disaster Recovery Plan contains strategies on minimizing the effects of a disaster, helping UOS to quickly resume key operations or continue to operate as if there was no disruption.
Project Year 2020/2021
Banner Upgrade
The technical currency of the core business systems needs to be maintained on an on-going basis. This has been neglected since around 2013 so much-needed upgrades are in progress. The migration of the Banner eco-system to the Ellucian/AWS cloud was the first step in 2018-2019 in achieving technical currency – the migration included a mandatory upgrade to a more recent Banner 8 version. Upgrade to Banner 9 moved the UoS to the most up-to-date releases and enabled the University to take advantage of up-to-the-minute features and functionality. The end result of this project was a Banner 9 technical platform from which the business units will be able to take advantage of the latest functionality through the project's realization initiatives.
Argos Reporting Project
The Evisions Argos reporting solution is an enterprise reporting application designed for Higher Education. It integrates with Banner and other data sources to deliver the information necessary to make timely, better-informed decisions. It is flexible, powerful, and easy-to-use and facilitates the standardization of data elements across the enterprise. The project was initiated and completed in 2018-2019 and since completion of the work, the University administration had a consolidated reporting mechanism across the business units and a well-trained staff to develop and maintain operational reports effectively and efficiently with consistency in the use and interpretation of the data. Business users developed hundreds of reports using the Argos tool.
Banner Workflow Project
Banner Workflow is a process management engine that is designed to work with Ellucian’s Banner ERP modules, namely Banner Student and Banner Finance at the University of Sharjah. There were two main drivers for introducing Banner Workflow at the University in 2018-2019:
- The University currently has a high number of Banner customizations which are expensive and cumbersome to maintain. Additionally, these customizations significantly complicate technical upgrades of the system to the extent that Banner has not been upgraded since 2013. Banner Workflow functionality was planned to significantly help in the elimination/reduction of customizations by providing baseline functionality to effectively manage process flows.
- Banner Workflow provides the functionality to allow existing manual processes to be automated, as well as to improve the efficiency of semi-automated processes.
UoS Go Mobile App Project
The Ellucian Mobile Foundation services are designed to provide the university with an institutional branded version of Ellucian mobile. The University named its UOS Go 2018-2019. Ellucian Mobile helps students stay connected to the University like never before. Students should have access to great features that make their campus experience more effective, more efficient, and more fun. Ellucian Mobile is a valuable application as it is connected with the core students Banner system and allows students to check academic information, news, campus map, calendar, and apply for all University services.
Lab Simulation Solutions
The University of Sharjah has initiated a project to convert the scientific laboratories at the university into digital laboratories remotely in order to ensure the continuation of the educational process and the keenness of the university administration to improve the learning process and put students at the highest levels of readiness to keep pace with the challenges and digital transformations that suit the labor market and innovation in the scientific and research community.
The university provided a set of digital laboratories that allow students and faculty members to work in virtual laboratories and obtain accurate practical results in addition to linking these laboratories to the Blackboard educational platform and enabling teachers of these courses to obtain reports and results within the university’s digital educational platform Blackboard, where the Students log in to this digital platform Blackboard and perform their laboratory duties remotely and save their work within the Blackboard, The laboratories include most of the science colleges such as Faculties of Medicine, Engineering and Sciences.
Blackboard Upgrade & Ultra
Blackboard Learn is the course management system utilized in the university of Sharjah. In September 2020-2021, Blackboard LMS was upgraded to the new Ultra Experience. This is the most significant update to Blackboard, which includes a redesigned landing page, and Ultra Course View that provides a simple, streamlined course experience for Faculty and students.
The new Ultra Experience provides a modern look and feel, intuitive workflows, and an improved mobile experience. In addition, the new interface offers powerful tools like the Activity Stream and institution page that consolidate the need for the best teaching experience. Everyone will experience the change and improvements. The updated Ultra Course View is modern, intuitive, and easy to use. Grading is streamlined, content is quicker to build, and it is easier than ever for students and faculty to connect with one another.
Faculty Evaluation System
Faculty evaluation is a workflow-based system where all the faculty submit their request for their annual evaluation to the department chair and dean, after the approval from the dean and chair its goes to the central committee for the last stage. Based on the evaluation the University of Sharjah extends faculty contracts.