To: Faculty and Staff from Arts and Sciences
Staff from Finance and Administration
Faculty, Staff and Students from the Medical Campus
Faculty, Staff and Students from the School of Drama

ITS News for April 2007

Yale installed a Google Search Appliance in the fall of 2006 and since then, it has crawled nearly 500,000 HTML files, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, and PDFs on the University’s network. All of these documents add up to about six (6) gigabytes of text. That’s just text; no images, video, or music. One gigabyte of storage is about 200,000 pages of digital text. Everything you will read in your lifetime, stored as text, is unlikely to amount to more than a few gigabytes (Hess, 2004). The Yale Google Search Appliance now serves as the institutional search engine and can be accessed via the front page of the University’s website, or via the default entry point at http://google.yale.edu. Read more...

Why change your password? The importance of password security

There are a number of common ways a Yale NetID password can be compromised. It is important to remember your NetID is public information (it is listed in public directories and may show up when you are logged into a computer or on the network). Passwords can be guessed, observed, read, "phished", "brute-forced", "sniffed", "decrypted" and "reverse-engineered". Read more...

Sending Yale email without using Virtual Private Network (VPN)

You can set your email client to automatically "authenticate" when you are sending email; this means that your Yale NetID and password are used when sending email. When configured correctly, your email client (e.g., Eudora, Outlook, or Thunderbird) can send email without running a VPN (Virtual Private Network) client. If you use a cell phone that can check email, you can also configure that to send "authenticated" email. For instructions on configuring your software to send "authenticated email,"Read more...

Office 2007 for Windows

Earlier this year Microsoft released Office 2007 for Windows. If you are considering an upgrade it is important to understand there are a few important differences between Office 2007 and earlier versions. Read more...

Pamela Sargent named Senior Director for Enterprise Systems

Pamela Sargent is the new Senior Director of Enterprise Systems in ITS, effective March 12th. A graduate of the University of Dayton in Electrical Engineering, Pam has worked since her graduation in professional and management IT roles. Her last 16 years have Read more...

This announcement was prepared by Jane Livingston, Associate Director of ITS Communications (jane.livingston@yale.edu)

Tell us what you think . We'd love to hear from you.