2018 Projects

Cohort Projects

  • Social Media Content Strategy Plan: A group worked mainly within the Communications department to research the ITS Twitter page along with other Big10 IT Twitter pages and conduct student and staff interviews. This research was used to create a guidelines document to provide recommendations to increase engagement with the Twitter account.
  • Internship Website Migration: One cohort group migrated the ITS internship website using a Drupal platform. The layout was updated and made to be more cohesive with other ITS websites. Content within the page was added and the existing content was updated.
  • Friend Account Back End: A cohort group worked on the creation and update of the Friend Account, a guest account which the university uses for prospective student and employees. For this update, the team recreated the data management system as well as making the front facing design up to university standards.
  • Who Does What: A group continued the work of a 2017 cohort group, who created a tool that allows ITS employees to find the right person or team to talk to when they have a problem with a technology or service. This group worked on making the application more useful and maintainable, by updating the existing information, adding new fields, and creating a system that allows the data to be updated regularly automatically.
  • Privacy Setting Tool for U Data P.O.C.: This group worked together to develop an interface that allows students to view and understand the various data that is collected of them by the University of Michigan, as well as provide them control over what is being collected and help them understand how the university is protecting their data.
  • Self Service Virtual Machines P.O.C.: One cohort group worked on an interface that non-technical people could use to provision themselves temporary dev-servers that live in the cloud. The idea was that the end user would have full control of their instance from the created web application. This project was just a technical proof of concept to see if it would be worth pursuing this concept.

Departmental Projects

  • Communications (Administration): One intern wrote and edited existing content, including department summaries, statistics and achievements for a Year at a Glance booklet that was printed and distributed to the departments across ITS. This involved collaboration with each department head, as well as the Communications team multimedia designer.
  • Human Resources (Administration): One of the projects an intern worked on was to serve on the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee. They were on both the main steering committee and the recruitment, retention, and development subcommittee. Through these committees they were able to contribute in ways such as drafting content for the “About ITS” page to recruit new employees, designing a sticker for the committee, and centralizing ITS job descriptions to promote career development conversations.
  • Collaboration Services: An intern in this department was involved in writing documentation for internal and external end users, specifically around the campus rollout of Google Jamboard and the new Gmail interface. This intern learned a significant amount of valuable experience which they will take into their information career, including technical writing and navigating/understanding large organizational politics.
  • Support Services: One intern worked with several managers and support services representatives to develop a tool that helps service center reps more efficiently answer customer questions about software access and licensing. They conducted multiple needs assessment and user interviews and used the Marvel app to develop a prototype.
  • Teaching & Learning: An intern was involved a variety of tasks, but was largely working on student outreach. This involved creating content for the ITS Twitter page as well as carrying out on-campus activities, including one where they set up a booth in the Shapiro Undergraduate Library to collect student feedback on the university’s learning management system, Canvas.
  • Teaching & Learning: One intern's major project involved the student facing learning analytics dashboard, which provides students visualizations of learning data to support their learning behaviors. They conducted data analyses and visualizations using python and Tableau.
  • Infrastructure: An intern was able to work closely with their team to help test new A/V technology and equipment, shadow various roles in infrastructure, as well as create an internal and external process flow for the audiovisual service offered to the university.
  • Information Assurance: One intern worked with another in their department on a large project sheet. The most impactful project one intern worked on was the Anti-Phishing Chrome Extension that they helped roll into deployment. It is currently an extension that is deployed on all work devices that detects false University of Michigan login pages and blocks the user from entering their credentials.
  • Information Assurance: One intern worked on a project sheet list. A big project they worked on was tracking forensic artifacts via RT during a cleanup, coordinating with outside units on drives/devices that belong to them, and improving the tracking process for future forensic artifact holds. The intern also worked on installing over fifty honeypots onto Raspberry Pis to be used inside MITN for threat intelligence.
  • Infrastructure Networks: An intern in this department mostly worked on writing new plugins for the network testing project know as pScheduler. Towards the end of the internship, they were doing Development Operations for a Software Defined Networking research grant.
  • Infrastructure Networks: One intern worked on several Ansible scripts to automate the build and deployment of perfSONAR containers in embedded systems. Ansible is a scripting language designed for automating software provisioning and device configuration. perfSONAR is a network monitoring toolkit, which the intern successfully built into an LXC container, as well as automated the deployment of as a Docker container. In a containerized format, the software then has potential to be run in various embedded devices, namely routers from Juniper, Cisco, and Arista, which will have a positive effect on the monitoring potential of networks across the university’s infrastructure.
  • UMNET: An intern in this department wrote scripts to transfer data over from multiple in house databases to a newer open source database called NetBox in an effort to upgrade existing systems. This database stores information about devices throughout campus and helps the team here manage them.
  • Infrastructure Networks: One intern worked with the Information Technology Communication Services team, and their project revolved around applying user experience research methods to gather technical and user requirements needed to replace a 15 year old web application. The web application is used by all campus departments across the three University of Michigan campuses. The main focus of the project was to critically examine how the campus customers place work orders and use the billing reports within the current web application in order to integrate new reporting structures for other ITS services and provide recommendations on how to replace the web application.
  • Strategy and Planning: An intern worked on revamping the process ITS uses to add new services to its portfolio, including administrative and technical workflows. This will allow the organization to act faster when providing new services to its customers.
  • Information Assurance (Tevon): My project for the summer was to create an automated test suite for the Uniqname and Account Setup app. This involved using Selenium browser automation and python. I experimented with different testing frameworks in python before settling on behave. This allowed me to implement a testing framework to which tests could be added in plain English. I also gained experience in databases since the tests had to call out to obtain data. My tests were able to detect multiple bugs in the app that have since been resolved.
  • Information Assurance: One intern worked on web development with python and the django framework, incorporating the alumni uniqname creation into the Uniqname and Account Setup app. As a result, all students, faculty, staff and alumni would create uniqnames from one application. This is important so as to reduce the number of uniqname creation applications supported by the Identity and Access Management (IAM) team.
  • Information Assurance: An intern's project was to create a proof-of-concept application and toolchain that followed the principles of continuous integration and deployment. They created a very small application that can perform basic LDAP searches of a umich database and wrote tests using multiple technologies including unittest, Selenium, and Behave. These tests were automatically run upon every code commit, and upon passing those tests, it was deployed to “production.” The goal of this project was to inform the rest of their team for how they might proceed as they work toward utilizing continuous integration and delivery in their application.
  • System Support and Infrastructure Services: One intern worked on Ansible scripts to automate the configuration and deployment of the ITS Login servers and the ITS statistical Computation Service servers. Ansible is a scripting language that gives servers a list of tasks to execute. The Ansible scripts take about 25 minutes to run and the end result is a production ready server.
  • Infrastructure Systems: An intern created python and powershell scripts for automating the process of transitioning from Nagios Core to the new Nagios XI system. These scripts utilize the Nagios REST API to allow users to easily and quickly interact with Nagios without using the web portal which helped relieve not only the burden on thier team but also teams that are leveraging this service.
  • Enterprise Application Services (Imani): My work as a UX intern involved improving the overall user experience, interface design, and information architecture of the various services the ITS Web Team supports. One of the projects I was involved with included making user-centric improvements to content and features in the Michigan App, which is an app utilized by over _____(have to find this out) users that provides useful maps, information, and communications to the campus community. Enhancements were achieved using user interviews, contextual inquiries/field studies, affinity diagramming, wireframing/prototyping, and other methods to survey the motivations, goals, and needs of the U-M community. More specifically, I am collaborating on improving the bus routes, academic information, and rec sports information within the app, as well as, working on improving the onboarding experience for new users of the Michigan App.
  • Information Quest (Nathan R)
  • Networking and Software Development: One intern worked on implementing and testing a program to automate the creation of new entries in BlueCat. BlueCat is a network management tool used by the Network Infrastructure team in ITS. The new tool will help system administrators keep the BlueCat server up-to-date whenever there are new changes in another database called NetInfo. This automation script will also help system admins save time and avoid errors in data entry in the future.
  • Enterprise Application Services: An intern worked on implementing the description feature file and the step codes behind to automate the testing of database. Donor Alumni Relationship Tool (DART) is a Blackbaud Enterprise CRM database used by the Enterprise Application Services team in ITS. The intern used SpecFlow and Selenium WebDriver with Visual Studio to run automated tests. The automation testing allows for continuous integration to be smooth and efficient and confirms that there are no bugs with the new content updates without time-consuming manual efforts.