Results are in: IT Services 7th Chili Competition

Thank you to everyone who made it out today to celebrate friendship, camaraderie, and love of food. The chili competition has always been one of our favorite events, and it makes me happy to see so many of my coworkers and friends in the same place. And for our friends who were not able to make it, know that we missed you!

Here are our winners:

Second place: Dean Harris

Dean Harris shows off his second place silver ladle

First place: Patrick Hawk

Patrick Hawk displaying his golden first place ladle

People’s Choice: Joe Mills

Joe Mills shows off his peanuts-themed people's choice award

We’ll be sending Patrick to the university-wide competition in March! Mark your calendars: March 25, 2025, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.! Come help us cheer on our champion!

IT Services and Friends Holiday Photo Winners 2024/25

Here are the winners of our holiday photo contest!

Pets: Shane Schlichter

Young sleeping baby in a red beanie leaning against a calf

Food: Kelly Donathan

Two huge jars of homemade pickles

Winter Wonder: Susan Leffingwell

View of a frozen pond and snow-covered garden furniture next to overarching trees

Decorations: David Seidl

A mantel with several stockings (two of which are shaped like cats!) surrounded by books and comfortable furniture

Thank you to everyone who came to the party, and thank you to everyone who couldn’t make it, as well. As David said: You all have done amazing work this year and every year — and it’s an honor and a privilege working with all of you.

IT Services and Friends Holiday Photo Winners!

Many thanks to all the participants in this year’s Holiday Photo Contest!

This year, we had five categories, and five separate winners. Here they are!

Food: Dylan McConnell

A transparent bowl of holiday snacks (pineapple, cranberries, granola) sits on a table in front of a Connect4 game board.

Winter Wonder: Kayla Becker

Vail, Colorado in the Winter. Tall, cream-colored buildings come to a point with holiday lights and snow-covered trees surrounding them. In the distance, you can see the snowy mountainside.

Holiday Decorations: Gus Coliadis

A brick house with holiday decorations. There are colorful light strings around the roof of the house and cutouts of the "Aristocats" in the yard - the kittens are displayed in a way that it makes them look like they are playing with the light strings.

Holiday Pets: Karen O’Hara

A beautiful tortoiseshell calico cat sits next to an empty cup of coffee, entreating the photographer with big yellow eyes, almost as if to say "refill my coffee cup now!!"

Retro Technology: David Seidl

A lego man holding a lego coffee stands on the keyboard of a Model Ten Noiseless typewriter.
1Password

NOTICE: IT Services moving to 1Password!

PLEASE READ CAREFULLY. Our LastPass subscription ends August 31, 2023. After this date, you will no longer be able to log in to your enterprise LastPass account (this does NOT impact your personal LastPass account in any way). You will need to manually import your personally saved passwords from LastPass to 1Password. 

1Password

(Some folks have already done this — please ignore if you have already migrated all of your passwords to 1Password.)

On Monday, August 21, you received an invitation to join 1Password from accounts@1password.com. The email said: “Join Miami University on 1Password.”

We’ve typed the instructions for migration into a handy Knowledge Base article.

Once more, with feeling: Our LastPass subscription ends August 31, 2023. That is NEXT THURSDAY. After this date, you will no longer be able to log in to your enterprise LastPass account (this does NOT impact your personal LastPass account in any way, but the LastPass export WILL include your personal account passwords if you have linked it). Please check out your 1Password account, import your passwords, install the extension, download the mobile app if applicable, and make sure everything is where it needs to be before the end of this month.

We highly, highly recommend that you do this soon so you can get used to the new tool before LastPass goes away.

Don’t worry, I will be sending more reminders about this. If you have any questions, please contact Elizabeth Parsons or Jake Harrison!

The Miami Compass in spring

Top IT Initiatives in the Spotlight

For calendar year 2023, we are focusing on several large, involved projects that all impact the Miami community in some way.

For those interested in a holistic look at what IT Services is prioritizing for the year, we are relaunching our “Top IT Initiatives” website! The Top IT Initiatives site is your “cheat sheet” for the big-ticket items we’re working on this year.

This site will be the jumping-off point for everything you need to know about all of the big-ticket projects coming down the pike in 2023 and beyond.

In the meantime, here is a sneak peek of the projects we’re currently working on (some of them may be familiar to you already):

  • Endpoint Detection and Response
  • Identity and Access Management
  • Enterprise Resource Planning
  • Accessible Technology

Bookmark the site to stay tuned for more information about other spotlighted initiatives.

The Miami Compass in spring