Improved discount for employees with Verizon cell service

W&L employees with personal cell phone service through Verizon may be eligible for reduced rates as a result of a new agreement negotiated by the Network and Telecommunications group of Information Technology Services.

To request a higher discount on your Verizon Wireless account,  go to

www.verizonwireless.com/discounts

and enter your W&L e-mail address as prompted.  When you finish, Verizon will send you an e-mail with further instructions. The e-mail will mention the League of Oregon Cities; the discount is available through W&L’s participation in a program provided through this organization. Please be aware that to qualify for discounts:

• Service must be in your own personal name (as the employee)
• If you have a Family Share Plan, the discount will be taken from the Primary Line (the line that carries the minutes as secondary lines are not discounted).
• If you have a single line plan, the cost of that plan must be above $35 to qualify

Please contact Dana Camper (dcamper@wlu.edu) with any questions.

New options for online learning

Several changes are planned or under  way in the options provided by W&L for online learning of information technology. W&L’s subscription to Element K, a Web-based tool offering interactive software tutorials, will end on June 30, 2010. Anyone who wishes to save data from their Element K account, such as transcript information, should do so before June 30.

Lynda.com will be licensed for W&L in the place of Element K, which was primarily used by students in the Information Technology Literacy course (INTR 201). Lynda.com will offer a more focused and cost-effective means of IT education than Element K, and will be available for faculty and staff as well as students; details will be announced in the fall.

Information Technology Services has introduced a new online tool called the Knowledge Base, with answers to IT-related questions commonly asked at W&L. The Knowledge Base is available at
http://help.wlu.edu
, or click on the Knowledge Base banner on the ITS home page at
http://its.wlu.edu

In addition, thousands of online books and videos on information technology are available to W&L faculty, staff and students through Safari Books Online. To see the list of available titles, access Annie, W&L’s online library catalog, at
http://annie.wlu.edu
and do a title search for Safari Books Online.  To find a specific title, select the Advanced Search tab in Annie, enter a search term, such as “Excel” and then click on Material Type “ebooks.”

Reduce your spam

Protect your data and reduce annoyance by helping to train Digitar, W&L’s e-mail-filtering tool, to identify unwanted messages.

Digitar automatically recognizes and blocks many kinds of spam, as well as viruses and other dangerous content delivered via e-mail. But these threats are constantly evolving, so your involvement in helping identify unwanted e-mail can help increase the effectiveness of the tool.

Here’s how it works. Suppose you receive an e-mail to “Valued User,” from the “WebMail Administrator,” that your e-mail account is about to be disabled unless you click on a link in the e-mail in order to verify certain information. You’re suspicious because the message is not personalized, and when you hover your mouse over the link (without clicking), the Web address that pops up does not seem to be related to the University.  You verify with the Information Desk that the e-mail is a fraud, and forward it to spam@wlu.edu.  Digitar receives the e-mail, classifies all similar, incoming messages as spam, and will block them from delivery to W&L addresses.

For more information on W&L’s spam-filtering capability, see
http://nospam.wlu.edu

Account update message is fake

Please beware of a message purporting to come from Washington and Lee University, asking you click on a link and log in (see below). Legitimate messages from Information Technology Services are signed and will include specific contact information.

If you receive the message below, or ones similar to it, delete the message without clicking on the link.

—-

Dear Valued User,

A scheduled maintenance has just been completed on the Washington Lee University online system. Due to the maintenance in which was completed, you will be required to immediately login in order to keep your account active. Kindly click on the “Washington Lee University” link stated below:

Login to Washington Lee University

We apologize for any inconveniences caused.

Security Department,

Washington Lee University.