IT service responds to criticism

Klaus Kvorning Hansen, Vice-president of University IT has responded to four of the five questions from UCPH Professor Johnny Kondrup concerning IT-problems at the University of Copenhagen. »In short – yes, no, no and yes,« writes Hansen, and elaborates:

On the issue of password renewal, Hansen writes that it is a limitation in their system currently being worked on. Apparently, University IT themselves are not always informed when passwords require renewal, and are consequently unable to inform staff and students of this:

»This should be solved by the end of October,« he writes. »But that, of course, does not change the fact that it is very annoying to be unable to log on to anything.«

Read article: Professor recounts tale of salary and IT system nightmare

Log-in solutions

Addressing the ‘smooth and correct login-procedure’, Hansen explains that once you are logged on to the intranet, you have access to every bit of information and every program that you are permitted to access. It is, however, entirely possible that you have to log on again in specific sub-systems, as permissions aren’t ‘inherited’ between systems:

»This can be solved using a single sign-on, meaning that each system communicates with every other system that you are permitted to access, and each would ‘know’ that you are logged in,«

Safe intranet

»A simple solution, supporting a form of single sign-on, is being tested at the moment, but it is not a single sign-on in the true sense of the word, and it would still require a user-id, a ‘strong’ password and the regular renewal of said password.«

This is to stick to the university IT safety policy, ensuring that no one gains unauthorised access to UCPH systems and data.

Stricter data discipline to weed out dead links

Addressing the dead link issue, Hansen writes that: »A new platform is in use now, and for this reason the CMS-system behind the intranet has been hard-hit by errors that we will hopefully have gotten to the bottom of soon,«

Weeding out these errors and practising a stricter data discipline should have this solved in the near future.

Phone loop »unacceptable«

University IT is also investigating what caused the loop when Johnny Kondrup phoned them. Hopefully, it is a simple technical error that can and will be fixed, and whatever the cause they intend to get to solve the problem.

»Saying this, I definitely agree that it is completely unacceptable that one is not at least informed when a telephone service is out of order, no matter what the cause.« writes Hansen.

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