Fall 2022 Newsletter
Agiloft
Agiloft: A Contract Management Platform
Information Technology Services (ITS) and the Office of University Counsel have been collaborating on introducing Agiloft, a contract management platform.
Agiloft will bring a new, centralized system in the cloud for new contracts to be housed and managed, allowing contracts to be more easily managed and viewable in a single pane of glass. Also brought to the table is a complete streamlining of the contract lifecycle from the initial request to contract execution.
It doesn't end there: Agiloft will leverage Adobe Sign to help meet the university’s goals of reducing carbon footprint and digital transformation. Lastly, once contracts are executed, Agiloft can set reminders as the end date of the contract approaches to remind contract owners of expiration dates.
Be on the lookout for more information regarding Agiloft as we approach the end of the beta.
Web Administration
Cascade CMS Training
HPU College websites will soon have a new look!
Each of our college websites will have a more modern user interface that will look more optimized, regardless of the device you are viewing the websites on. We will be adding more web elements, such as cards, sliders, pop ups, searchable tables, pagination, and much more! This will enable HPU’s faculty members and researchers to build websites that are within HPU’s jurisdiction, and in accordance with HPU’s branding guides, instead of relying on third-party paid services such as Word Press, WIX, Squarespace, and so on.
So far, we have begun the make-over with the Research page for the faculty members of each College. Once we have completed this transition, we will provide training for everyone to build their websites from scratch. Once that work is done, we will start working on college homepages which will contain all those Research pages.
The ‘Ohana University News Hub
Breaking News!
Our university news system is not just HPU News anymore! Spearheaded by the members of the Communications and Marketing department, in cooperation with Enterprise Apps, HPU News is now: The ‘Ohana: HPU’s Daily News. This is a part of our redesign and consolidation process together with other major upcoming web projects.
The old HPU News was phased out due to its inflexibility to both end users and maintainers of the news hub. Also, there were a lot of inconsistencies starting from the front end (the user interface) to the backend (site functionality). With the improved look and functionality of the new version of the news hub, navigating and searching for a word has never been easier!
Since there are numerous articles to view, we needed to implement an ID system for each of them. The old way of adding a news article involved creating an HTML page for each article, reducing the flexibility of the website and increasing its overall size exponentially. With the ID system, readers only view one page, and the contents will change according to the ID of that article. In addition, if we ever need to update the layout or the user interface of the news hub, we can easily do so, by changing just one page, instead of changing the user interface of thousands of individual HTML pages! Not only is the new system streamlined, it is also future- proofed!
Esports
Esports Summer Updates
HPU Esports had a very eventful Summer - its busiest to date. We kicked off the summer with an Esports Summer Camp at the Arena: Four separate week-long sessions focused on gaming and Esports fundamentals, team building, new technologies and fun. These programs had high demand and provided excellent feedback.
In addition to Esports camps, the HPU Esports Arena also welcomed several schools and local organizations for large private gaming and education events. Several YMCA chapters, Palama Estate, various high schools, the University of Hawaii at Mānoa and the US Air Force (full-day Warzone Tournament) held private events planned to round out our summer.
In July, HPU Esports saw the successful iteration of a six-month long project in partnership with the TRUE Initiative and Waipahu Public Library. The launch of the TRUE Esports and Tech Lab at Waipahu Library was met with great fanfare: a League of Legends show match between HPU Esports and UH Esports took place before Governor Ige, an audience of local press and business leaders, and was broadcast on ESPN Honolulu, Ōlelo, and Twitch. HPU Esports not only consulted on the build, set-up and programming for the project, we also contributed gaming PCs for the show match and managed to take home the win.
July was our busiest month ever at the arena. We welcomed a growing number of local gamers and hosted hundreds of sailors taking a break from RIMPAC 2022. At several points we had a wait-list of over 20 people and a consistently full house.
We capped off the Summer with Welcome Week for incoming students, Varsity Valorant, and a remote at the Kaneohe Bay Air Show. The success of the programming and community outreach has created new partnerships for HPU Esports. Finally, we would like to give a huge shout-out to our students and staff for their incredible work throughout the summer.
Cybersecurity Updates
Improving HPU's Cybersecurity
Hawaii Pacific University is investing significant effort into improving its cybersecurity posture to meet the needs of students, staff and faculty. New staff, including a Cybersecurity Analyst and Information Security Officer, are dedicated to improving HPU cybersecurity and are building a roadmap to better protect our users and data. We would like to share a glimpse into some upcoming efforts to improve our systems.
One common concern for our users is phishing e-mails which attempt to impersonate, compromise or scam HPU staff and faculty. Our users can expect multiple improvements to our e-mail systems in the coming months to help reduce this threat and keep inboxes clean.
The first improvement is a new Phishing Alert button. This feature will allow users to report suspicious emails. Upon clicking the Phishing Alert Button, the email in question will be forwarded to our Information Security team. Once forwarded, it will immediately be removed from the user’s Inbox. This functionality will support Desktop, Cloud and Mobile versions of Outlook and is intended to help employees have additional email security whether at home or in the office.
A second feature that is being tested will help prevent impersonation of HPU staff: E-mail spoofing happens when an adversary pretends to be someone from HPU and attempts to trick an end-user into interacting with the email to acquire information which will help them gain further access, data or financial rewards. Anti-spoofing protection will help prevent spoofed emails by verifying emails, whether or not they are from a trusted sender. Once an email is identified as suspicious, it will automatically be moved to the Junk folder where links, attachments, and other functionalities will be disabled to prevent users from accidentally interacting with the suspicious email.
Our third line of defense is called Safe Links. Even when we have very good email security with many layers of protection in place, some malicious emails will still make their way to our inboxes. Sometimes a user might interact with suspicious links in the email and put our organization at risk. Safe Links will help prevent these incidents by scanning unverified links that are clicked from an email before allowing the user to have direct access to a website. The website is scanned for malicious content and the user will be notified about website’s safety. Otherwise the site will load normally for the user.