IT News

Chancellor Woolsey grew up in a small Missouri town where he spent his plentiful free time marveling at fictional depictions of the future. He watched computers advance, and in his college years 3D printing, then ChatGPT. Somewhere between Star Wars marathons and a lifelong love of science fiction, he developed a question that would follow him to a PhD program at the University of Arizona: what if the technology we've been dreaming about on screen could actually help people?

Trellis CRM, the University of Arizona's enterprise constituent relationship management program, improves the university constituent experience by helping units make data-informed decisions in their day-to-day workflows. Of the products in the Trellis ecosystem, Trellis Events allows users to easily create and manage free or paid virtual, hybrid, and in-person campus events.

Many people think alumni engagement is only about keeping graduates informed. At the University of Arizona, it’s about building lifelong relationships, and increasingly, technology is helping make those connections more personalized, strategic, and scalable than ever before.

The university’s AI roadmap has reached some significant milestones, shared in a town hall opened by chief AI officer David Ebert. The biggest news is that campus community members now have access to U of A GenAI collection built on AWS Bedrock. This includes the generative AI platforms that can support teaching, learning, research and administrative work. All are private and FERPA compliant, though not HIPAA compliant. 

What is the IT job market going to look like in three years? With the advances in technology, especially Artificial Intelligence, it’s difficult to know, which is especially challenging for students working towards their degrees. Luckily, researchers at the University of Arizona are engaged in numerous important projects, from machine learning to quantum computing to health sciences and health sciences engineering.

When the Compass Assistant and Resource Advisor (CARA) recently went live, it marked more than the launch of another chatbot. It represented something bigger: a growing, campus-wide movement to bring practical, secure, and deeply integrated AI tools into everyday work across the University of Arizona.

Across the University of Arizona’s IT ecosystem, a quiet yet transformative effort is nearing completion, one most campus users will experience firsthand, often with a single click to submit a ServiceNow ticket. Beneath that simplicity lies a complex, months-long effort to integrate dozens of independent systems and workflows into a unified platform.

In 1987, the University of Arizona stood at the edge of something new. Today, as Microsoft Teams becomes the hub of collaboration across campus, it’s easy to think we’re navigating uncharted territory. But for many in IT, especially those who remember the early days here at the university, the story feels strikingly familiar.

Members of the campus community are relying on the university’s critical systems to be secure—preventing bad actors from sabotaging services or stealing information. The core of information security is risk management. The Information Security Risk Management Program (RMaP) provides Information Resource Owners a way to identify and minimize potential risks to university systems and information before a successful threat is realized. For 2026, the RMaP cycle is in its 7th year. The program runs every spring, with completion due by June 30.

Beginning Wednesday, April 15, Microsoft will stop offering the embedded Copilot tool within Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. This change will affect University of Arizona students and employees. You don’t need to take any action.