IT News

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.

Eight years ago, the university faced a moment of change. As Skype reached the end of its lifecycle, teams in UITS needed a new way to communicate. What followed was months of evaluation, testing, and discussion, ultimately leading to the decision to adopt Slack at a time when Microsoft Teams was still emerging and not yet fully mature.

What will happen to rainforests as global temperatures rise with climate change? Biosphere 2 has the hottest rainforest on the planet—there’s a huge temperature change from the shaded forest floor to the top of the tree canopy under the Arizona sun. That makes it the ideal place for postdoctoral researcher Justin Bestily to study resilience in plant life.

When most of campus powers down for the night, critical enterprise systems are just getting started. Reports begin processing. Data compiles. Networks move information between systems. Websites remain online. Behind the scenes, the University of Arizona’s technology infrastructure continues running around the clock—and someone needs to be watching.

Whether it’s a support request, a quick comment after a service interaction, or feedback shared through a form, those experiences help shape how technology services evolve across the university. To better capture and learn from those experiences, University Information Technology Services (UITS) has launched a new Voice of the Customer initiative.

As Flandrau Science Center & Planetarium marks its 50th anniversary, visitors are stepping into an experience that feels anything but ordinary. Inside the dome, the night sky comes alive, planets move in real time, constellations shift overhead, and audiences can travel across the solar system in seconds. Behind the scenes, that seamless experience is powered by advanced computing, high-performance Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), and a carefully designed projection system that brings the universe into focus.

Each year, when more than 130,000 visitors arrive on the University of Arizona campus for the Tucson Festival of Books, they expect to easily find author talks, food vendors, exhibits, and gathering spaces spread across dozens of buildings and hundreds of tents. What most attendees don’t see is the sophisticated mapping effort working quietly behind the scenes to make that experience possible.

University IT systems and networks constantly face the threat of malicious actors attempting to breach them. The staff and faculty responsible for managing these systems must ensure that software and systems are regularly patched and kept current to prevent security vulnerabilities. Besides being a best security practice, this is also mandated by the university’s Vulnerability and Patch Management Policy.

Across the University of Arizona, classrooms welcome students from Tucson and around the globe. Ideas are debated. Research is presented. Complex concepts are broken down in real time. Powering many of those moments is a technology that rarely gets the spotlight but is essential to the experience: audiovisual systems (AV).

In celebration of International Day of Women and Girls in Science, universities around the world are spotlighting the importance of representation, mentorship, and access in shaping the future of scientific discovery. At the University of Arizona, programs like the BIO5 Institute’s Keep Engaging Youth in Science (KEYS) Research Internship Program are helping create powerful early pathways for young women to see themselves not only as students of science, but as its future leaders.