TO: All System Administration and Construction Fund Employees
FROM: Hao Wang, Chief Information Officer
DATE: August 22, 2013
SUBJECT: Announcing SUNY Blue as our Intranet and Collaboration Platform
Welcome to SUNY Blue! SUNY Blue is our new intranet platform, created so that all of our employees can connect, communicate, and collaborate on a regular basis. The new home page for every employee here at SUNY System Administration, SUNY Blue will enable our ability to share documents, work on projects together, and eventually automate much of our existing paper-based manual workflows such as travel requests and approvals. By August 26th, 2013, SUNY Blue will be live and available at blue.suny.edu.
Key Features
One of the top features of any intranet is employee search. SUNY Blue will enable the search of any of our employees for their name, picture, title, office location, phone numbers, e-mail, skill sets, professional interests, work portfolio, reporting relationships, and much more. This will help us build a closely connected open working environment here at System Administration.
Using a new unified communication software installed on your computer called Jabber, SUNY Blue will allow you to share availability status, send each other instant messages, view each other’s desktop, share PowerPoint presentations, and conduct voice and video conferences with your colleagues at any location that is part of SUNY System Administration (SUNY Plaza, NYC Office, Global Center, Center for Professional Development). Jabber’s functionality will also integrate with Outlook e-mail to allow you to instantly initiate phone calls, send emails, and write instant messages with a single click.
Departmental sites will allow each department to create, publish, and share information among employees in both open and secure ways. Several units such as the Board of Trustees office, Shared Services, and Information Technology have been piloting their sites. Through a future shared content management system, SUNY Blue will also integrate with our public facing website to ensure synchronization of public messages and policies online.
Paperless automated business processes are also being introduced. We have piloted a new travel request process that is entirely digital on SUNY Blue. This new workflow will route online travel request forms through the appropriate chain of approval without the need to manually fill our paper forms - shortening the request approval process and enabling better reporting and analysis of our travel activities.
SUNY Blue also enables single sign-on to cloud email for our employees. Web access to cloud email has become preferred email access method for its much improved reliability. Every employee will be able to access his/her SUNY email right there in SUNY Blue.
Additionally, SUNY Blue will feature a SUNY calendar for events, System Administration announcements, Generation SUNY blog posts, SUNY in the News, project sites, and other useful tools. It will also leverage single sign-on to provide automatic access to authorized business systems and applications such as time and attendance.
Demonstration, Training, and Web Camera
In an effort to provide training and support to our System Administration and Construction Fund staff, the Office of Information Technology will be offering live demonstrations, overview, and FAQ walk-in sessions between 9:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. on Monday, August 26th in room S137.
Shortly after SUNY Blue goes live, we will ask each department to designate one or two departmental site managers. Training on how to create, publish, organize, and manage site content will be arranged.
Since the unified communication has a videoconferencing component, in order to take advantage of this feature, you will need a web camera if you do not have one already. Please email helpdesk@suny.edu if you would like to take advantage of this feature and we will order a web camera to be installed for you in the future.
For additional information, processes, policies, request forms, dates for scheduled demos and online help tutorials please visit our web site at http://www.suny.edu/web/sunyblue
Continuous Improvement and Expansion
Every journey starts with a first step. The first version of SUNY Blue will only be the beginning of our continuous efforts to build an open and collaborative work place. We will periodically release additional features to enhance and expand SUNY Blue. Some future additions to SUNY Blue will include:
In this first release, SUNY Blue will be open to employees at System Administration and the Construction Fund. Future releases will expand to include SUNY campus liaisons with the goal of replacing the current Employee Services portal. Eventually, we will make SUNY Blue and its functionalities available to all faculty and staff across our System.
Credits
SUNY Blue itself is a product of collaboration effort across multiple departments of SUNY System Administration. Specifically, I would like to thank the following collaborators: