BCTC News and Information blog

On December 13th BCTC and CUNY CIS will make MFA mandatory for all faculty and staff.  If MFA is enforced and you don’t have multifactor methods enabled in advance you will have to do it before moving ahead with your sign-in.  Doing it in advance will help you log in when MFA is enforced for your account.

CUNY has a website that discusses MFA for M365, which includes an FAQ.

Please follow the instructions below to set up MFA.  You will be prompted to do this at login within the next few days, but you can set it up in advance of the prompt.

Log into Office 365 from the Quick Links drop-down using your CUNY login credentials, or go to “https://office.com” from your browser, and log in with your CUNY Login credentials to Micrsoft 365.

In the upper right corner, click on your name.

A drop-down will appear—select View Account.

On the My Account page, look for the section called Security Info.  Select Update Info.

On the Security Info page, select +Add Sign in Method.

The add method screen will appear and prompt you to choose a method.  The prompts for each method will be straightforward. We recommend using the Authenticator App as your primary method.

After you have added a few methods, you will want to ensure that the “Default sign-in method” listed is the one you prefer.  You will still be offered all methods when entering your sign-in verification.

When you are done, close the window to exit.

The BCTC help desk can assist, if you have any questions.

Please see the following message from CIS:

As previously communicated, we have implemented Zoom security settings on December 27th that enforced meeting passcodes and waiting rooms for all Zoom meetings. This email provides additional information regarding Zoom meeting passcodes and waiting rooms.

At 6pm on December 27th CUNY CIS will enforce the following Zoom security settings to ensure meeting security:

• A passcode will be required when setting up all Zoom meetings (scheduled, instant and personal) and webinars 
• All Zoom meeting and webinar attendees will be required to enter the passcode to access the meeting
• The use of the Zoom waiting room to validate attendees will be enforced  

These changes will be for all CUNY users and can not be overridden individually or by campus.

Please note that CUNY has set the waiting room options to have anyone in the CUNY Zoom instance to bypass the waiting room by default, and this option also can’t be overridden:

We do anticipate this may necessitate a change in open meetings for support; the potential solution is to require registration and publicly post the registration link instead of the open meeting link.  This will also allow offices holding Zoom office hours to get emails of their customers for followup.

This change is a full enforcement of the current CUNY policy on securing Zoom meetings and is a response to continued meeting disruptions (“zoombombing”) across CUNY.

• You can learn more about these changes, as well as best practices when setting up and running Zoom meetings, by attending one of the following training sessions:  
  
  Wednesday, December 28, 2-3pm 
  Wednesday, January 11, 2-3pm 
  Tuesday, January 24, 11am-12pm  
  
  To register for one of these training sessions, please visit https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcrfuqorT4vE9G5hGqvUyJM3bbXQMohEm8E  
  
  If you are unable to attend the training, you can either review: 

• A training recording to be available with other Zoom training recordings in the CIS Training Zoom channel in Microsoft 365 Stream.
  
• The Zoom Security Protocol document on the CUNY website and in CUNY IT Help [KB0011713] outlines required and recommended Zoom settings, as well as best practices, to ensure safe and secure Zoom meetings and webinars.

The “eduroam” wireless network is now available at Baruch!  Thank you to the networking team at Baruch and CUNY CIS for getting this done.

What this means is that any user from another eduroam organization can log into the Wi-Fi at Baruch by using the “eduroam” SSID and the login credentials from their home institution.  Baruch users can also use their CUNY Login username and password to connect to eduroam both on campus and at any other eduroam institution.  Users from other CUNY schools who come to Baruch can also use eduroam and their CUNY Login to access wireless while on campus.

While you will now see the eduroam SSID everywhere on campus, you should continue to use the Baruch SSID for your normal network access if you’re a Baruch student, faculty or staff member, since it will provide access to additional on-campus resources that eduroam will not.

Connecting to eduroam

In most cases, you will just need to find the “eduroam” wireless network, and when it asks for a username and password provide your CUNY Login username (firstname.lastnamexx@login.cuny.edu) and password.  If you need to configure settings, the following ones will work:

Security:  WPA2 Enterprise
EAP method: PEAP
CA Certificate:  don’t validate
Phase 2 Authentication: GTC

Attached is a screenshot from a Samsung phone showing the setup with the above options (in most cases you shouldn’t need to enter anything but the “CA Certificate” option)

This is what it looks like on an iPhone:

Windows and macOS are similar as well.  Once you configure eduroam at Baruch it will work anyplace eduroam is available.

For additional information about eduroam you can go to https://eduroam.org/ .

We look forward to being able to provide this service to the Baruch community as well as both CUNY and external visitors to Baruch.

The College has licensed LinkedIn Learning for all currently-enrolled Baruch College students and current employees.

LinkedIn Learning is an online educational platform that includes over 16,000 expert-led courses across many subject areas with a focus on business, technology-related, and creative skills. Users are able to receive personalized recommendations or discover, complete, and track courses related to their own interests.

LinkedIn Learning content includes the courses formerly offered via Lynda.com.  In addition, the College has incorporated thousands of courses, videos, and books from its subscription to O’Reilly, an online learning platform in the field of information technology.

There are courses that will led to certification credentials.   If you choose to link your LinkedIn Learning account to your LinkedIn profile, you can download course completion certificates to your profile.  Please note that once you link the two, after you log in with your CUNY Login username and password, you may also have to log in with your LinkedIn credentials, if you had previously logged out of that system.

By default LinkedIn Learning will send you recommendations of courses, but you can manage those communications in your user profile.

Login to LinkedIn Learning using your CUNY Login Credentials.

Below are examples of courses that have already been used by members of the Baruch community.

The College has migrated the faculty activity data from Digital Measures to Interfolio Faculty 180.  To ensure that our use of Faculty 180 begins with accurate data, faculty members need to review their record to make edits, if necessary, or report issues.  The following are specific areas of the faculty activity record that deserve attention in the review process, along with explanations regarding data that cannot be edited by the user.  Questions should be directed to the College’s central email address for managing Interfolio support: AssociateProvost@baruch.cuny.edu.  This page will be updated with new information during the period of faculty Initiated Input in fall 2022.

1. Items Have to  be Marked as Either Peer-Reviewed or Not Peer-Reviewed

The University requires that faculty CVs used in personnel actions indicate that scholarly and creative activities are either peer-reviewed or not peer-reviewed.  There is a field in the Activity Classifications section of the item record that is labelled “Was this peer-reviewed/refereed?*”  As the asterisk indicates, this is a required field.  If that field was blank in Digital Measures, you need to select “Peer-Reviewed/Refereed” or “Not Peer-Reviewed/Refereed” from the drop-down menu.  Otherwise, when you run your CV the item will appear in a separate section “Additional Activities”.  As soon as the designation is selected and the record is saved, the item will move from Additional Activities to its proper place under Peer-Reviewed or Not Peer-Reviewed on the CV.

2. N/a in Co-Author Fields

Some records may contain and display “N/a”  in either the first name or last name field of the co-author of a scholarly or creative work.  That is because the data shifted to an adjacent field, such as the middle initial field.  We corrected these errors when we caught them, but it is likely that there are still cases that need to be addressed.  The data can be cut and pasted from the wrong field to the correct one.

3. Secondary Affiliation Field: CUNY Graduate Center

In the Profile section there is a field for Secondary Affiliation.  The College will soon be batch-loading “CUNY Graduate Center” in that field for faculty who have appointments there.  Faculty should not enter that information in this field themselves.  We need to use consistent language to designate CUNY Graduate Center appointments across all records.

4. Scheduled Teaching – User Cannot Edit

The section Scheduled Teaching contains records from CUNYfirst for courses taught at Baruch and the CUNY Graduate Center.  Baruch courses extend back to the College’s earliest records in CUNYfirst (Summer 2001).   For courses taught at the Graduate Center the starting period is Fall 2012.  Users cannot edit this section.  If there are errors in the data, they are also in the official record in CUNYfirst and should be reported to the department chair or department administrator who handles course scheduling with the Registrar’s office.  Courses taught at other CUNY campuses do not appear in this section, because the College does not have access to this data.  An additional section of the Faculty 180 record is being created to enable reporting of teaching activities at other institutions, including outside CUNY.

5. Grants and Grants (Not via SPAR)

There are two separate sections for grant-related activity.  The section labelled “Grants” contains records from the College’s Office of Sponsored Programs and Research (SPAR) for grants submitted and awarded.  SPAR will be the source of data for this section going forward as well.  The migrated data from the grants section of Digital Measures has been placed in the section that is temporarily named “Grants (Not via SPAR)”.   There is duplication between the two sections that will be addressed.

6. Contact Information in the Profile Section

The College did not use the contact information fields in DM, which is why we did not migrate any data from those fields into the Profile section of Interfolio.  Faculty who enter their contact information should be aware that it may appear on CVs and public profile pages.  For this reason, you should avoid entering a personal cell phone number, an address that is not your office address, a non-Baruch email address, and other private contact information.

New and returning students frequently have challenges connecting to WiFi at the start of the semester. BCTC identified a timing issue that was affecting the ability of students to connect with their Baruch username and password; we have adjusted the parameters on the WiFi network and we believe we have improved that situation.

If you do not know your Baruch username and password, you can reset it at https://mypassword.baruch.cuny.edu/ if you have previously set your password recovery items there; you can also contact the BCTC Helpdesk who can assist in resetting the password.

It is impossible for BCTC to test for connectivity for every device and every combination of operating system, network drivers, etc. If you know you have the correct password and still are not connecting reliably you should make sure you’re running the most recent version of whatever operating system you have, and if there are separate network drivers available for your device you can upbrade those as well. BCTC can assist if necessary as well.

Effective August 1st, 2022, CUNY CIS has disabled M365 Basic Authentication for all CUNY accounts.

What this means is that older clients and methods of access to the CUNY M365 environment (this includes faculty/staff email through the “CUNY tenant” and all student access to M365 including baruchmail.cuny.edu) no longer work. This change is necessary both to improve security of the M365 environment and allow for the enforcement of multifactor authentication (which was previously enabled for student accounts and will be enabled for faculty and staff accounts shortly.)

Among other things this affects it affects people who are using the Gmail POP3 importer. Gmail has not updated this interface to use modern authentication, and if they do not before October 1st 2022 when Microsoft will completely disable basic authentication for all Microsoft accounts it will stop working for everyone. Users who are affected can read their CUNY email via the web client, the native M365 support in iOS and Android (both of which support modern authentication), the Outlook client (for Mac, Windows, iOS or Android), or any other application that supports modern authentication (also known as OAuth) for POP or IMAP. POP and IMAP access is still enabled when modern authentication is used.

This change is necessary because of the high number of compromised accounts we have seen. If you have received messages from a CUNY address that are scams (these are often employment scams) you know the impact of having accounts that are easily compromised. Enabling modern authentication both reduces the likelihood of this occurring and allows us to fully enforce multifactor authentication which further reduces the chance of account compromise.

Please note that basic authentication was already disabled for faculty and staff M365 accounts in June.

1. Open the “Mail” app:
   
2. If this is the first account you’re entering, you’ll be prompted to add the account, otherwise you’ll need to manually add a new account. Select “Microsoft Exchange”:
   
   
3. Enter your name and your CUNY Login ID in the box and click “Sign In”:
   
4. At the next screen, click “Sign In” again:
   
   
5. You will be presented with the CUNY Web Applications Login, log in with your CUNY Login ID and password:
   
   
   
   
6. Click the apps you want synced to your “Mac” and then click “Done”:
   
   
   
7. The last step is to ensure that your Baruch email address is used for outgoing messages. In Mail, go to the “Mail” menu and select “Preferences”:
   
   
   
8. In the Preferences window, you’ll see the new account you added. Click on the email address and select “Edit Email Addresses”:
   
   
   
   
   
   
9. In the list of email addresses, simply click on the @login.cuny.edu address and change it to your @baruch.cuny.edu email address (note: you will not be able to use an email address for which you are not authorized):
   
   
   
   
10. Once that is completed you should be able to use the Mail app to send and receive email from your Mac.
    

Most Android devices have a “Mail” or “Email” application that can be used to read your Microsoft 365 email. These screenshots were taken on a Galaxy S21 Ultra but the instructions should be similar on any Android device running a current version of Android.

1. Open the “Email” app on your device.
2. You should get an option to “Set up Email”. Pick the “Office 365” option:
   

At the “Sign In” screen, enter your CUNY Login ID (firstname.lastnameXX@login.cuny.edu):

You will be taken to the CUNY Web Applications Login page, where you will login with your CUNY Login ID and password:

Once you log in you may get a permissions dialog from Microsoft asking you to authorize the Email app to have access to your Microsoft 365 account. Click “Accept”:

The Android Email app will then ask you to authorize M365 to be able to configure your device. You should click “activate” here:

You’ll then get a screen asking how much mail you want downloaded to the device, and whether or not calendars, contacts, and tasks should sync to your device. Selectd your desired settings and click “Done”:

Your email app is now configured for use with your Baruch M365 account.