ESUP in the News

ESUP’s leadership have participated in a few conversations with the Minnesota Daily this winter. The discussions have been interesting and likely informative to the University community, but some comments in each article require further explanation.

In a January 23, 2014 article in the Minnesota Daily, Dean Elde spoke about accessibility concerns and how ESUP might be able to help. (Read the article here.)

The article suggests ESUP will include “internally coding University websites to make them readable for people with low vision…”.  ESUP is working hard to make self-service functionality like the new Student Center and Faculty Center areas accessible to all users, but the accessibility of other University websites is not in scope for the program.

On February 5, 2014, the MN Daily published an interview with Dean Elde and Executive Program Director Dennis Wenzel. (Read the article here.)

In that article, Dean Elde is cited as saying the program will have an impact on “managing the benefits rates for University employees and students.” In actuality, the work done on ESUP will result in fewer fringe rates; there will be no change to benefit rates as a result of ESUP.

Later in the same article, there is reference to two-factor authentication when working between systems and the amount of time students will remain logged in to the new University Portal, reporting that, “they [the portal] will just know what systems you have access to, and you won’t have to be reauthenticated for the different parts of the system that you want to go into.”

The first part of that statement is correct--the new University Portal will know to which systems each user has access. However, staff who currently use non-self service parts of the PeopleSoft (PS) system will still be required to use two-factor authentication. At that point, users should be able to move between PS and non-PS systems without reauthenticating.

ESUP has not yet identified the timeout duration for users. Currently, the non self-service PS applications have a 1 hour inactivity timeout, whereas many self-service applications have a 20 minute timeout. Business project directors are still reviewing timeout requirements for ESUP.