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Print Spooler Disabled Due to PrintNightmare

As a protection against critical, remotely exploitable vulnerabilities within the Windows Print Spooler, Managed Workstation has disabled the Print Spooler on all Managed Workstations.  This will affect your ability to print, including using “print to PDF” functionality, and may prevent some applications from working as well.

This was not a decision taken lightly — we are aware that it may have a wide range of impacts to our customers.  However, the risks this vulnerability poses to the University as a whole gave us no choice but to act.

Please contact us via help@uw.edu if this severely impacts your business continuity and we’ll work with you to find a viable solution.

For reference:

PrintNightmare, Critical Windows Print Spooler Vulnerability | CISA

VU#383432 – Microsoft Windows Print Spooler RpcAddPrinterDriverEx() function allows for RCE (cert.org)

RPG Release: Student Grade Reports – Missing “W” Grades Bug Resolved

The Report Prioritization Group (RPG) just released bug fixes on these BI Portal reports:

In this news story we provide a summary of the changes. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to write help@uw.edu and put “BI Portal Report Question: Student Grade report” in the subject line.

Change Summary:

A user of the student grade report let us know that the two reports were excluding students that received a “W” grade. When they ran the report and chose “W” from the Course Grade Filter, the report returned no results in the dataset.

In researching this issue, we realized there was another issue with the report around “duplicate enrollment courses”. Additionally, some data was being unintentionally excluded based on registration statuses.

All of these issues were being caused by the same problem. We were pulling registration info into a report that should have been strictly built to source grade information from transcript records. All of these issues have been resolved. Now when you run the report, students that received “W” grades will be included in the report, and you’ll see duplicate enrollment grade information as expected.

In short, what you see on the report should match what you see on the transcript for a given student.

More Information on this update:

We made four updates to this report that you should know about:

  • Transcript Grades Only: 
    • We updated the report source to pull entirely from the “transcript” records. In the past, the report also pulled in registration information. The intent was to show all students, including students that have not yet received grades. However, this made the report unnecessarily complicated. So we pulled that part out and now the report is a strictly “transcript grades” report.
  • Resolved the Missing “W” Grades: 
    • Updating the source, resolved the primary bug with the report — the missing W grades. These were being excluded, or in the case of HW not reporting all cases, because these types of grades don’t have a registration status. Previously, the report only displayed records where the Reg Status = ‘A’, ‘C’, ‘R’, or blank, so we missed cases where it was ‘D’, ‘W’, etc.
  • Removed “Reg Status” column: 
    • This is a registration-related data element. Transcript pages in SDB and EARS don’t display this field, and it’s not relevant to transcripts, so this column was removed.
  • The report now displays Duplicate Enrollment information: 
    • Duplicate Enrollment can refer to two things:
      • Course Section Duplicate Enrollment (in Time Schedule): In the Time Schedule, duplicate enrollment refers to a student’s ability to register for multiple sections of a course in a single quarter. To do so, all sections must have the duplicate enrollment flag set to ‘Y’ (time_schedule.dup_enroll_allow). Students can be shown as being enrolled for Section A and B of a course.
      • Student Registration Duplicate Enrollment (in the registration process): Duplicate enrollment refers to multiple additions (“adds”) of a single section to a student’s registration record. This can either be because the student has dropped the section and is re-adding it, or because the section allows for duplicate enrollment in its Time Schedule record.
    • In the report, the duplicate enrollment information can display as identical rows for a student in a single course section. Meanwhile, course credits can be the same or different for each row.

Questions?

This report references important institutional concepts like “Registrar Drop, “Cumulative Grade Point Average” and many others. If you have questions about the meaning of these or any other terms, please explore the links or find more detail in the Knowledge Navigator.

As always, if you have any questions, please write help@uw.edu and put “BI Portal Report Question: Student Grade Report” in the subject line.

Also, to get one on one help and guidance, or to just meet the people who support the BI Portal, please join us on Fridays for Business Intelligence Office Hours.

UWSDBDataStore Reorg on June 5, 2021

The student database (SDB) will go through a reorganization on June 5, 2021 which will cause changes in the Enterprise Data Warehouse database, UWSDBDataStore. These changes to the objects will be available in the UWSDBDataStore on June 7, 2021.
However, data on the new objects will be available as soon as the Data Custodians submit the security role definitions and the SIS team loads the data.

(last modified: 05.28.2021)

*Please continuously monitor this site for the most current update.

Old Columns to be deleted

Table Name Column Name
sa_sf_fund fund_type
sr_instructor instr_hepps_dt
sr_stu_disability stu_disab_grp_cd
stu_disab_acc_5
sys_tbl_19_disability_grp disab_grp_desc

New columns to be added

Table Name Column Name Datatype
budget_resources br_budget_type smallint
sa_transaction op_dat_pay_ref_no char(30)
sf_evaluation verif_done char(1)
verif_date date
sf_history wsos_id char(9)
sr_stu_disability stu_disab_cat tinyint
stu_disab_grp char(2)
stu_disab_subgrp tinyint
stu_disab_reloc bit
sys_tbl_19_disability_grp dgrp_short_desc char(40)
dgrp_long_desc char(150)
sys_tbl_20_disability dcat_short_desc char(40)
dcat_long_desc char(150)
student_2 covid19_stat tinyint
covid19_stat_dt datetime
covid19_exp_dt datetime
covid19_comment char(75)
covid19_updt_dt datetime
covid19_updt_id char(12)
covid19_spare_1 char(12)
covid19_spare_2 char(12)
covid19_spare_3 char(12)
covid19_spare_4 int
covid19_spare_5 int
covid19_spare_6 int

New Table to be Added

Table Name Column Name Datatype
sys_tbl_22_disabl_subgrp table_type tinyint
table_key char(20)
record_type smallint
table_subkey tinyint
dsubgrp_shrt_desc char(40)
dsubgrp_long_desc char(150)
sf_fees sff_year_code smallint
sff_campus tinyint
sff_credit_hours tinyint
sff_fee_amt int

Existing Table to be renamed

Old Table Name New Table Name
sa_wd_sum_trans sa_wd_sum_tran
sys_tbl_24_resident_tbl sys_tbl_24_resident

The UW Microsoft sign in experience is changing

Over the next month, your Microsoft sign in experience for the UW will change to be simpler while remaining secure.

Check out the new experience rolling out next month. 

If you encounter an error when you sign in to Microsoft on June 17, check out the troubleshooting guide to learn what to do.

General communication about this change is being sent via UW Insider and IT Connect News for Students newsletters, with more technical information planned for Computing Directors, techsupport mailing list, and mi-announce mailing list.

Timeline

  • 5/20: UW-IT pilot: UW-IT moved to new experience
    • Status as of 5/25: Zero problems reported across several thousand accounts
  • 6/2: Pilot group 2: 30 percent of all active UW Microsoft accounts moved to new experience (UW NetIDs beginning with a through e)
  • 6/17: Complete removal of federation — all users not in a prior pilot will get the new experience

More information for technical contacts

  • Interactive sign in will shift from a federated sign in to cloud-based sign in. The experience will look slightly different but will be simpler and secure. Note: whether Duo is expected depends on whether the account has opted into ‘UW 2FA for the Web‘.
  • The pilots preview the cloud-based sign in experience without committing the entire tenant to the new experience. This helps us to minimize the possibility of a more significant interruption of service should we need to rollback the removal of federation on 6/17.
  • While your user account might be in a preview of the new experience, you may not see the experience for quite some time. This is because Entra ID interactive sign ins do not happen very often, because the authentication tokens are long-lived and responsive to security events, to improve the user experience without impacting overall security.
  • Users in the pilots who are previewing the cloud-based sign in experience can still end up with a federated sign in experience. This can happen via one of two possible scenarios:
    • If they have a client which can only perform legacy authentication, then their interactive sign in experience will fail back to federated sign in. Note: For the 6/2 pilot, we will automatically omit any user from the pilot who has had legacy authentication use in the past 30 days to reduce the chance of impact.
    • If a “domain_hint” query parameter is passed to an Entra ID application during sign in, then their interactive sign in experience will fail back to federated sign in. For example, https://outlook.office365.com/uw.edu includes the “uw.edu” domain hint parameter in the URL and would result in the federated experience, whereas https://outlook.office365.com/ would result in the new sign in experience.
  • User accounts which experience a Microsoft sign in issue can ask to be removed from the pilot experience, which will take approximately 1 hour. Please have any users who experience problems provide some basic Entra ID authentication troubleshooting information when sending an email to help@uw.edu, subject: “MS sign in transition”
  • On 6/17/2021 around 5pm, the UW Entra ID will remove the possibility of federated authentication with the UW IdP to complete this change. After this change, all users will have the new cloud-based sign in experience and no one will have the federated sign in experience. At that time:
    • Customers which are using a browser from a device which is not Entra ID registered to access applications *might* experience an error during a four hour window immediately following this change, while a service-side cache is cleared. Customers using native clients or from Entra ID registered devices *should not* experience any issues during this four hour period. Overall, we estimate that very few users will see this error.
    • Customers which have integrated applications in a way which requires federated authentication will break. Known examples include:

 

BI Portal Finance Report Changes: Budget Group Code Update

Enterprise Reporting and Analytics just released an update that affects several finance reports in the BI Portal. Here is a summary of the changes and their impact to finance report users.

This work was completed in partnership with the Enterprise Data Warehouse team in UW-IT and the DATAGroup in UW Finance.

What has Changed?

We’ve updated the categories for the Budget Group Codes (Funding Sources) for several BI Portal Finance reports (see list below). These updated categories better reflect the consensus view of budget group code groupings in use today. Specifically, some budgets that have historically been classified as ‘Grants and Contracts’ should be classified as ‘Royalty Revenue’ or ‘Clinical Medicine’, and these budgets are now organized into the correct categories. After reviewing this update with impacted users, we’ve heard that these updated groupings represent an improvement over the old method!

There are no changes to the layout of any of the reports. Everything else will look the same – just some numbers will be showing up in different categories, which we believe is an improvement to the reports.

Here’s an example from the Remaining Balance report:

Before:

Observe that “Research Royalty Fund” (RRF) dollars are grouped in the “Grants and Contracts” category.

After:

Following the update, observe that RRF dollars are broken out into their own category separate from “Grants and Contracts”. The Grants and Contracts value is smaller after the update because the money is grouped into a different category. Please note, the total value has not changed!

Which reports are affected?

The following reports display Budget Group Code information and are affected by this update:

Questions?

This report sources Budget Group Code information from the RPTBudgetGroupFY table in the FinancialSumMart database in the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW). If you have questions about this table, please see Knowledge Navigator: RPTBudgetGroupFY

As always, if you have any questions, please write help@uw.edu and put “BI Portal Question: Budget group codes” (or the specific report name) in the subject line.

HRPWS Release: support for streamline initiative

Update (6/7/2021): HRPWS updates to support the streamline initiative are in production.

Over the past year, we have been working on an initiative to streamline how we get HR/Payroll Data from Workday into the Enterprise Data Platform (the portfolio of services including Enterprise Web Services & Events and the Enterprise Data Warehouse). The purpose of this initiative is to transition away from extracting Workday data primarily with files to having a Web Service pull data using Workday-native APIs and Reports as a Service (RaaS).

We are currently using this streamline approach to support Finance Transformation with our Financial Web Service (FWS v2) and are experiencing the benefits of:

  • increased reliability – reduces our dependence on file creation which has proven to not be performant and will hit size limitations over time potentially resulting in stale data.
  • increased capacity – more automation will be in place that will greatly reduce the amount of manual work that is required with the current approach.
  • reduced complexity – by having our own Web Service pull data directly from Workday, we are reducing the number of steps and platforms that data must flow through before it gets to you.

HRPWS EVAL scheduled for May 10, 2021

We are now ready to transition the HR/Payroll Web Service (HRPWS) to take advantage of the streamline approach.

We are also taking this opportunity to improve the quality of the data as follows:

  • Improving the correctness of the data to better reflect the data source (Workday)
  • Reflecting current data only – HRPWS will no longer provide historical data. The EDW will be the resource of choice for historical data going forward.
  • Some data will be pulled from different Workday resources than they are today
  • Record filtering/deleting has been dramatically reduced in order to better reflect source data
  • Field data manipulation has been eliminated (e.g. extra spaces and characters restored)
  • Although we are NOT removing any fields, we are setting some fields to NULL in preparation for deprecation

Detailed list of upcoming changes in HRPWS

https://wiki.cac.washington.edu/display/hrpws/2021/03/19/HRPWS+Updates

These changes WILL IMPACT you! Please take a moment to review these changes and assess how they will affect your solution(s) and how you will adapt. If you have any questions, please contact us and we will support you.

We are planning to make these changes available in HRPWS EVAL on Monday May 10, 2021. The schedule for deploying into production is contingent on your evaluation experience and schedule for adapting (if needed). Please reach out to us as early as possible if you have any questions or concerns, so that we can ensure a smooth transition experience for you!

Support

Please contact us at hrpws-support@uw.edu if you have any questions or would like to provide feedback.

SpaceWS Release: Support for the new Space Inventory Management System

On March 31, 2021 the source system for Space Web Services (SpaceWS) successfully migrated to a new Space inventory Management System (Invision).

In order to support this migration, the Enterprise Web Services team has released an update to SpaceWS which has resulted in some fields changes.

The complete list of field changes are available on our Wiki at https://wiki.cac.washington.edu/display/EBWS/SpaceWS+v1+Source+Change

Support:

If you would like to learn more about the new Space Inventory Management System, please visit https://facilities.uw.edu/catalog/space-manager or contact uwftech@uw.edu.

For SpaceWS service related questions, please reach out to us at spacews-support@uw.edu

 

RPG Release: Filter Bug Fix on UG Transcript Course Search by Major

The Report Prioritization Group (RPG) just released a bug fix on the BI Portal report Undergraduate Transcript Course Search by Major

In this news story we provide a summary of the change. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to write help@uw.edu and put “BI Portal Report Question: UG Transcript Course Search by Major” in the subject line.

Change Summary:

The report was not working correctly when a user selected more than one course from the Course Number filter. Even if a user selected multiple courses, the report only ran for 1 course. This issue is now resolved!

By design, the Course Number filter is multi-select. We built it this way so that you can choose multiple courses if a program-required course is offered jointly with other courses as part of a Joint Course Loop.

 

A joint course loop is a set of sections or courses that are all offered jointly together. Joint course loops occur in both the curriculum data and in the Time Schedule.

 

In this way, the report allows advisers to look at “their majors” and see if they have taken a program-required course, even if that course is part of a loop. To be clear though, the report does not do the “loop logic” for the user. Instead, it is up to the user to know which courses are part of a loop and select them from the Course Number filter.

For Example:

In this example, I am an adviser for Marine Biology Majors (0-MARBIO-00-1-5). I want to know which of my students have taken the program-required course BIOL 250.

I first choose a quarter and Marine Biology majors using the filter selections in Green in the image above.

Next, I choose all the courses in the joint loop. I know that BIOL 250 is jointly offered with FISH 250 and OCEAN 250. In this case, the courses are not only offered from 3 different departments (i.e. Biology, School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, and School of Oceanography), but those departments are even in different Colleges (i.e. Arts & Sciences and Environment). Again, the report does not have clever logic to search and find all courses in a loop. It is up to you to know where these courses sit in the SDB organization hierarchy.

Finally, I choose Course Taken Indicator Yes, No, and Registered.

The report’s result set shows me that for students that are “my majors” as of Spring 2021, which ones have taken one of the three courses in the loop that meet the Marine Biology program requirements based on the Crs Taken Indicator Column.

Questions?

We published the first version of this report in May 2020. For more details on the release of this report, please read this news story in IT Connect: RPG New Report Release: Undergraduate Transcript Course Search by Major

This report references important institutional concepts like “Eligible to Register“, “Student Hold” and many others. If you have questions about the meaning of these or any other terms, please explore the links or find more detail in the Knowledge Navigator.

As always, if you have any questions, please write help@uw.edu and put “BI Portal Report Question: UG Transcript Course Search by Major” in the subject line.

RPG New Report Release: Academic Scholarship List

The Report Prioritization Group (RPG) just released the newest addition to the BI Portal: Academic Scholarship List

In this news story we explain the purpose and benefits of the new report. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to write help@uw.edu and put “BI Portal Report Question: Academic Scholarship List” in the subject line.

Meaning and Purpose

The new report evolved from a very specific purpose to a more general-use tool for the entire tri-campus academic user community!

  • RPG heard this request:
    • “Will you please build us a report that will help us identify undergraduate students on visas that were dropped due to low scholarship?”
  • What RPG delivered:
    • We built a more flexible report that delivers the use case above, as well as:
      • All students: graduate and undergraduate student population
      • Students with or without visas, and all visa types (not just F or J)
      • All scholarship types, including negative ones (e.g. Drop, Probation), but also positive ones (Dean’s List)

Users and Uses

The Academic Scholarship List report is based on students transcript information and allows you to select a specific (historical) quarter and pull a list of students.

For more information about specific use cases, please visit the Interpretation tab in the BI Portal, or read below.

Report Use Cases:

Easily generate a list of Dean’s List students and give recognition

  1. First, filter filter down the Transcript Quarter and Majors you are interested in
  2. In the Quarterly Scholarship Type Filter, choose ” 1 – Dean’s List”
  3. In the Visa Type filter, choose “Select All”
  4. In the Columns to Display Filter be sure to include: Student Name, UW Email, Preferred First/Last Name, and Display First/Last Name

Now when you run the report you’ll generate a list of Dean’s List students for the selected Majors and Quarters,

If you plan to send a “congratulations” email to these students, be sure you use the Display First and Last Name fields. But please note that “display names” are not guaranteed to be 100% accurate. Please validate them against the Student Name and Preferred Name fields.

Easily generate a list of low scholarship students and offer additional advising support

The report includes all Academic Scholarship Types, including low scholarship and probation. To generate a list of low scholarship students:

  1. First, filter filter down the Transcript Quarter and Majors you are interested in
  2. In the Quarterly Scholarship Type Filter, choose ” 2 – LOW”, ” 3 – PROBATION”, ” 5 – DROP”
  3. In the Visa Type filter, choose “Select All”
  4. In the Columns to Display Filter be sure to include: Student Name, UW Email, Preferred First/Last Name, and Display First/Last Name

If you plan to send a “advising support” email to these students, be sure you use the Display First and Last Name fields. But please note that “display names” are not guaranteed to be 100% accurate. Please validate them against the Student Name and Preferred Name fields.

What is Scholarship?

You may be thinking:

“Scholarship, like Financial Aid?”

No! When we say “Academic Scholarship” in the context of this report, we’re referring to the SDB Scholarship Type:

Academic Scholarship refers to the various satisfactory or unsatisfactory standings of a student as they progress toward completion of their degree. Academic Scholarship does not refer to any types of financial or award scholarships.

For more information on the meaning of this term, please visit the Definitions tab in the BI Portal!

Student Display Name: We Need Your Input

In this report we are piloting a new data element called Student Display Name. We need to hear from you if this element is meaningful and useful and if we should add it to other “list” style reports like Class List by Curriculum Course and Section. To share your input, please write help@uw.edu and put “BI Portal Report Feedback: Academic Scholarship List”

Here’s how it works:

We heard that advisers and others spend hours preparing student names for email lists. So we created the display name fields in the report based on the SDB Student Name so that you no longer have to create it yourself! This new data element relies on the SDB Student Name data and optional student-provided Preferred Name field.

  • If a student does provide a preferred name (first, middle, last), we use that as the display name (first, middle, last)
  • If a student does not provide a preferred name, we parse the SDB Student name into discrete name elements (first, middle, last) and use those.

For Example:

If a student does provide a preferred name:

  • SDB Name: Zimmerman, Robert Allen Sr.
  • Preferred Name: Bob Dylan
  • Display Name:
    • First: Bob
    • Last: Dylan

If a student does not provide a preferred name:

  • SDB Name: Zimmerman, Robert Allen Sr.
  • Preferred Name: <no preferred name>
  • Display Name:
    • First: Robert
    • Last: Zimmerman

Please Note: Parsing a single name field is not an exact science. Here’s an example:

  • We look for the string “IV” in the SDB student name to identify “the fourth”. But sometimes a person’s middle name is “Liv” and we catch that as a partial match.

As a result, we recommend you still use the SDB Name and Preferred Name fields to validate the Display Name results. However, we strongly believe that this “validation” will be faster and easier than “DIY calculation” and will save advisers and other “list report users” lots of time!

Questions?

This report references important institutional concepts like Academic ScholarshipCumulative GPA, Student Display Name, and many others. If you have questions about the meaning of these or any other terms, please explore the links or find more detail in the Knowledge Navigator.

As always, if you have any questions, please write help@uw.edu and put “BI Portal Report Question: Academic Scholarship List” in the subject line.

FWS v2 EVAL Release 2 is now available

FWS v2 Release 2 is now deployed in EVAL. Processing has been turned back on and will provide the most current P1.5 data from UW11 Workday Tenant. Check out the Release Notes here for new features, changes, and bug fixes. You can also find a link to our Release Notes and additional resources including a ‘Getting Started Guide’ to support your evaluation on our FWS v2 Support Page.

FWS v2 DEV continues to provide current P1.5 data. Note that changes are made on DEV on a daily frequency without notice. We continue to recommend EVAL if you require a more stable environment for your evaluation.

Support

  • Please submit support requests to fws-support@uw.edu with ‘FWS v2 EVAL’ in the subject line.
  • Subscribe to fws-ft-users to stay current on upcoming deployments and changes.
  • Subscribe to the FWS v2 Support page; we will be adding new resources to this page periodically.
  • We will support questions related to e.g. missing data, data structure, access/connection issues, and adding access for additional NetIds or Applications.
  • For questions regarding data quality please contact UWFT at uwftask@uw.edu.