As the Senior Systems Administrator at the Tepper School of Business, I have had many different responsibilities since I started working at Tepper in November of 2017 as the Systems Administrator.  In June of 2023, I was promoted to Senior Systems Administrator due to the additional job roles I had taken on over the past few years.  I've included a brief overview of some of the bigger projects that I have been involved in as well as my day-to-day responsibilities.  

While the Systems Administrator role had historically not had much customer interaction (mostly behind-the-scenes), I have changed this historical precedent to get more face time with our end users.  I do this by working on some help desk tickets from time-to-time and also going with our help desk support staff to office calls.  This interaction ultimately makes me a better systems administrator as I see how our customers use the technology that I manage.

Tepper Technology Services is currently in the process of migrating inventory management from an in-house developed solution using ServiceNow to a more widely-supported Snipe-IT.

My role has been everything from building the servers and running the service to developing PowerShell scripts to be able to take our inventory, users, and departments to import them into the system.  I've also been utilizing data from multiple data sources to create a more complete overview of our assets.

My ultimate goal is once all of our assets are in Snipe-IT is to utilize Snipe-IT's APIs with APIs from JamfPro, Crashplan, CrowdStrike, and SCCM to be able to give the Tepper Help Desk more information about systems without needing to escalate tickets to a higher tier.

Tepper Technology Services was nominated for an Andy Award in the Teamwork and Collaboration category for the second year in a row.  Unfortunately, we didn't win the award, but we were recognized during the ceremony.

"This award honors staff teams who exemplify collaboration and cooperation with colleagues, students and the university community and recognizes its transformative impact. The team has developed new approaches, methods and systems to improve organizational effectiveness or has improved the student experience and/or students' learning opportunities. It has demonstrated imagination and creativity in solving problems or fostering change that benefits the university community. "

Tepper Technology Services was nominated for an Andy Award in the Teamwork and Collaboration category.

"This award honors staff teams who exemplify collaboration and cooperation with colleagues, students and the university community and recognizes its transformative impact. The team has developed new approaches, methods and systems to improve organizational effectiveness or has improved the student experience and/or students' learning opportunities. It has demonstrated imagination and creativity in solving problems or fostering change that benefits the university community. "

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We are currently wrapping up the migration from Windows Server 2012 R2 with only two remaining servers (both of which have ESU).  This project involved working with faculty, staff, and our development team to move sites, upgrade servers, and ensure available of services.  Throughout the entire process, other than a few scheduled downtime, there were no outages and everything is running on newer (And still in support) operating systems.

Our remaining servers are slated for retirement in the fall, having currently been enrolled in ESU.

I spent most of summer 2023 working through technology solutions for getting CrowdStrike deployed through the Tepper computing environments, both managed infrastructure (Servers), and client workstations.  Staff and Server machines met Carnegie Mellon's deadline ahead of schedule.  I continue to monitor deployments, system health, and respond to detections and CrowdScore Incidents.

During the Crowdstrike Outage of July 2024, I served a a point of contact for the Tepper School to interact with leadership, both at the Tepper level and the Carnegie Mellon-wide level.

My first major project at Tepper was the move from the old GSIA/Posner Hall complex to the brand new Tepper Quad.  This was a multi-phase project.  The first of my responsibilities for this was to coordinate the decommissioning of two server rooms and migrating the still-running servers to the university data center.  After that project was completed, the entire Tepper Technology Services team worked to move the end-user machines and technology to the Tepper Quad over a 4-week period.  After this process was complete, the final part of the project was to get the rest of the systems up and running in the Tepper Quad, such as the digital signage (Using a PowerPoint solution at the time, moved to Visix), Mersive Solstice Pods, and working with the University Events group to get the building grand-opening ready.  Grand Opening happened in September 2018.

Throughout my time at Tepper, my role has expanded to include the management of Tepper's Google Workspace for Education.  I've worked closely with my manager and other stakeholders to refine policies and procedures for account creation, deprovisioning, and system access levels.

Part of this process also included the addition of a 2-Step Verification requirement for all Tepper accounts.  This had been an optional security feature that we enabled in 2018, but we started to mandate the use of 2SV in waves starting with the current students and then moving onto the accounts of our alumni.

There is still more work to do with our Google Workspace instance, and we continue to work through these tasks.

During my tenure at Tepper, I spearheaded the project to get all of our staff laptops centrally managed.  Before I started at Tepper, all the machines were added to an Active Directory domain, but there was no management, all users were administrators on their computer.

Now, our staff machines are managed either by Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (For PCs) or JAMF (For Macs).  We utilized the infrastructure provided by the university's Foundation Services group to set up our own policies, configurations, and deployments.  Our staff no longer have administrative rights, and all updates are managed by the management platforms and myself.

I've also had to troubleshoot the underlying infrastructure when it failed to push updates to Tepper Windows machines.   This required me to work closely with the Foundation Services and Windows Services team on campus to troubleshoot areas of the system that I didn't have access to.  Ultimately, this issue was tracked to a bug in Microsoft's code.

I continue to fine-tune process and procedures and manage the day-to-day operations of the Tepper configurations and deployments within the management platforms.

I served as a migration coordinator for the Tepper School of Business while Carnegie Mellon University migrated all Exchange Mailboxes to Google Workspace.  This role required me to work with our faculty and staff to coordinate the migration of individual mailboxes, shared mailboxes, and resource accounts.  I served as the point of contact between Computing Services and the Tepper School of Business' user base.  This project was completed for Tepper in July of 2022.

I converted all of Tepper's digital signage from two different systems (BrightSigns and Visix) that were difficult to manage into one unified platform, OptiSigns.  The digital signage in the building was not something that historically had been part of the System Administrator role until after the opening of the new Tepper Quad, so there had been no input from a technical standpoint.  Now that we have the opportunity to make changes to the platform, we have decided on a web-based digital signage solution to allow for ease of use by our stakeholders and to allow for a unified platform for all of the digital signage in the building.