A replacement voice-mail service is coming next in a major overhaul of the Davis campus phone system.

About 4,000 people — faculty and staff — use central voice mail, and if they want to continue using it they’ll need to set up accounts in the new service. The switchover is set for Saturday, May 16, and people can avoid uninterrupted voice mail by setting up their new accounts in advance, starting Monday (April 27).

Account set-up instructions are posted at MyPhone.ucdavis.edu, and short how-to videos will be added to the site soon. You’ll have to record a new outgoing message.

If you don’t set up your account by May 15, your voice mail will be unavailable until you do.

Communications Resources, part of Information and Educational Technology, has already begun to help departments move more complicated multiline voice-mail accounts.

The phone system overhaul began in December when the campus switched to seven-digit dialing for calls to other campus numbers. Phase 2 brings the new voice-mail service, described as a better fit for modern telecommunications — such as what the campus is getting in the third and final phase of the phone overhaul: Voice over Internet protocol, or VOIP, in place of wired, analog service.

Questions about phone service in your unit or department? Contact your authorized telecommunications representative (check the ATR directory to find your representative). Other questions or comments shoiuld be directed to the IT Express Service Desk, (530) 754-HELP (4357).

ucd-guest in, moobilenet out

The university is preparing to roll out the wireless service ucd-guest to the entire Davis campus, on Tuesday, May 5, offering simpler Internet access for visitors.

At the same time, moobilenet will be retired. “If you’re one of the relatively few campus affiliates who still use this now-outdated wireless service, you’ll need to switch to one of the campus’s more secure alternatives,” officials said in a TechNews article.

Communications Resources installed ucd-guest in student housing last fall, then extended it to the Conference Center, Gallagher Hall and Buehler Alumni Center on March 10. The service worked as intended, leading to the campuswide rollout.

To use ucd-guest, a visitor simply enters his or her name, email address and mobile phone number into the ucd-guest service, which will then send access information.

This replaces the need for instructors or employees to fill out temporary access forms for visitors. (That process remains in place for extended-stay guests, but ucd-guest will meet most other visitors' needs.)

Other features of ucd-guest:

• Guest accounts do not require campus Kerberos authentication.
• Accounts are valid for five days, although users must re-authenticate if they are off the network for more than eight hours.
• One guest account can accommodate up to three wireless devices.
• Visitors who lose their passwords can simply create a new account.

Faculty, students and staff should not use ucd-guest, which imposes a one-hour limit for anyone who accesses it with campus credentials.

Moving on to eduroam

Moobilenet, once the main campus wireless service, became a secondary choice over the years as UC Davis added moobilenetx and then eduroam. The campus kept moobilenet for visitors, however, and some UC Davis affiliates have continued to use it, perhaps partly due to habit.

Eduroam will eventually become the main campus wireless network, which is one reason why Communication Resources recommends it to campus affiliates who have been using moobilenet. Choosing eduroam now will save them a little extra transition time down the road.

Eduroam also offers a bonus for travelers: It works at other colleges and universities worldwide. Your eduroam login is your UC Davis login (Kerberos) ID plus “@ucdavis.edu.” Eduroam uses encryption to secure your communications, and automatically connects you to the wireless network — you don't have to manually log in to connect. Other Northern California members of eduroam include UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, the UC Office of the President, Stanford University, and California State University, Sacramento.

More information about eduroam is available in “connecting to wireless” articles in the IT Knowledge Base.

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