Change Management & Outages

The IT Change Management process is dedicated to providing valuable information to the SMU Community related to IT maintenance activities. All changes are tracked within OIT and any change that impacts campus constituents is communicated in advance through our managed campus lists.  These lists are available to faculty and staff only.

Scheduled Maintenance and Outages

Click on Planned Outages to launch the IT Changes site with the most recent scheduled maintenance and outages:

Planned Outages 

Communicating Changes

All changes to the production environment (server updates, configuration changes, networking changes etc) are submitted to the Change Advisory Board (CAB).  The CAB reviews the changes scheduled to ensure that there are no known conflicts and to determine the appropriate type of communication to be sent.  The change is posted to the internal website and information about the change is included in a weekly email to the managed listserve.  Faculty and staff may opt in or out of this list at any time via mylists.smu.edu.

Emergency Outages

Although we work diligently to provide a  reliable and stable technology environment, emergency outages do occur.  When these events happen, the IT staff work as quickly as possible to restore functionality and provide the necessary communication regarding the outage.  Notification during outages is managed by the IT Help Desk staff and the method is determined by the severity of the outage and portion of the campus community affected.