More Laurels.

Dateline staff

An Information and Educational Technology team won a silver award in the UC system’s Larry L. Sautter awards program for innovation in information technology.

UC Davis won three awards altogether — counting two honorable mentions for the UC Davis Health System — out of 11 total in the competition for 2011. Award presentations took place Aug. 8 during the UC Computing Services Conference at UC Merced.

The UC Information Technology Leadership Council sponsors the awards program to recognize innovation and encourage faculty and staff to share creative solutions across the system.

The awards’ namesake served as UC Riverside’s associate vice chancellor for Computing and Communications, recognized for his leadership in Riverside’s development and implementation of a modern data network, client server computing and improved technical support services. He died in 1999.

UC Davis IET earned its silver for the Kerberos KDC and Passphrase Upgrade Project, for improved security and reliability in centralized authentication services for the Davis and Sacramento campuses. The Kerberos key distribution center handles on average up to 160,000 authentications daily for secure, automated systems, including those used to access e-mail, report business travel expenses and conduct academic personnel reviews.

The project required all Kerberos users — staff, faculty and students — to start using passphrases instead of passwords. Passphrases, at least 12 characters long (including spaces), are more secure than passwords.

Robert Ono, information technology security coordinator, cited innovative technical approaches as key to the project’s success, along with a communications strategy to get the word out about the switchover from passwords to passphrases. He also credited strong collaboration between the project team and campus administrators, technologists and students.

The Passphrase Change Campaign began last spring and concluded in late February, by which time more than 56,000 computing accounts — more than 96 percent of all active accounts — had been converted from password protection to passphrase protection.

As the campaign progressed, IET added a message to the Kerberos log-in dialogue box, to alert computer users to the pending expiration of their passwords.

Also, IET provided a passphrase strength meter — to show each computer user the strength of his or her passphrase as the user typed it.

The IET team comprised Ono, sponsor and co-chair; Doreen Meyer, technical architect and co-chair; Chris Callahan, technical architect; Joyce Johnstone and Sandra Stewart, co-project managers; Jatinder Singh, manager; John Harris, Tim Metz and Josh Van Horn, system administrators; and Blaise Camp, Brian Donnelly, Bram Lewis, Jed Whitten and Omen Wild, programmers; Julie McCall, communication analyst; and Dan Wright, manager, IT Express computing services help desk.

Here are brief summaries of the UC Davis Health System’s honorable mentions:

• Real Time Location System Refrigeration and Equipment Tracking — The health system is using wireless technology to monitor the temperature in refrigerators in which food and medicine is stored, and to keep track of medical equipment.

The temperature monitoring system alerts staff if anything is awry, and the equipment tracking system — for such items as wheelchairs and gurneys, portable imaging equipment, surgical equipment and poles that hold intravenous fluids — allows staff to find such equipment quickly.

• School of Medicine Admissions System — New software transforms the admissions process from a sluggish, paper-based model to a nimble, electronic system. The school reduced its admissions cycle by five months and notifies students faster so they have more time to make their decisions.

Read the UC Davis Health System news release about the Sautter awards.

Read the UCOP news release on all the award winners. More information, including the application for each project, is available here.