Services

Authentication is the process by which a user interacts with a computer and a computer program to validate or confirm one's identity. This may be performed via the correct combination of username and password, presentation of digital certificate, or other methods.

Authorization is the process of deciding if a user is allowed to access the service he or she has requested.

AIT provides the Movable Type publishing platform to individual student, staff and faculty members of the Penn State community via The Blogs at Penn State.

The Co-location Center (COLO) is a central-housing, secure, climate controlled facility for computer systems available to Penn State departments and units for a monthly fee.

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a client/server mechanism by which machine names get "mapped" (or equated) to IP addresses.

AIT maintains a full suite of extended services associated with Penn State's primary e-mail servers.

Kerberos is a standards based, lightweight, efficient, multi-platform enterprise authentication system based on strong symmetric cryptography.

The keytab generator is an online, self-service method for users to generate kerberos keytabs for use with the Penn State Access Account (dce.psu.edu) kerberos realm.

As of April 7, 2011, no new accounts will be provisioned in the Oracle Collaboration Suite as official vendor support has been discontinued. A replacement production service is being deployed as University Collaboration Suite (UCS). For further information regarding ITS's end of life of Oracle Calendar, please refer to the following ITS Alert, http://alerts.its.psu.edu/alert-2016. If your department is still using Oracle Calendar special circumstances, however, will be considered on a case by case basis by contacting the ITS Accounts Office at accounts@psu.edu or 814-865-4772. Please see your ITS Consultant for more information about migrating your department to UCS.

For information about Penn State Access Account Storage Space (PASS), please visit: http://its.psu.edu/PASS

The Penn State Directory service provides a searchable source of information about Penn State personnel, departments, groups, and roles.

TrackITS is a joint effort between ITS Financial Services and Applied Information Technologies (AIT) to develop an online purchase and asset tracking system.

Penn State's environment for electronic collaboration provides users with a choice of e-mail and calendaring clients including: Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla's Thunderbird, Mail.app, iCal, and the University Collaboration Suite (UCS) desktop and web based clients. This opportunity to choose, provides our users Operating System independence when working with the collaborative suite. The technology the collaborative suite used to provide this service is VMWare's Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS).

A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is a secure encrypted network connection. You may want to use a VPN to connect from your third-party Internet Service Provider (ISP) to Penn State services and resources.

AIT provides Web hosting for individuals and groups.

Penn State WebMail, https://webmail.psu.edu/, is a web-based e-mail client that provides Penn State students, faculty, and staff with anytime, anywhere access to their Penn State e-mail via a web browser. The easy-to-use interface lets users create and organize mailboxes, access directory services, create and add personalized signatures, and change a variety of settings.

WebRAT stands for Web-based Role Assignment Tool. A Role is a group defined by specific attributes. WebRAT is a tool used to manage the membership of these groups. Both a Role and the Attributes used to describe that role are kept in our Penn State Enterprise Directory Service (sometimes known as LDAP). Those Roles, these special groups with specifically defined attributes, can be populated with members which can be anyone having a Penn State Access Account userid.