November 2025 Tech News Continued
Wednesday, November 5, 2025
2026 USG Benefits Open Enrollment: This year’s open enrollment period will be held from October 27 through November 7, 2025. This is an active enrollment year, which means action will be required on the part of each UGA employee to ensure that benefits and associated costs match individual circumstances. All faculty and staff enrolled or enrolling in a USG healthcare plan must certify their tobacco status. Employees covering a spouse on their USG/UGA health plan must also update the working spouse certification; those faculty and staff who take no action during open enrollment to complete these certifications will default to the $150 monthly surcharge for each item. Open Enrollment is also the only opportunity to enroll in or donate to the Shared Sick Leave Pool for 2026. This program allows employees to contribute paid sick leave to a shared pool for colleagues who meet eligibility requirements. Learn more about open enrollment.
Qualtrics Cost-Sharing Program Planning Underway: To assist departments interested in continued use of Qualtrics after December 2025, EITS has instituted a cost-sharing program. The deadline to opt-in to the cost-sharing program was May 1, 2025, and cost-sharing program participants have received recommendations for survey clean-ups. Effective January 2026, Qualtrics access will be limited to cost-sharing program participants only, and UGA Single Sign-On will be required. Current faculty and staff who are not part of the cost-sharing program will retain Qualtrics access through December 2025 and have received information on transitioning to alternative survey tools. After this time, they should use QuestionPro as their primary survey tool. For more information, contact the EITS Survey Tools Team.
Teams Phone Available for Campus Units: EITS now offers Teams Phone, a cloud-based, next-generation phone system provided by Microsoft. Teams Phone allows UGA employees to communicate and collaborate anytime, anywhere, on any device. It integrates seamlessly with the Microsoft Teams application on laptops, tablets, or mobile devices, allowing employees to access all calls, chats, calendar invites, and meetings in one place. EITS will transition all phone lines off the legacy PBX and onto Teams Phone by March 2026. Telephone Services is scheduling departments that have not already scheduled their transition to Teams Phone. DTRs should fill out a Teams Phone Onboarding Request for their unit as soon as possible. Upon receiving the onboarding request, approximately six weeks prior to the port date, Telephone Services will schedule a large group meeting to address any concerns and answer questions. The Teams Phone transition does not affect AT&T Centrex/HVS users or phone lines outside of the Athens area. As part of this project, Telephone Services has successfully transitioned around 5,000 extensions off the UGA PBX and approximately 3,500 phone extensions now on Microsoft Teams phone. For more information, contact Steven Duffee.
Transition from Omni CMS to Kaptiv8 WordPress by December 2025: Effective December 2025, Omni CMS (formerly OmniUpdate) will no longer be offered as a content management system for university websites. EITS recommends WordPress provided by Kaptiv8 as an alternative solution for content management and website hosting. All university websites using Omni CMS must migrate to WordPress or another website hosting platform by the end of 2025. The transition from Omni CMS to WordPress was announced in 2023 and began in early 2024. To learn more about options for transitioning to WordPress, visit the EITS Knowlege Base article, Centralized WordPress Hosting. For more information, contact David Crouch.
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