The work world was flipped on its head in March 2020 as world health experts declared a global pandemic. Students were sent home, buildings were closed, and everyone was left trying to figure out how to live and work remotely. Over the next year and a half, we have emerged from our houses to engage in person again.

Those first few days and weeks at Pitt are a whirlwind. So much information is thrown at you during Welcome Week, when you were most concerned about finding your classes and getting moved into your residence hall. Now that you know what you’re doing, it’s time to take your Panther prowess to the next level with the Pitt Mobile app. It’s the only app you need to keep track of everything going on at Pitt!

Every fall, thousands of Pitt students complete an application for graduation, eagerly anticipating donning their caps and gowns to receive their diploma in front of friends and family. After working hard to earn their Pitt degree, with only a single semester to go, all that remains is for their academic advisor to sign off that they have met their degree requirements.

Back in the day, nearly all faculty and staff worked almost entirely in a campus office with a Pitt phone extension, while residence hall rooms had campus phones installed — until cell phones made residence halls phones obsolete and the pandemic introduced wide-spread remote work. Many faculty and staff still work one or more days a week from home … and away from their office phone. They now use their home or cell phone to make work calls or use the Teams app from their laptop to talk with coworkers.

OneNote is Microsoft’s electronic note-taking app that help you organize your notes, edit and annotate them, and share them with others. It is available to all Pitt students, faculty, and staff at no cost as part of Microsoft 365. I asked some OneNote devotees what they loved about it. Here's why it’s their go-to app and how they use it.

With Cybersecurity Awareness Month coming to a close, it would be a crime not to mention one of the most common scams: phishing. No, I’m not talking about that thing you do on the weekends during the summer at the lake, but rather sketchy emails. Whether it’s an unknown professor asking you to be a part of their research team, “Amazon” asking you to verify a purchase you didn’t make, or an announcement that you’ve won a cruise to the Bahamas, phishing has become trickier to spot and affects more people each day than you’d think.

Passwords — you can’t escape them. Logging into Canvas? Enter your password. Checking your email? Password. Online banking? Amazon purchase? Password, password. Passwords are such an integral part of online life, it’s easy to forget how important they are for protecting your digital footprint. According to the 2022 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, over 80% of breaches of online sites and apps were caused by stolen or weak credentials. A little password hygiene can go a long way — because getting hacked stinks.

Cybersecurity has become one of the biggest IT topics over the last two years, from securing digital learning tools during the pandemic, to widespread phishing scams that continue to target students, faculty, and staff. The seemingly endless cybersecurity news cycle and technical jargon that gets tossed around can make cybersecurity seem overwhelming and like something that should be left to the pros, but each of us have a huge role to play in cybersecurity threat prevention, detection, and remediation.

Digital Inclusion Week (October 3–7) is a week of education, awareness, and activism dedicated to addressing disparities in digital access. Digital inequity disproportionately impacts the lives and careers of people of color, older people, those with disabilities, the poor, and women.  Digital inclusion goals include affordable internet, access to appropriate devices, and digital skills training. Pitt IT is a proud partner in engaging the University and community in making strides toward digital equity.

OneDrive is Microsoft’s cloud service that lets you store and protect your files, share and simultaneously edit documents, get to your files from anywhere on all your devices, and even recover previous versions or deleted files. (If you’re not familiar with these features, check out this article.) But OneDrive pros utilize other exceptionally handy features that really take you to the next level.