Practical Workflows With Adobe Express: Templates, Consistency, and Accessibility

In this session, I’ll share how I’ve incorporated Adobe Express into my web and digital content workflow to streamline design tasks, maintain consistency, and support accessibility goals. I’ll discuss practical examples of creating and using shared templates, organizing lightweight design assets, and integrating Express into existing web and marketing processes. The session will also highlight built‑in accessibility checks and how they help reinforce inclusive design practices with minimal overhead.

Design Once, Deploy Many: Building an AV Room Standard That Actually Sticks

In many organizations, audio-visual (AV) spaces evolve room-by-room—resulting in inconsistent user experiences, higher support burden, and slower deployments. This session shares a practical approach to AV space standardization based on our in-progress standardization initiative: defining room “archetypes,” establishing baseline technical and user-experience standards, aligning cross-functional stakeholders (IT, AV, facilities, procurement, and web/UC partners), and creating documentation that enables repeatable builds and smoother operations.

What Nobody Prepares You For: Going from Peer to Leader

The transition from peer to leader is one of the most destabilizing and under-supported moments in a professional career. Organizations often promote high performers because of technical expertise, institutional knowledge, or relationship strength—but rarely provide guidance on how to fundamentally redefine those same relationships.

Penn State's AI Services: Empowering a University at Scale

Penn State is launching a leadership-funded portfolio of AI services in 2026 to equitably serve its students, faculty, and staff. Anchored by a university-wide AI literacy campaign, the initiative pairs AI access with the knowledge to use it effectively. Supporting tools include nebulaONE, a multi-model AI platform, and centrally managed premium licenses for ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini — all delivered within Penn State's security and governance framework.

Shifting Left in Shifting Sands: Negotiating Change During Uncertain Times

Penn State IT’s OST strategy is transforming how services are delivered, but the hardest part of modernization is rarely technical. It’s navigating competing priorities, local ownership, and uncertainty about change. This session explores how principles from the best selling business book Getting to Yes can help IT professionals negotiate adoption of shared services without creating friction or resistance.

Tiering the Web: A Practical Framework for Governing Web Sprawl

Abstract:

When we inventoried our web ecosystem at Penn State, we discovered over 2,000 distinct public subdomains and over 100,000 active WP sites across multiple environments.

Over time, institutions accumulate hundreds, sometimes thousands, of sites across multiple CMS platforms, themes, and hosting environments. The result isn’t just brand inconsistency. It’s governance gaps, accessibility risk, analytics fragmentation, duplicated spend, and organizational fatigue.

The Road to 47 Days: Automating the PSU Certificate Lifecycle

The era of the "annual certificate" is over. Following the adoption of Ballot SC-081v3, we have entered a phased reduction of SSL/TLS validity periods: dropping to 200 days in March 2026, 100 days in 2027, and finally 47 days by 2029. Crucially, the Domain Control Validation (DCV) reuse period is shrinking even further—slashing down to just 10 days by the end of this transition. For Penn State's distributed IT environment, this means proving domain ownership is no longer a "once a year" task, but a continuous requirement.