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.
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 University’s web presence is supported and sustained by a broad network of professionals — communicators, developers, marketers, designers, content owners, and service leaders — each contributing in meaningful but often distributed ways.
In today’s rapidly evolving technology landscape, IT professionals thrive not only through technical expertise but through strong, supportive communities. This session explores how intentional networking, peer collaboration, and professional development pathways can accelerate career growth and elevate entire organizations.
Discover how Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini can make your workday a little smarter and a lot easier. In this session, you will explore key features of both tools, learn when and how to use AI responsibly at Penn State, and practice turning vague prompts into great ones. Perfect for anyone curious about using Copilot and Gemini without feeling overwhelmed! Feel free to bring your laptop and follow along throughout the session.
In this session, I'll share the current state of Penn State's Design System, highlighting how it has grown and showcasing components/pages in production across the University's web ecosystem. Outcomes include a greater understanding of where we are, where we're going, and how we plan to prioritize both the user and authoring experiences along the way.
The Office of Central Procurement collaborated with Outreach and Online Education to analyze, map, and rebuild the Software Request Form. This presentation will cover the redesign process and explain the form's essential role in compliance: the structured Q&A format ensures that appropriate compliance partners can effectively review requirements and negotiate suitable agreements based on each software use case.
This session will show how the Penn State Equidox service can remediate PDFs that are difficult to tag including scanned files, infographics, math content and other technical content. The session will cover basic zoning and tagging, adding information for screen readers, OCR tools and inserting MathML for HTML export.
Participants will explore the evolving technology of building and utilizing custom keyboards in the workplace as both an accessibility and productivity tool. We'll examine the practicality of this technology trend, possible productivity boosts, and best practices. A portion of this session will be dedicated to a live demonstration and hands-on exploration of the technology.