IT Pros, Mailing lists, tools, and regular events for campus IT professionals

These mailing lists, conferences, and workshops may be of interest to campus IT professionals.

Conferences and recurring events

  • The IT Pro Forum takes place twice a year in Urbana and once a year in Chicago. 

  • The U of I Web Conference takes place once a year in Urbana.

  • The IT Pro Caffeine Break series takes place every week at 9 am Friday at rotating locations around campus. Weekly details are sent to CCSP and to the Caffeine Break mailing list (described below).

  • Video captured from these events is stored in the Campus IT Pro Videos channel (login required for access).

  • The Recurring meetings of interest to the campus IT community page contains several monthly or biweekly events for groups including accessibility liaisons, cybersecurity liaisons, web hosting customers, and more. You can find opportunities there and/or add your own.

Communities of Practice

The OCIO Communities of Practice page contains information on both centrally organized and participant organized communities of practice, including:

(Centrally organized)

  • Faculty IT Senate
  • IT Council
  • TeamDynamix Advisory Group
  • TeamDynamix Collaborative Board
  • TeamDynamix Communications and Training Committee
  • Website Management Center of Expertise

(Participant organized)

  • Web Implementation Guidelines Group (WIGG) (to join, see the Microsoft Teams spaces below)
  • Women in Technology (to join, see the WIT mailing list below)

Teams and chat groups

Microsoft Teams and other chat services offer community spaces for IT pros to gather. 
The OCIO Microsoft Teams Spaces page contains information on how to connect to:
    • IT End User Services 
    • Boldly IT
    • Answers KB Community of Practice
    • Illinois Splunk Users Group
    • AI & Power Platform
    • Cloud at Illinois
    • Application Development
    • Project Management Community
    • IT Partners
    • IT Partners @ Education
    • ITP Gies Apps, Platforms, and Data Services
    • Security & Privacy Liaisons

Some additional communities gather on Microsoft Teams via recurring meetings of interest to the campus IT community, including Women in IT, Web Conversations, and some programming-specific and platform-specifics groups.

Mailing lists

  • Topical mailing lists of interest to IT Pros are gathered at the OCIO Mailing Lists page. These topical lists include:
    • Tech News Weekly
    • Office of the CIO Newsletter
    • Accessibility
    • AV Pros
    • Caffeine Break
    • Campus Computer Support Professionals (CCSP)
    • Crowdstrike announcements
    • Digital Signage
    • Interest Group in Educational Technologies (IGET)
    • Publish @ Illinois (WordPress multisite web hosting) announcements
    • Shibboleth (authentication) announcements
    • UI Datamasters
    • Webmasters  

The OCIO Mailing Lists page contains additional instructions on how to subscribe to the lists above.

Additional mailing lists that may be of interest to campus IT pros include:

  • Some additional topic-specific mailing lists, approximately alphabetical by list topic and/or title:
    • Bulk Purchasing (email it-bulk-purchasing-request@lists.illinois.edu to request to join)
      A list for discussion and information for IT Pros who purchase computer equipment on behalf of their teams and/or units or advise unit purchasers. Vendor negotiations and updates are shared here, primarily for Dell and Lenovo endpoints, but it is open to any IT equipment purchasing topics.


    • Campus Knowledge Base administrators (list name: uofi-kb-admins )
      Discussion among groups and departments with Knowledge Base (answers.uillinois.edu) spaces

    • Illinois Higher Ed Tableau Users Group (subscribe at https://lists.aits.uillinois.edu/lists/info/ihetug)
      A mailing list for Tableau software users.  

    • Research Support Community (list name: research-support-community)
      A campus-wide network of professionals from many domains dedicated to connecting researchers with the people and tools they need across organizational boundaries.

    • IT Security (list name: it-security)
      A security-related mailing list.

    • Women in Technology (list name: wit)
      A collaborative discussion space for women in technology at the University of Illinois.

  • More campus computing-related mailing lists are available at https://lists.illinois.edu/lists/lists/computing . 

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Keywords:
it pros, caffeine break, it pro forum, it professionals forum, ccsp, mailing lists, tech support, techsupport 
Doc ID:
68107
Owned by:
Dena S. in University of Illinois Technology Services
Created:
2016-10-27
Updated:
2026-10-29
Sites:
University of Illinois Technology Services