Zoom has become a part of the daily routine for many at The University of Texas at Austin since the COVID-19 pandemic made it necessary to move the spring semester online. But preparing for thousands of faculty members, staff members and students to use the popular service for remote instruction and video conferencing was anything but routine. The campus Zoom system was put in place in just days — a task that usually takes weeks, if not months, of planning. At the same time, because of social distancing guidelines, much of the implementation was completed remotely, with team members working together from their at-home screens. 

“From all the time that I’ve worked on campus, we’re usually very methodical and deliberate in terms of the way that we introduce new services and thoughtful planning that goes into it,” David Moss, interim associate director for applications and services in Information Technology Services, says. “This was, by necessity, the complete opposite, where things were literally happening in real time.”

Information Technology Services, or ITS, UT’s main IT group, was responsible for the technical implementation and upkeep of Zoom. Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services, or LAITS, was the instructional and academic face of Zoom for faculty members to help them integrate classes online. After everything was set up, many university groups collaborated to help inform and guide the campus community during the transition to the new online normality. 

One piece was in place months before concerns about COVID-19 even existed. IT Leadership Council (ITLC) had been working to secure a contract with Zoom after trying many online services and in the fall selecting the web conferencing tool as the best fit for UT. In January, an ITLC committee was beginning plans for how Zoom would be used for future instructional use. But those plans were quickly fast-tracked. 

On March 6, before anyone knew the severity of the disruption to the remaining semester, Trice Humpert, interim assistant vice president of ITS, asked Moss whether he could close a contract with Zoom and have the service running on campus by March 13. 

Moss and Mario Guerra, senior information technology manager in the College of Liberal Arts, were responsible for implementing Canvas in 2015.  Moss now manages the campus-wide email service, among other services, while Guerra continues to manage Canvas and other instructional tools. The two were essentially tasked with the same mission as when Canvas was introduced to campus, but instead of the two years of planning that Canvas required, they had less than a week to get Zoom running.

“Under normal circumstances, we would have put together a project plan to offer the service campus-wide,” Moss says. “Usually it’s something that would take place over the course of several months and involve a lot of planning and discussion.” 

Moss and Guerra both say their work together on the Canvas project helped them feel prepared to tackle Zoom. 

“If it was anybody other than Mario, I feel like it would have been difficult for two people that didn’t have the professional relationship that Mario and I did to be able to move this quickly on something, especially given that we both represented these two totally different organizations within the university,” Moss says. “We just hit the ground running and never looked back.” 

They used the College of Education’s preexisting contract with Zoom as a template to finalize a new university contract with the company and added more terms and conditions that applied to the whole campus. The contract was secured on Monday, March 9, and they began to get the technology in place on campus. 

That same day, Moss and Guerra quickly realized they would need a full team from ITS to accomplish such a major task. While on a Microsoft Teams group chat with Guerra, Moss added five new team members who immediately began working on Zoom.

“One by one, we were pulling people into this group chat, and it was kind of like, ‘Hey, congratulations. You’re part of the Zoom team,’” Moss says. “Everybody was really excited to work on it. We had a really flexible and resilient group of technical folks that were ready.” 

The team grew from the original seven members to about 20 people in the first few weeks to respond to the mass of support questions from users. Moss says the team was “almost in a better position” to implement Zoom remotely than if they had done it in person. 

“Those couple weeks, there was nothing but Zoom,” Moss says. “So having that very focused attention, and that accelerated timeline, there were no distractions. It also allowed us to almost block out a little bit of what was going on in the rest of the world because we were so singularly focused on this thing with these very aggressive timelines. We knew that the university was essentially counting on us to have Zoom in place in order to have the remote instruction continuity for the semester.”