The Hub: Published By, For and About ITS

The ITS Employee Council provided a wonderful ice cream social for us on Friday June 24, 2005. The weather was warm and the treats were cool!

Welcome! You are reading the thirteenth issue of “The Hub,” the newsletter that is published by, for, and about ITS. This special late edition has the most up-to-date information about contracts on ITS Manning as well as lots of news about our projects and people.

The goal of this publication is to provide each other with timely information about the services and activities of our department and to support the ITS community, and we appreciate your support for our efforts. Submit your stories and announcements to its_communications@unc.edu by 5 p.m. Friday, July 8th, to be included in the July 12th issue.

As part of the University’s coordinated technology plan, the Carolina Computing Initiative (CCI) aims to ensure that Carolina students, faculty, and staff have easy access to high-quality and affordable technology and can use it effectively. At the center of the initiative is the requirement that all undergraduates at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill own laptop computers that meet University specifications. This month CCI launched its seventh year of coordinated efforts with vendors and other campus organizations to distribute students’ technology supplies as part of their attendance at CTOPS (Carolina Testing & Orientation Program Sessions) and TSOP (Transfer Student Orientation Program).

Students are guided through the process individually. In a matter of minutes, they leave the Student Union with a brand new laptop that is networked and customized to the Carolina information technology environment.

CCI team members will be distributing student machines throughout the summer in conjunction with orientation programs. “CTOPs has gone fairly well so far,” says David Eckert of Academic Computing, who manages the day-to-operations of the CCI. He adds that in just the last two weeks (four CTOPS sessions), his team has distributed over 1,000 laptops. “Right now we’ve distributed a few more of the T43 than the R52 ThinkPads. Over the past 3 years, by the end of the summer, it’s near 50% of each type,” he says.

ITS is proud to welcome our new students. Go Heels!–MRB with LJB

Jeremiah Joyner, manager of the Classroom Hotline, clicks the mouse at his desk in Swain, and video of the technology in Murphey classrooms comes into view. It’s 10:52 a.m. on a Wednesday and students are streaming toward the exit. Another click, and Jeremiah can see when the last roomcheck was done for that room and by whom. It’s all part of the powerful Web front-end developed by Jordan Meyer to provide a single page for preventative maintenance checks, and with the assistance of the Remedy Services team, create multiple Remedy Requests for Service (RFS) for individual problems.

Roomchecks are preventive maintenance visits, usually performed by students who are specially trained. Of 246 classrooms maintained by the Hotline, 141 are technology equipped. This summer, 13 more rooms will be added to the list while others go off-line for upgrades, and by Spring 2008, 153–over three-fourths–of the classrooms will be tech enabled.

Tech rooms are ideally checked twice a week; non-tech rooms are checked about once a week. And the Hotline employees check everything. DVD fast forward? Check. Slide projector lamp? Check. Classroom lights,
electric window shades, chalk, markers, batteries? Check. Jeremiah wants the Hotline to be the place to call for any classroom needs. If necessary, Hotline employees will pass along a request to Housekeeping or Facilities Services for follow-up, and create a Remedy ticket to remind themselves to be sure the problem was addressed.

Having just one telephone number as a resource vastly simplifies instructors’ duties. To further streamline reporting, each technology classroom has a telephone that rings directly to the Hotline, or to a separate line in the ITS Response Center when Hotline staff are unavailable. (One call doesn’t quite do it all, as Hotline staff don’t control room reservations, but each classroom has a page on the Hotline Web site, and that page lists whom to call to reserve a room based on the time of day that the room is needed.)

Using our Remedy RFS application, Jeremiah can assign specific rooms to a specific student worker (or groups of rooms to teams of workers, for safety after dark). The student, who carries a laptop and a radio, logs in to the Hotline Web site to see the list of rooms to be checked on that shift. Going to the first room, she enters the name of the room to call up an inventory of equipment used there. The inventory can be edited either from the room or from the database. So if the student discovers that a slide projector is missing from the room, for example, she can temporarily move it from that room’s inventory and generate a report to Public Safety about a possible theft. Once the inventory is confirmed on site, each item must be marked “Not tested,” “Broken,” or “Works fine”; the first two options require a brief text explanation, and a “Broken” option generates a separate Remedy ticket for each piece of equipment.

At the bottom of the report form is a list of inventory items to check, like chalk and light bulbs. The student notes how many of each item were left in the classroom, and clicks Submit when the visit is complete. The room disappears from the assignment list and goes back into a pool to be reassigned at a later date. (Should the room have been locked or occupied when the student arrived, the system would move that assignment to the bottom of the list for that student to recheck later.) A student who finishes checking all the rooms can be assigned additional rooms.

Jeremiah worked with the Remedy Services team to develop menus that are customized for the Hotline, including a drop-down list of the most common problems encountered. Having each classroom listed in RFS menus standardizes room names and numbers for reporting. Reports showing a history of the problems in a given room assist in the planning and scheduling of renovations and upgrades. Reports can tell which rooms were checked when and by whom. A Remedy inventory project now underway will track specific equipment by cost by expected lifetime, so that Jeremiah can budget accurately for the coming year and so that cost-effective decisions can be made about repairing vs. replacing equipment. And another future project will switch the server that powers it all from ColdFusion to PHP/Oracle.

Jeremiah, Jordan, and their teammates had a big challenge in front of them, but using available resources and some creative thinking, found a cost-efficient and effective means to improve their own daily responsibilities and the level of customer service they could provide. Great work!!–LJB with MRB, Jeremiah Joyner, and Tomee Howard

The Hub has exclusive access to upcoming “What ITS About” columns in the University Gazette.. Read on for one of the two “What ITS About” articles coming next week.

Fall semester will see a change for campus in how University e-mail addresses and Onyens are provided with the creation of the new Campus E-mail and Onyen Assignment Program. Security concerns, privacy laws, HIPAA regulations, and identity authentication issues all were factors in the decision by the Chancellor’s Cabinet to adopt a campus-wide e-mail address and Onyen assignment program. The ITS project team leading the effort met extensively with campus technology leaders to examine both the technology requirements and the user preferences that would shape the final implementation plan. Once in place, the program will determine each person’s University Onyen upon assignment of a PID from Human Resources. The assigned Onyen will in turn determine the person’s official University e-mail address. For example, an Onyen of “hsimpson” would be used to create the e-mail address hsimpson@email.unc.edu. This will be the default e-mail address listed in the Campus Directory. Campus alias tools will be in place so that customers may set up alternate e-mail addresses that feed into their accounts. To continue the example, the assigned e-mail address hsimpson@email.unc.edu could include the alias name, determined by the customer, howard_simpson@unc.edu. The alias could be listed in the Campus Directory in place of hsimpson@email.unc.edu.

E-mail accounts managed by individual schools and departments outside of ITS must complete the “Trusted Domain” process to ensure security while protecting server access across campus. Departmental administrators will be given tools to modify aliases for individuals within their departments so that aliases resolve to a departmental mail account. As the project progresses, updates will be provided. Questions about the Campus E-mail and Onyen Assignment Program may be addressed to Candy Davies.–MRB

Dateline: June 6, 2005, Washington, D.C.

This month ibiblio was named an Honors Finalist at a ceremony in Washington by the Chairmen’s Committee for the ComputerWorld Honors Program.

This year over 300 nominations were submitted for the selection of 50 finalists from 10 categories. More about the award is included in the June 6th ComputerWorld article and in an article specifically about ibiblio.

On behalf of The Hub staff and all of ITS, congrats to all ibiblio team members!–MRB

Here’s the second of two “What ITS About” articles coming in next week’s Gazette.

The new campus directory Web site provides an improved search tool coupled with new capabilities for updating personal information. Changes in personal data made on the site will be automatically coordinated with University administrative systems, including the printed directory, Payroll, Human Resources, and Student Information systems. The new site provides faculty, staff, and students with the ability to update home and work addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, opt-in/out settings for informational mass e-mail, personal homepages, and privacy flags.

The new Online Campus Directory is the result of a collaboration among the campus members of the Directory Steering Committee and the ITS project team. Questions about the Online Directory Project may be addressed to the project team at pdmcomments@listserv.unc.edu.–MRB

The 8th Annual IBM ThinkTank Conference was held June 5th-7th at UNC-Chapel Hill. The goal of the Conference is to bring together higher education and K-12 groups to discuss the use of laptops, particularly IBM Think Pads, in education. Discussions include service, support, and vendor relationships.

This year the IBM Executive Forum for senior-level executives ran concurrently with the larger ThinkTank conference. Both Executive Forum and regular conference participants attended the general session in the afternoon, which featured keynote speaker Clayton Christensen, Harvard professor and author of “The Innovator’s Dilemma.” Christen’s presentation, made possible in part from the conference support by Microsoft that was arranged by Will Moore (IBM Education Sector), was entertaining and informative.

The attendance for ThinkTank 2004 was 175; ThinkTank 2005 attendance increased by almost 64% to 274. Of the 274 attendees, higher education professionals numbered 163 people from across 45 institutions and K-12 professionals numbered 25 people from across 16 schools/districts. The other attendees were from IBM/Lenovo.

The Conference also included:

• IBM/Lenovo Tablet announcement on the last day of conference
• K-12 client Jeff Ritter demonstrated VitalSource and Microsoft OneNote on the new Lenovo Tablet
• Record number of attendees that list teaching as a primary job responsibility (47)

Attendees of ThinkTank 2005 were provided tours of the first CCI distribution at CTOPS and a personalized tour of the ITS Response Center (Help Desk). The level of technical skills and high customer service demonstrated at the CCI distribution and ITS Response Center were noted and complimented by many Think Tank attendees.

The biggest event of the Conference? The First Annual ThinkTank Best Ball Tournament won by a local team–Dennis Wilson, Rick Overman, and Linwood Futrelle with ITS and Steve Restivo of Lenovo! Congrats to all ITS staff who helped arrange the conference.–DBM and MRB