The Hub: Published By, For and About ITS

The ITS holiday party will return to Bailey’s Pub & Grill in Ram’s Plaza this year on Thursday, Dec. 15, from 6:00 until 10:00 p.m—and there’s still time to say you’re coming.

The deadline for reserving your spot has been extended to noon on Thursday. Spouses, dates and children are welcome to enjoy the varied menu and to compete in or watch the darts and pool tournaments. E-mail Beth Crutchfield to let her know how many to expect.

“We’re doing the door prizes differently this year,” reports John Gallagher. To avoid long lines of people filling out their tickets, all those who have said that they’ll attend will be assigned numbers from the RSVP spreadsheet. Numbers will be drawn throughout the evening, and winners need not be present when the numbers are pulled (although they must have attended at some point). Among the prizes offered are an Ipod Nano, a Nokia 9300 cell phone and tickets to the Mark Morris Dance Group at Memorial Hall.

Steve Cornelison and Dave Eckert are organizing the Pool and Darts Extravaganza, with $25 Bailey’s Pub & Grill gift certificates for the winners (not to mention bragging rights). These will be doubles events, so either find a partner or let Steve and Dave assign you someone. E-mail them with your name, skill level (novice, intermediate, ringer) and choice of pool and/or darts. Include your doubles partner’s name or a request to be assigned a partner.–LJB

Work is going well on replacing the existing UNC–Chapel Hill search tool, Verity, with Google, Duncan Riley reports. “Google is the national standard,” says Riley. “Many people already use Google.com to search the Carolina site. By installing Google as our appliance, we can give them search performance at least as good as what they get there—and better perfomance without the advertisements.”

Riley is almost ready to test the installation. People interested in helping him evaluate the appliance should e-mail him at driley@email.unc.edu.–LJB

About 30 ITS staff gathered between Fetzer and Woollen gyms Friday, Dec. 9, to take part in the university’s 15th annual Jingle Bell Jog.

The JBJ is a way for employees to exercise and interact as part of the employee fitness program within Carolina Fitness.

This year Karen McCollough of Infrastructure and Operations served as ITS team leader, coordinating ITS employee sign-up and team registration. “I just wanted everyone to have a little time to socialize in the holiday spirit,” said McCollough. “The turnout was great!”

To participate in a holiday spirit competition, McCollough worked with ITS employees Loretta Bohn, Mary Foscue and Tonya Heath to create festive shirts that said “Let ITSnow.” But most important was the opportunity to get to know more co-workers.

“For next year, I’d like to get as many people as we can out there and [let them know about] more fitness opportunities that employee fitness offers,” said McCollough. “We’re such an enormous organization now that it’s nice for us to get together like this and have some goofy fun while getting some exercise!”

McCollough hopes to see everyone who participated in the Jog bring a co-worker to the Spring Fling run, scheduled for May 5, 2006.–HKC

The Hub’s September 13 article about User Support and Engagement focused on the groups in the division that are most active at the start of each semester. For this issue, Priscilla Alden, assistant vice chancellor for User Support and Engagement, provided us with information on the other groups of US&E.

The On-Site Support (OSS) Service includes two groups. One group provides support staff that sit at the customer’s site and meet all computing needs, which vary greatly from department to department. Recently US&E expanded to include an on-site support person for Marine Sciences—in Morehead City. The other group in OSS is known as the dispatch group; these staff members are sent out as needed to departments without full-time on-site support.

The Computer Repair Center (CRC) provides warranty and non-warranty support for Lenovo computers. They work closely with Lenovo to resolve issues and provide the best service possible. In addition to laptops serviced at the Undergraduate Library, they will also provide on-site repair services for faculty and staff. They also work on certain models of printers.

The Campus Operators provide information assistance for UNC–Chapel Hill. Their callers include many people not affiliated with the University and cover a wide range of requests. The operators’ goal is to provide the information needed or to direct the caller to someone who can provide the information—for instance when they receive calls asking about parking for football games. Because they are the first contact for many people contacting the University, a high quality of service is required. They also assist with the quality assistance callback program for the Help Desk.

The Remedy Services team works with 20 distributed help desks on campus and 21 applications. The team works with customers to meet their requirements and design interfaces, working for ease of use. They also provide training and support for their customers.

The goal for all the groups is to provide the best possible customer service. “As the ‘face’ of ITS for many customers, we strive to meet the customer’s needs in as timely and efficient a manner as possible,” said Alden.–DBM

The Hub is pleased to provide, in every other issue, a column authored by the ITS Accessibility Specialist, Jason Morningstar. “Accessibility Hot Tips” will help all ITS staff members increase their knowledge of accessibility issues and solutions. Accessibility Hot Tips are also electronically published in the ITS Teaching and Learning newsletter, CITations.

In SUMMARY…
Whoa, tables. How in the heck does a blind person interact with tabular data? There are two answers to that question, depending on whether the table is properly marked up or not: either “just like anybody else” or “not too much, really.” First and foremost, use SUMMARY and accurately describe your table—very important and underutilized around here. Next, properly mark up row and column headers. Use the SCOPE and (if necessary, for complex tabular data) ID attributes. The bottom line is that you want to make sure your table makes sense when linearized, because that is how a screen reader will parse it—line by line, according to your markup. It’s a complex topic, and I teach a whole class on tables! My class notes are at http://www.unc.edu/webaccess/consult.html.