Service Desk Student Employment during COVID-19

Our CIO Andrea Ballinger has confirmed that Service Desk students are considered vital employees. As such, Student Techs who wish to work will be enabled to do so throughout this process. More details to come!

Documentation

We have started a new KB article to serve as a landing page for IT-related COVID-19 information: https://oregonstate.teamdynamix.com/TDClient/1935/Portal/KB/ArticleDet?ID=101041

In particular, please note the official OSU COVID-19 website and information number for general, non-IT questions about OSU’s response:

• https://leadership.oregonstate.edu/coronavirus
• non-emergency COVID-19 information line at 541-737-7211

Instructors, students, employees and other community members will have a lot of questions and concerns. Please direct non-IT questions to the resources listed above, and be patient and kind with our customers who may be frustrated or upset about university policies.

You should also review the “Keep” sites, linked on the KB article and in RefTool:

• Keep Learning – resources for students
• Keep Teaching – resources for instructors
• Keep Working – resources for employees

If you have feedback about the “Keep” sites or any other documentation issues, please contact me (Kirsten). I will coordinate with the IS communications team.

Customers Working from Home

We are working with administrative units whose employees handle personally identifiable information (PII) to identify priority people who will receive OSU loaner computers to work at home. Chris Sinnett is the point-of-contact for all such requests. We have ordered laptops to set up for this purpose. More on this later.

Infrastructure are working to stand up an RDP gateway to allow employees to remote into their work computer without needing to use VPN. Richard Turk is the point-of-contact about that.

We should encourage customers not to use the VPN if they don’t have to. A list of services that need or don’t need VPN can be found here: https://oregonstate.teamdynamix.com/TDClient/1935/Portal/KB/ArticleDet?ID=101052

CN-Share, CN-Home and Box

Accessing network drives (such as CN-Share) from off-campus requires VPN. CN customers can also use MyCN for web access to their files, but they have to download files to edit them.

We should encourage customers who will be working from home to move the files they need to Box.

• Review Data classifications chart for what can go on Box: https://uit.oregonstate.edu/ois/data-management-and-classification-overview
• Box getting started info: https://box.oregonstate.edu/getting-started-box

Service Desk Logistics

Starting Saturday 3/14/2020 we will close the walk-up service. We will still maintain our regular hours, but will support customers primarily via phone, web and email. We will only schedule in-person appointments for urgent matters; this can include walk-up work by appointment.

We will be moving some technicians to other locations (involves moving computers and phones, too) to spread our team out for “social distancing”. Max Cohen is taking point on this.

We are working with Telecom to test soft phones, to enable us to sign into the Service Desk split from off-campus. More on this later.

Supporting Teaching

We might add another menu option (option #4) to our phone line to support instructors, operated by staff from Academic Technology. I created a reference document for everyone who will be supporting faculty here: https://oregonstate.teamdynamix.com/TDClient/1935/Portal/KB/ArticleDet?ID=100769

For now, Service Desk should support instructors as best we can. If we get a question that is more about course delivery, course design, or exam delivery, escalate to “Canvas Consultation (Group)” in TeamDynamix. Please collect good details in the ticket before escalating.