Tag Archives: Team Dynamix

All Groups

SCCM Sync Update (01/08/2020)

Leave a comment

An update to SCCM sync will be pushed today after 7 PM. Here are the changes.

Setting Owning Customers

Before, SCCM sync set an asset’s owning customer by getting all users in TD and searching for a customer in that list. This was a very expensive task and it was restricted to after hours only.

Now, SCCM sync only gets single user if needed. As a result, SCCM sync can run from 7 AM and 7 PM everyday and update owning customers every time.

Matching SCCM and TDx Assets

Before, the script matched assets from SCCM and TDx by Resource ID (external ID) and serial number. This resulted in complications in cases of rebuilds, where the external ID must be updated.

Now, it does a single match by serial number and treats the external ID as simply another property of an asset to update.

Print CN Label Link

Lastly, the script now checks if an asset has the print CN label link set, in case it was not when the asset was created manually.

Documentation

Before, KB documentation on asset sync was written in a single long article. Now, it is split into a short “parent” article that lists the scripts that make up asset sync and their schedules, and more specific articles for the individual scripts (which are linked in the parent article).

That’s all, folks! If you have questions or concerns, let me know.

All Groups

Service Desk Digest – 8/16/2016

Leave a comment

Customer Service Training

On Tuesday 8/9, all full-time staff in Client Services attended a customer service training provided by Kristen Magis from HR. The goal of the session was to work through the training modules and customize them to our needs. Kristen will also be helping us turn this into a Canvas module so that student workers can do the training ad-hoc.

Box Training

Box is slated to be made available to all students and employees in a soft launch on September 7. The Service Desk is the tier 1 point-of-contact for Box support.

All Client Services staff and student workers (everyone who is here this summer) should be able to login to oregonstate.box.com now. If you had trouble accessing the training before, please try again via this method:

  1. Login to oregonstate.box.com.
  2. Click on “Get Training” on the right.
  3. If this is the first time you have gone to the Training site, wait 1 day before doing the next step.
  4. Search for “Helpdesk Essentials”, click on it, and choose “Launch”.
  5. If that doesn’t work, click on your profile at the top-right, then choose “Transcript” – the training should be listed under “Active”.

Walk-up Moving to Milne

There is a project underway to move the repair and tier 1 services of the walk-up desk from the Library to Milne before school starts in September. The checkout and production services will stay in the library. If this move happens, it will be during early to mid September.

The project team is: Andrew, Kirsten, Max, Samuel, Jeff, Richard, Ed. Ping one of us if you have questions or concerns.

I am currently working on the communications plan and CAB request for this change.

Walk-up folks please note: Community Network customers will also be able to bring their OSU-owned computers to the walk-up for assistance, but we will not be promoting this service until later in Fall. For now, if a CN customer comes to the walkup, please DO NOT TURN THEM AWAY. Ask for their ticket number, or look them up in RefTool to find their ticket, and call the 78787 number if you are not sure what to do.

New IS Website

The Information Services website is being redone, and the new one should be going into production either late August or early September.

You can view the dev version of the new IS site here. I am still working with Sher Fenn to update much of our content.

Apps.oregonstate.edu

Citrix XenApp (apps.oregonstate.edu) has replaced RemoteApps. The Service Desk is the tier 1 point-of-contact for all Citrix requests. Escalate issues to the Campus Labs queue in Coho as needed.

The InfoSheet for Citrix is in ITKnows.

The name of this service may change, but for now we seem to be calling it “Citrix” or “Apps”.

OSU-Cascades New Building

The grand opening for Tykeson Hall is September 13. Greg Chilcote and Shannon Osborne were busy last week getting things ready.

With things being very busy in Bend and with OSU-Cascades expanding to more locations, we are encouraging CN customers at OSU-Cascades to call the call center for support rather than arm-grabbing Greg and Shannon for everything. Always make note of where a customer is located when talking to them on the phone. We can send Greg and Shannon to field appointments in Bend just as we do with field techs here in Corvallis. Max C. is working on getting travel time information to assist us with scheduling.

New Email Address for Service Desk

Beginning with promotional events this Fall and with changes to the IS website, I will be promoting a new email address for contacting the Service Desk.

The official contact information for the Service Desk is as follows:

IS Service Desk

Phone: 541-737-8787 (Corvallis/Statewide),  541-322-2051 (OSU-Cascades)

Email: Service.Desk@oregonstate.edu

Walk-up: Valley Library, main floor lobby area (until this changes)

Fall Service Desk Hours

With the move of the walk-up to Milne, we will be syncing up the call center hours with the walk-up. Our fall hours for walk-up and call center will be:

IS Service Desk Hours

Monday-Friday: 8am-7PM

Saturday/Sunday: 3PM-7PM

Team Dynamix Update

We are getting ready to reboot the project to roll Client Services to Team Dynamix, our new ticketing system.

Lucas Friedrichsen will be heading up this effort, with Paul Bunn as the project manager.

I can’t give an exact time frame yet, but if all goes well, we will be migrating the Service Desk from Coho to Team Dynamix in mid-to-late Fall term.

We will address other groups who use Coho after the Service Desk operations have moved.

All Groups, Base, Bench, Call Desk, Community Network, Field, OCH, SCF, Walkup

Call Center Update – 4/21/2016

2 Comments

Colleagues,

Lately I have been less of a funnel of information and more of a black hole.  We have a lot going on, and I will do my best to hit the highlights here. If you ever want to know more about something, please contact me or your manager.

Speaking of managers:

Some of you who are student workers may not know who your manager is. To clarify: Max Cohen, Samuel Rudin and Jeff Bonnichsen are the current student supervisors. You will work with one or more of them on a daily basis; they will assign you tasks, review your work and give you feedback regularly. Lucas Friedrichsen, Chris Sinnett, Ed Ostrander and I (Kirsten Petersen) are managers. We are responsible for hiring/firing, discipline, conflict resolution, as well as performance feedback. If you have a question or problem, you should generally take it to your supervisor first. If you work in more than one area, take the problem to the supervisor you work with most. If your problem is *with* your supervisor, take it to your manager. If you don’t know who your manager is, please look in the TSS Management tool (linked from RefTool).

Please note that all of the full time staff also have a lead role and may assign you tasks and provide feedback on your work. They may share that feedback with your supervisor or manager as well. They are also a fantastic resource to you if you need advice. Just… read the section below about asking questions first.

 

Asking questions is a good thing.

There is an art to asking questions. You need to be respectful of the other person’s time, you need to bring them the right information to approach the problem, and you need to be willing to learn.

Kirsten’s Guide to Asking Questions:

  1. Gather all the pertinent information and have it ready. The first thing I will ask you is: who is the customer, and what are they trying to do? If you can’t answer that, it’s back to the drawing board for you, and a pointless interruption for me. Also, it’s a delay in resolving the customer’s problem. You should know if this is a laptop, or a Mac, or if the customer is in Hermiston. You should know if they have another computer to use or are dead in the water. You should be so intimate with the problem and what the customer is trying to accomplish that you can speak for them.
  2. Tell me what you have tried. I hope it goes without saying, but: you should have tried some things first. And I don’t mean random things. You should have looked at our documentation and troubleshooting templates (TemplateHub). You should have asked the customer a lot of questions. You should have seen the error they are seeing, or checked the logs. When you come to ask me for help, tell me what steps you have tried and exactly what the outcome was. Be as specific as possible. There could be important clues there to help solve the problem.
  3. Tell me how urgent this problem is. If the customer is still waiting on the phone and they can’t do their job and you have tried everything and are stuck, this is probably urgent. If the customer has a work-around and you are just curious what the right answer is, that’s a very different thing. If I know how urgent this is, I will probably respond differently.
  4. Be willing to learn. Don’t just punt a problem to me and then wash your hands of it (not that any of you would do that, right!?). You should be coming to me because you want to know how to solve this yourself next time.
  5. Help others. Let’s say you went looking for an answer in our documentation and could not find it. You had to ask for help, you got the answer, and you learned. That’s great for you, but doesn’t help your coworkers much. Take the initiative and update the documentation – or at a minimum, let your supervisor know that the documentation is lacking.

 

Things Going On in Client Services, Information Services and OSU

Note: you can always check on the status of large IS projects here: http://is.oregonstate.edu/strategic-plan-projects/project-management

Box

Box is a cloud storage and collaboration platform provided via Internet2 NetPlus. OSU IT leadership met at a storage summit last year to discuss the merits of Box, OneDrive and GoogleDrive, and came to the conclusion that Box provides the best features to meet the university’s needs. In particular, Box should provide better business continuity, better local synchronization tools and better cross-platform feature parity.

In addition, Box is expected to integrate with Office 365 (replacing OneDrive), with Canvas and with Kumo. The project team are targeting Fall term 2016 to make Box available to campus.

A sole source justification has been done for the purchase of Box, and the contract is presently in PACS. A project team has been established, and I am on it. I will provide regular updates here. Currently, we are in a pre-pilot testing phase. The features in the pre-pilot are not what we expected and the implementation team are looking into that problem (it may because we are not under contract yet).

Initially there was much conversation about this service replacing CN-Home and CN-Share, in addition to ONID-FS (the Z drive). CN-Home and ONID-FS home directories seem like a no-brainer, but whether department shares will move to the cloud is a bit unclear at this time.

While it is true that Google Drive is not going away, it is my understanding that the university will declare Box the preferred, supported cloud storage solution.

Exchange Online

The Identity & Access Management team have confirmed that OSU will most likely be migrating to Exchange Online around Fall 2016. They ran into some legacy configuration that held them up, and are working through that now.

Getting all employees unified and enabled for Office 365 is still a pre-requisite for Exchange Online, but is almost complete.

Service Desk, ITIL, ITSM and Team Dynamix

Most of the full-time staff in Client Services attended ITIL and ITSM training this week. All of the directors in Information Services and staff from many other units also attended. The goal of the training is to get to a shared understanding of ITIL principles among IT staff who will use Team Dynamix on a regular basis. We couldn’t send student workers to the training, so I will be doing my best to share what we learned with all of you.

ITIL is a set of best practices that is about aligning IT with the needs of the business it supports, and ITSM is a discipline that breaks down IT management into specific processes.  The adoption of the new Team Dynamix tool for ticket tracking has been a catalyst for us adopting more ITIL practices. In particular, we will be adopting Incident Management, and will be transforming much of Client Services into a Service Desk that serves as the single point of contact for all services provided by Information Services.

Our director, Andrew Wheeler, will be sharing more information with all of you about these changes soon. I know many of you are concerned about what this means for our service to our customers, and for your daily work, so I am working to share as much information with you now as possible. Please be aware that this project is still very much in the planning phase.

The first stage of creating the Service Desk will be to consolidate workflows of the OSU Computer Helpdesk, CN call center and CN field team. This will be my primary focus for the coming weeks. I am working now on mapping out detailed tasks in TeamWork, and you will all have access to view the project there soon.

ITC Recruitment

The recruitment to fill Tom Loveday’s vacant position is in progress. The position has been posted and is open until Friday, April 29th.  The posting is here, and you are welcome to share this with anyone you think would be interested:

https://jobs.oregonstate.edu/postings/23568

The hiring committee members are: Kirsten Petersen, Max Cohen, Keenan Carr and Kaelan Rasmussen. I am also working to add a search advocate from a department outside of Information Services.

Training and Skills Assessment

I will be following up with many of you soon to put together a detailed profile of your skills and to work up a formal training plan. If you already have a LinkedIn profile with that type of information in it, please connect with me there.

Kudos

Kudos to Chris “CJ” Johnson for suggesting that we shift the student field techs to same-day appointments only. This has allowed us to have greater flexibility in responding to urgent site visit requests.

Kudos to Josh Zheng for advocating for the “call assist” role in the call center. We are still ironing out the mechanics, but the idea is that there will always be a seasoned tech in the call center who is available to assist people in calls. This person stays out of the phones, works the queue, and helps on difficult troubleshoots. This is helping to improve the quality of our service and increase first call resolution. Kudos to Robin Castle as well for helping to make this work.

Kudos to Ken Howard for suggesting that when process changes are made, the impact is clearly spelled out for each of our workflows. This came up when we decided to implement named user licenses for Adobe Creative Cloud and I neglected to consider how that would impact computer imaging. I have committed to follow Ken’s suggestion on future communications of changes.

And a sincere “thank you!” to all of you for patiently answering my many questions, putting up with the massive amount of changes we have been going through, and making suggestions that will ultimately make us all more successful.