Monthly Archives: October 2016

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IS Service Desk Mission

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Team,

It was recently brought to my attention that the mission of the IS Service Desk is not clear to all of our technicians.

Please note: it is not my expectation that we be the experts on everything that customers might bring to us. However, it is my expectation that we will tell customers what we CAN do to help, and route them to the right places or help them find the information they need. Customers may sometimes have unreasonable expectations, and if that happens, you are welcome to refer them to a supervisor.

The following statement is located on the Service Desk website. Please tell me if this covers the issue clearly or if more clarity is needed. This is not a mission statement (yet) but will be the raw material for establishing one.

The IS Service Desk is the single point of contact for getting help with all services provided by Information Services. This includes general assistance with campus-wide services such as ONID, the wireless network, and Canvas, as well as the desktop support service known as Community Network.

We provide “Tier 1” technical support to students and employees. For more difficult technical problems, we make referrals to department IT contacts or outside support services as needed.

We also help with any software not listed here to the best of our abilities and as time permits. This support is provided on a “best effort” basis.

Students and employees may contact the IS Service Desk by phone, email, or walk-up.

If you continue to the “About” page, the following is also outlined:

Services Available

  • Help with password changes and login problems
  • Application support (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.)
  • Operating system problem or error diagnosis
  • Assistance and education with malware removal
  • Laptop service for personal devices (To best serve you, we require you to stay with your laptop for 30 minutes to ensure the problem is completely understood and we have enough details from you to solve the problem.)
    • Basic hardware diagnosis
    • Simple hardware replacement: hard drive, CD-ROM, battery, RAM
    • Laptop wireless connectivity
    • Operating system installation/rebuilds
    • Wireless printing
  • Residence hall network (ResNet) connection help
  • Technology education
  • ONID, unified OSU accounts, Canvas, Online Services, and other campus technology support
  • Referrals to the appropriate place for help

Our goal as a team is to help you overcome your computer problems, to the best of our ability.

Services NOT available

  • Intensive hardware repairs – such as motherboard or LCD screen replacements – on personal devices.
  • Unassisted customer data backup for personal devices. You must be present at all times. We prefer that you also bring your own backup medium, although we also have temporary, 30 day storage available.
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Outlook GPO update

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The Outlook GPO has been updated in two ways:

  • The GPO has been renamed from “Outlook – Junk Mail Disable” to “Outlook Experience General”
  • The GPO now removes the iTunes plugins from Outlook in addition to configuring the junk mail filtering options

The latter is accomplished by deleting the following four registry keys:

  • HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Addins\Apple.DAV.Addin
  • HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Addins\Apple.DAV.Addin
  • HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Addins\OutlookChangeNotifier.Connect
  • SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Addins\OutlookChangeNotifier.Connect

This is functionally equivalent to removing them from the list of COM addins via the Outlook options.

In general, the iTunes plugins for Outlook have been problematic (hangs while loading and other general performance issues), with this also making the rounds on MSDN/Technet in the last couple of months. We’re removing the plugin from Outlook en masse because in addition to that, we don’t want our users synchronizing data via the methods that the plugin supports (we should have them use ActiveSync or IMAP).

 

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Casper Update: Screen Connect Client update on macs

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I have created a new policy to update the screenconnect client on all macs to the latest version (6.) This policy also runs a script to add the client to trusted applications. Once this policy is ran, users should no longer have issues running the client when trying to establish a session, even when logged into a non administrator account.

The policy will go live to all machines tonight. It will be completely silent on the user side of things. They will not see any sort of change on their machine.

As always, if you have any questions or concerns, feel free to shoot me an email: christopher.johnson@oregonstate.edu

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TeamDynamix implementation for Service Desk 11/16/2016

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Please read the following announcement and let me know if you have any questions or concerns.

On November 16, 2016, Client Services and Server Support will transition to using TeamDynamix (TD) for all new Incident and Service Request tickets. Existing tickets in COHO will be processed and closed within Coho. Following that, COHO will be available in read-only mode for those tickets created prior to the cut-over. Other teams still in Coho will continue to use it until we have cut them over as well.

The project team’s current focus is on finalizing the design and build of the ticketing application in TD for the Service Desk. This work includes designing ticket types, templates, task templates, forms, groups, reports and technician dashboards for Service Desk and Server Support.

Training
Once the design and implementation is complete, the project team will prepare documentation and training for all technicians. The training session for technicians will be about 2 hours long. We will hold several training sessions in late October, allowing people to fit the training into their regular work schedule.

Our TD consultant will be on-site this Thursday to meet with the project team, IS leadership, and to conduct train the trainer sessions.

Road Map
For the November implementation, we are only including Incident Management, Service Request Management and Change Management. We will not be including Service Catalog, Knowledge Management, Project Management, Problem Management, Asset Management or other components of TD at this time. We will be scoping out the roadmap for these features at a a later date.

Starting in December, other IS teams will be rolled in to TeamDynamix as well, pending further coordination with those groups. Priority will be given to teams that are either already in Coho, or that don’t have a ticketing system and process a large number of requests.

Improvements
The project team recognizes that changing a tool like this can be very disruptive. We are taking this opportunity to streamline processes that to-date have been burdensome in COHO. The following are some of the improvements technicians will see in TD:

  • TD will require only minimal fields in order to enter a ticket; time tracking will not be required.
  • The user’s department and type (e.g. employee, student) will be auto-filled based on a Banner upload.
  • Ticket history for a user is easily viewed within TD, unlike Coho where we have to use a separate tool (RefTool) to see this information.
  • Templates will be available within TD to facilitate auto-filling fields for specific, oft-requested items.
  • Custom attributes in TD allow us to replace templates from TemplateHub, and we can perform queries on these attributes.
  • We will define desktop templates to facilitate finding new tickets that need attention, or items that have been assigned to individual techs.
  • Metrics are easier to report and display on, showing the work you accomplished.

So, while many things will be different, and some probably “not as nice” as COHO, other features will be a big improvement for us.

Q&A
Q: Will this change impact me?
A: This change will impact the following teams: Call center, Walk-up, CN Field, CN Bench, CN Accounts, CN ECTU, CN OSU-Cascades, Campus Labs and Server Support. Other teams and their workflows will be brought in to TD at a later date.

Q: Will this change impact customers?
A: Customers will notice differences in the look and feel of emails and e-mail addresses from our ticketing system. As we transition web forms to TD, customers will see those changes as well. Overall impact to customers should be very minimal, however.

Q: Who are the project team members?
A: Currently, the project team includes Lucas Friedrichsen, Kirsten Petersen, Max Cohen, Chris Sinnett, Jason Appah and Liv Vitale.