Service Desk Digest 1/20/2017

Salmon Bowl

Jeff will be helping out again at the Salmon Bowl in February and April this year. Todd and Jeff were able to secure from CPHHS a laptop cart with Dell laptops for the event. With help from Thomas, Jeff and Jim Galloway, we will be able to upgrade the drives to SSD by re-purposing old lab hardware. Nicely done, guys!

Exchange Issues

The issue with “Microsoft Exchange administrator has made a change that requires you quit and restart Outlook” should be fixed by emergency maintenance tomorrow, 1/21/2017. The root cause was a configuration problem at the load balancers. This should also resolve the issue for customers who see this error when roaming between wired and wireless. More info: 2433305

The intermittent Exchange outages we have been seeing for the past couple weeks are a separate issue. It appears to be a problem with some Mac clients. In some cases, it appeared to be an issue with malware, and in one case with an out-of-date Mac Mail app. The clients open too many connections to the server, causing a performance hit and resulting in disconnects for other users talking to that mailbox server. Server Support are monitoring for clients making too many connections, and are disabling them and notifying desktop support teams as they see this happening. More info: 2531723

Field Techs

Vu Le is now a trained field tech. The current list of field techs available for on-site appointments has been updated. See the Appointment Scheduling Workflow section under Call Center Processes in the ISCS Service Desk Process Guide for details.

Walk-up Access to Back Office

The walk-up area now has a key for after-hours access to the back office, where CN computers are stored before and after the build process.

The West door to the back office area should be unlocked during business hours (Monday through Friday, 8AM to 5PM). At all other times, it should be locked as no one will be staffing those areas.

Thank you to Angela and Max for taking care of that. And thanks to Thomas for bringing up this issue.

Professional Conduct

As a general reminder, please note that food is not allowed in the walk-up at any time, even if you are not on shift. Everyone is welcome to eat in the call center. Please do not eat while you are taking calls – no one wants to hear that, and I don’t care how careful you are with the mute button.

This is also a good time to remind everyone that trash pick-up is on Tuesday evening only. Please do not leave any food trash in the call center or walk-up.  It smells bad and is not kind to your co-workers. There are trash cans just outside the building that you can use.

As space is sometimes tight in the walk-up, please do not hang out in there for long periods of time when you are not on shift. It doesn’t look good to our customers if they walk in and see us playing games, looking at our phones, or goofing off.

Likewise, when working in the call center, please be aware of how loud your conversations are. Technicians working nearby may not be able to hear the customer well over the background noise.

Campus Labs

Reminder: if a computer breaks in the lab, please put one of the “out of order” signs on it, AND assign a ticket in TeamDynamix to the Campus Labs group. Include information in the ticket about what is wrong with the machine.

If you are trying to fix a computer in the lab, you can always ask for help in the #is-campus-labs channel in Slack. However, this is not a substitute for making a ticket.

After hours “special” access to the labs: starting this week, students and employees can fill out a form to request after-hours access to the computer lab in the basement of Milne. The forms should be submitted at the walk-up, and then will be given to the Accounts team to process and reprogram the doors.

 

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