All,

Some minor improvements and changes have been made to Build-Tracker. These changes will go live Friday morning (2/2/18).

Person Interviewed Field:

Interviews will now include a “Person Interviewed” field for situations where the person interviewed is not the customer who will  be using the machine. A checkbox has been provided to autofill this information in the event that the person interviewed is the customer.

Improved Ticket Updates:

Build steps that prompt to update the ticket will now autopopulate information where applicable. In particular, the “Checkoff Complete” template triggered by the last step in the build has been revamped to display much more information without requiring a manual ticket update. (Note: Tickets will still need to be updated from TDx for placement scheduling, etc.)

Inactive Interviews:

Interviews with a completed build will now automatically be marked as inactive and won’t display in the interview list unless the “Show Inactive” switch is enabled.

Team,

If you add yourself to a department security group for testing or troubleshooting purposes, please remember to remove yourself afterwards.

I have audited group memberships in AD for all Client Services employee accounts, and have removed several that did not appear to be needed. The full list of changes are here – let me know if I removed something you needed.

Team,

Ben has turned off the GPO that forces Exchange cached mode in Outlook on Client Services computers. Our default setting will still be for cached mode to be enabled, but we now have the option to disable it for troubleshooting.

This now matches the configuration that all CN customer computers already had.

To see the change immediately, force update of GPO and exit both Outlook and Skype for Business.

Short history:

We required cached mode on Client Services’ computers last year as part of a pilot to roll that change out to the entire CN fleet. That was part of an effort to address intermittent Exchange communication errors that were resulting in nuisance notifications to many customers. Cached mode helped to suppress those notices. However, since the communication issues have been resolved, there is no reason to force cached mode for everyone.

While cached mode generally works just fine, it can sometimes cause problems with calendar and address book sync, so being able to turn it off is an important trouble-shooting step. Generally, leaving it on is preferred.

The following short article from Educause provides a nice overview of what photogrammetry is and how it is being used in educational settings:

https://library.educause.edu/resources/2018/1/7-things-you-should-know-about-photogrammetry