Reftool IT Pros Reflector

Hello all,

The latest change to Reftool went live this last Friday afternoon. In an attempt to help the OSU IT community better help ourselves, we have added IT Pros status to the list of information displayed by Reftool. If a user is an IT Pro, this should appear at the bottom of the “Customer Details” box (i.e. right below “CN Supported”).

IT Pro Reflector

Some questions you might be asking:

Why can’t I see this?

If the IT Pros label is missing, it means that that account is not currently designated as an IT Pro (please see below for further details on what this means). Rather than cluttering the UI with excess useless information, we chose to only display the reflector if the appropriate trait is set. All other accounts will appear the same as before.

But I know (user) is an IT Pro. What gives?

The current setup is intended as a stop-gap measure and may not currently identify all IT Pros.  Users such as CoSINe student employees, IT people in the business units and certain other groups will not show up as IT Pros at this time. For more info on why, see below.

Where does this information come from?

Currently, we are determining IT Pros status based on membership in the IS DCA grouper/AD group. This is intended as a temporary measure until a new, all-inclusive IT Pros grouper group can be created and populated. Until that time, as mentioned above, some actual IT Pros may not appear as IT Pros in Reftool.

Why is this necessary?

The OSU IT community is large and diffuse. Many of us, especially the students who occupy many first-line support roles, are likely unfamiliar with large swathes of this community. In the past, this has led to issues where OSU IT Pros up to the director level have been mistakenly funneled through the normal escalation process as if they were a normal user. Adding this information to Reftool is intended to help IT Pros get quickly escalated to the appropriate level and gain access to the information/individuals they need to do their jobs, hopefully saving valuable time for both the IT Pro and the end users they support.

Further updates will follow as this feature evolves and we work on getting future pieces in place.

As always, if you have any questions, comments or concerns, please let me know!