Service Desk Digest – 4/5/2019

Important Notices

Accreditation Process 4/15-4/17

The university accreditation process is happening April 15th-17th. Chris Sinnett will set up a computer for them to use in the MU. They may also have some sessions in other locations on campus. There will be several visitors who will likely be using eduroam for wireless. JoAnne Bunnage is the OSU point-of-contact and may call us for IT support. We will also probably have a staff member on-site April 15th. Please treat these customers as VIPs; if you have any questions, contact Chris Sinnett.

Process Updates

Ticket Contacts

We now have the ability to add a contact on a ticket, enabling someone other than the requestor to view that ticket.

This is particularly useful for department LRPs and IT Pros who are not IS employees (neither group have access to view tickets in TDx other than their own). If an IT Pro calls and asks to be added as a contact on a ticket, please do so.

See: How to add a contact to a ticket

Support and Escalation for IT Pros

IT Pros are IT professionals in distributed IT units around campus. Please do not refer them. We should try to resolve their requests.

If an IT Pro asks to be escalated to a tier 2 team (such as NOC, Infrastructure, etc.) it is okay to do so. The assumption is that the IT Pro has already done tier 1 troubleshooting. However, we should still make an effort to collect and record in the ticket any information we can that would be relevant to tier 2 teams, such as usernames, IP addresses, symptoms, etc.

Reminders

Usual Suspects

Three things keep coming up that need improvement:

  1. Get the customer’s name
  2. Get the computer info and add it to the ticket (as an asset for CN computers)
  3. Update computer location in the ticket

Please make sure you are doing those ^^ things. If you have ideas to improve our processes, let me know!

Escalation Versus Referral

Escalation means we ask another team in Information Services for help. Functional escalation involves escalating to a team with specialized expertise or administrative access. Hierarchical escalation involves escalating to management for approval or response (e.g. customer says “I demand to speak to a supervisor.”)

Referral means we have told the customer to talk to a group outside of Information Services. This could be another IT group on campus – such as the Engineering helpdesk – or an administrative unit such as Registrar, a Business Center, or Ecampus. When doing a referral, please make sure the customer knows why they are being referred and what they need to ask for. A “warm transfer” is best – that is, stay on the phone with them to explain the reason for the call to the other office. If the person has already gotten the run-around, ask if you can stay on the phone for a conference call, not just a transfer. Then you get to hear the resolution, too.

Things to Know

Upcoming Dates

  • April 15-17 – OSU accreditation process
  • May 22, 2019 – Duo will be mandatory for all non-students
  • June 28, 2019 – The Cyrus mail server will be retired on or before this date

Duo for Shell Servers

Duo has been enabled for shell.onid.oregonstate.edu and College of Engineering Linux servers. This only affects people who are Duo-enrolled. More information here: ONID Shell Server – Login with Duo

HR Guidance on Employee Privacy

We have received updated instructions from Human Resources regarding employee privacy. This impacts our processes for granting access to another employee’s mailbox and doing mailbox and personal drive exports. Please see: Data Exports, Access and Employee Privacy

MeltBot Launch

The Web and Mobile Services team are working with Enrollment Management to launch a new AI chatbot tool in May of this year. The Service Desk may get some questions about it, but we don’t expect a lot. I’ve created a stub KB article and will update it as we learn more. See: MeltBot Service InfoSheet

News

UIT New Hires

  • Beginning April 1, Melody Riley is the new Director of IT Customer Relationship Management (CRM), reporting to interim CIO Jon Dolan.
  • Beginning March 11, Hao Truong has joined the Identity & Access Management team.
  • Beginning February 1, Jason Peak has joined the Identity & Access Management team.
  • The search to fill the Vice Provost for UIT (CIO) has been announced. More information here.

Knowledge Base Updates

KB Articles Linked to Tickets

I’m working on creating specific KB articles for each type of request and then linking them to tickets. The goal is to get to a point where the steps to resolve a ticket are linked to the ticket, so technicians know what to do, and we know what the resolution was. This will also allow us to better report on the types of requests we get, and then potentially improve those processes.

If you see a KB article linked to a ticket, please review it before proceeding.

If you know the answer to a ticket is in the KB, feel free to link the article to the ticket.

New KB Articles

A few new KB articles to be aware of:

As always, please feel free to edit articles (if you have edit permissions) or put feedback on them.

KB Edit Access?

If you don’t have access to edit KB articles and would like to, write a couple of KB articles first and submit them for review and approval. If they look good, I will grant you access to edit other articles, too.

Training Updates

The Bridge software will be ready to host trainings for students by the end of April. Max and I have some work to do to learn how to implement that for training modules. We will still be using Canvas for now, but transitioning to Bridge probably over Spring/Summer.

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