Athletics IT

Due to staffing issues in Athletics, the Service Desk will be assisting Athletics employees with IT support for the near future.

Athletics have not been on-boarded as CN customers, and we do not have local administrative access to their computers at this time. That may change in the near future.

Please do not refer Athletics customers. Do your best to assist them. See below for options if you get stuck:

  1. Please check the KB first. We will add information to the Athletics internal infosheet as we gather it: https://oregonstate.teamdynamix.com/TDClient/1935/Portal/KB/ArticleDet?ID=27573
  2. Richard Turk is serving as the UIT liaison to Athletics at this time; contact Richard (after checking the KB) for any questions we would normally have brought to Athletics IT, e.g. about department-specific software, network shares, etc.

Service Desk Digest 7/30/2020

ONID Website Update

IAM have launched a new version of the ONID website this week. The pages for signing up for ONID, changing password, and recovering an account (previously: changing a forgotten password) have all been updated and improved. Note: the relevant KB articles have already been updated as this launch was delayed previously by the pandemic.

Communications to Customers

When you are working on a ticket, please make sure to send the customer updates. Even if you are not sure what the next step is, it doesn’t hurt to send an update letting the customer know we are still looking into it. Keeping up good communication is one of our main functions.

If we have bad news for a customer, it is even more important to communicate that early. The longer we make them wait, the more unhappy they will be about it. Feel free to ask for help if you are looking at a bad news situation. The team is here to help.

Always Make a Ticket

We have had a couple of issues lately where customers followed up on a call and there was no ticket for us to refer back to. Please remember that the ticket is an important communication tool that helps your team mates help the customer. Customers don’t want to have to repeat the same information, or have us try the same steps again and waste their time. And if we get a complaint, the ticket tells us which technician to talk contact to get our side of what happened.

Always try to get the customer’s name, but if you can’t for some reason, you can make the ticket with “phone @log” as the requestor.

ArcGIS Renewal Underway

The campus license for ArcGIS expires soon, and the renewal process is underway. Customers who connect to the campus license server don’t need to do anything, but some customers use ArcGIS offline. If you get a question about that, let them know it’s in progress. If customers would like a notification when it’s ready make a task for “Software Distribution” and Pelkey will let them know when it’s there.

Service Desk Digest 7/22/2020

Reminder: Face Coverings Required On Campus

If you are working on campus in a room with another person present, you need to wear a mask or other face covering. This applies even if the person is not close to you.

For details, see:

In particular, please note: “OSU requires faculty, staff, students, contractors, volunteers, and visitors across all OSU locations to use face coverings, which include masks, cloth face coverings, or face shields, when in enclosed public and common areas on campus and outdoor areas where physical distancing is not easily maintained, unless an exception is met. Masks and cloth face coverings should be worn in combination with other measures, such as strict physical distancing and proper hand washing.”

Reminder: Service Desk In-Person Support by Appointment Only

As a reminder: to ensure our safety and the safety of our customers, we are limiting all in-person support to appointments only. That goes for both in-office visits and visits in Milne. We have limited staff on-site and cannot take drop-ins. For details (and a webpage you can share with customers) please read the “Covid-19 Announcement” box on the Service Desk get help page.

When helping a customer by phone, please do your best to exhaust all efforts to help them via remote. Ask for help on Teams. Other technicians may have more ideas to offer, and full-time staff members are available throughout the day to assist.

The only on-site full-time staff members at this time are:

  • Max Cohen
  • Ken Howard
  • Robin Castle
  • Jeff Bonnichsen

We also have a few students working on-site – see WhenToWork for who is on-site at a given day and time.

Ken is handling most CN builds, Robin is handling most CN in-office appointments, and Jeff is handling most Milne appointments. If you need to schedule a customer appointment, look for an available time on their calendars and make sure to notify the technician. Please also remind the customer to show up on time, to wear a face covering, and to follow social distancing guidelines. I am working on updating our appointment confirmation email to include those reminders as well.

Service Desk Webpage Updates

There are several former URLs that redirect ultimately to a single page for the Service Desk. Our main page is the official place to look for hours of operation, map, parking info, tickets, and the knowledge base, and is hostd in TeamDynamix. (It is the “Get Help” link in the Client Portal header). The short URL https://beav.es/help directs to the main Service Desk page.

If you see references to http://oregonstate.edu/helpdocs, those should be updated to https://beav.es/help. Also, our documentation is no longer called “Helpdocs”; it is just the IT knowledge base.

In light of a direction to promote the UIT brand over the IS brand, I have been asked to update all references to “IS Service Desk”. I have updated our KB article footer, and several email response templates, but it’s still out in the wild on some webpages. If you run into it, let me know. In general, I’ve been replacing “IS Service Desk” with just “Service Desk” unless that is vague for some reason, in which case “UIT Service Desk” also works.

Finally, I made some changes in the “Additional Resources” section of our help page:

  • The HR functions of the business centers are now handled by the “HR Service Center”
  • The OSU directory page (“main.oregonstate.edu”) has been retired
  • I added a link to Ecampus
  • I removed the handful of other IT groups that were listed in favor of the single “Other OSU IT Helpdesks” link

Side note: VetMed IT has a new website, which has been added here: IT Helpdesks for Employees

VPN Update

I have seen a couple tickets where customers report that the new VPN disconnects frequently, but the old VPN does not. We have many users on the new VPN, and it seems to be performing fine. So, I suspect these are client-side issues and we need to troubleshoot them as such. Please encourage users to move to the new VPN, because come September, the old one will be shut off.

A reminder was sent yesterday to 2,600 current users of the old VPN server. Of those 2,600, 28 contacted us, mostly for help installing the client as it requires local admin privileges. Next week when we get usage numbers we will be able to tell how many people were able to make the transition without assistance.

The “VPN before login” feature is going away with the new VPN server. It does not work with Duo. We can still use this feature on the old server (sds.oregonstate.edu) for now, and are looking at alternative solutions to help people with the “first time login via remote” issue. The best thing is for customers to login once while on-campus, before they take a computer home. Devin has created a new KB article to help navigate this issue: Windows – First Time Login Remote

Microsoft Bookings is Coming Soon

Microsoft Bookings is being promoted for use as an appointment scheduling tool at OSU. It may end up replacing TimeTrade, for example. We may consider using it for CN appointment scheduling as well.

Bookings is a component of the Office 365 suite, and Service Desk will be the first point-of-contact for support. See: MS Bookings – Service InfoSheet (Internal)

The project team have provide several KB articles here: MS Bookings

I’m working with Jenesis Long to create a training module in Canvas for technicians. I should have an update on that by next week.

Thank You!

A huge thank you to everyone who has pinged me recently to point out broken links, confusing instructions, or missing documentation. I try to get things cleaned up as fast as you find them. I really appreciate all the sharp eyes on these things. Thank you for your help!

Service Desk AY 2020 Stats

Team, I thought you would appreciate seeing some of our stats for the past academic year:

  • Total Tickets Created with Service Desk: 50,198 
  • Total Calls Handled by Service Desk: 37,001 
  • Tickets Resolved within 1 Day: 61% 
  • Average Speed to Answer: 14 seconds 
  • Percent Answered Calls: 96.83% 
  • Positive Customer Satisfaction Rating: 96.3% 

Those are perfectly fine stats for a normal year, but this hasn’t been a normal year, as the following graphs show:

In addition to the pandemic, the Service Desk helped support the following over the past academic year: 

  • May 28, 2019 – Zoom enabled. 
  • June 18, 2019 – Instructure implemented a new phone menu for Canvas support, intended to route more requests to the Service Desk. 
  • July 12, 2019 – College of Engineering required Duo for SSH access to their servers. 
  • July, 2019 – Security incident. 
  • July 25, 2019 – Security key and Apple Touch ID methods enabled for Duo. 
  • July 31, 2019 – Webex sunset. 
  • Fall 2019 – Duo mandatory enrollment for students. 
  • September 10, 2019 – the MCS phone number was routed to the Service Desk. 
  • September 18, 2019 – implemented new form attributes to better track service offering on tickets. 
  • 10/4/2019 – macOS Catalina release. 
  • October 2019 – June 2020 – Exchange Online migrations. 
  • October 2019 – MS Teams roll-out. 
  • January 2020 – Windows 7 end-of-life. 
  • February 11, 2020 – HMSC brought on CN support. 
  • March 4, 2020 – New VPN client software. 
  • March 12, 2020 – work-from-home for COVID-19 begins. 
  • March 14, 2020 – Service Desk walk-up service closed, on-site appointments become limited. 
  • March 17, 2020 – Soft phone service launched. 
  • March 18, 2020 – Remote Desktop Gateway service launched. 
  • March 20, 2020 – New VPN server deployed for soft phone users only. Old VPN changed to split-tunnel. 
  • March 23, 2020 – Most Service Desk technicians begin working from remote. 
  • March 30, 2020 – Launched COVID-19 loaner service. 
  • April 2, 2020 – Service Desk moves from Slack to Teams. 
  • April 8, 2020 – Keep Teaching Assistants service launched. 
  • June 15, 2020 – New VPN server announced to campus. 
  • July 2020 – Office 365 licensing issues impacting some users. 

Thank you for everything you all do to help keep the university running, particularly during these challenging times. Truly it takes a team to pull off this Herculean feat. Well done, everyone!

Service Desk Digest 7/10/2020

Please Don’t Punt

Looking at an unusual ticket and not sure what to do with it? Please ask for help! Don’t just ignore the ticket and hope the next person will know what to do. We still get tickets sometimes that sit for days, read by 20+ technicians, with no response to the customer.

Even a quick note to the customer to say that we are looking into their issue is better than nothing. Customers appreciate knowing we have not missed their request.

Ongoing Office 365 Licensing Issues

We are still getting frequent reports of users who should be licensed for the Microsoft 365 Apps but are not able to install Office. IAM and Infrastructure are aware of this issue and working to resolve it. For now, if we get a report like this, confirm the customer should be eligible, and then escalate to Office 365 Tier 2 team to re-apply licenses.

All current students and current employees should be licensed for the Microsoft 365 Apps. They should also be licensed for Teams.

VPN Training Reminder

Please complete the VPN training soon. The new VPN server will replace the old one in mid-September. Reminders will be going out to active users on the old server over the summer, and we are likely to get calls.

VPN Training: https://canvas.oregonstate.edu/courses/1807048

Username Changes

Addendum to my previous post on this issue: we are currently unable to make username changes for Exchange Online users. IAM are working on revising that process. However, we can still process username changes for students and other non-Exchange Online users. I added a note to my previous blog post on 6/22 and have updated the KB article with a note on this as well: ONID – How to Request a Username Change

Teams private channels with no owners

If a private channel in Teams has no members, the owner of the team cannot assign new ones. Private channels have their own permissions boundary within the team. The solution is to escalate the issue to Infrastructure: MS Teams – Team or Private Channel with No Owners or Members

Sick Leave and Covid Leave Reminder

Reminder: students have both sick leave and prorated COVID leave that can be used if needed. If you are sick, please take care of yourself. Be sure to let us know if you need to miss a shift.