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!