In-Person Support for Personal Devices

Since mid-March we have not been taking in-person appointments for personal devices. Starting today, we are bringing that service back. This includes personal devices for OSU employees and students.

We should still exhaust all remote support options before scheduling an in-person visit. If a request obviously requires an in-person visit (e.g. someone is asking us to replace a busted hard drive) please go ahead and schedule it.

For now, schedule primarily with Jeff. Remind customers to be on time, wear a face covering, and follow social distancing guidelines. We will keep our interactions with customers as short as we can, and may ask to take their computer and have them come back later to pick it up.

I’m working on updating our response templates to better communicate how we are handling appointments. I’ll have another update on this early next week.

As a reminder: we have COVID loaner laptops for employees if they need one, and HSRC has loaner laptops for students in need.

Mandatory Trainings for Incoming OSU Students

We are starting to get questions again about the OSU-wide mandatory trainings for incoming students. Sometimes folks get the invite but can’t login to the training. I’ve updated the KB article with referral info: Cannot Access Mandatory Student Training

Software

ESRI Desktop will expire at the end of the month. The software team are working on getting this renewed.

ArcGIS renewal has gone through and Pelkey placed new licenses in \\software. Folks with named user licenses should have renewed automatically. Contact Pelkey on Teams if you see issues.

Office 365 Training

We are talking about putting together some training on basic tasks in the Microsoft 365 environment (including Outlook on the Web, Teams, file collaboration via Teams/OneDrive/SharePoint, etc.). What are some things you’d like to know more about in the 365 suite? Message me on Teams with your wish list.

VPN Update

The VPN project team met yesterday and discussed exception requests for people with active ONID accounts who are not VPN eligible. The team agreed that if an OSU employee sponsors an ONID user for VPN access, Service Desk can grant it.

We do not yet have a process to do the granting. IAM is working on that right now. For now, please refer such requests to me (not to OIS).

Note that students who are “eligible to register” already have VPN access, but that is a flag set in Banner for which UIT is unsure of the logic. If someone thinks they should be eligible to register but aren’t, we should refer them to the Registrar or Grad School.