Welcome to Summer!

We are starting to (finally) get caught up on the ticket queue. Huge thanks to Max for hiring a record number of student techs this year, and thanks to our student techs for being here! Every day the OSU community fill out surveys saying how consistently helpful, kind, efficient, and courteous you all are. Thank you for everything you do.

I haven’t done a blog post in a while. This time, I’m focusing on some items that tend to come up a lot at the end of the school year. Let me know if you have questions! It’s smart to ask questions. If there are items you would like to see in a future blog post, let me know.

Extend VPN Access

VPN access is lost when a person is no longer a current employee or student. VPN access can be extended temporarily by request of another employee who is still current. There is a specific form to use. Service Desk can then grant the access in that case. Details here: VPN – Extend Access for Non-Current ONID User (Internal)

Extend Library Access

Library access is also lost when someone is no longer a current student or employee. Library access can be extended by request. The form creates a ticket for Library staff to process. For details, see: Library – Access Denied to OSU Online Library or Interlibrary Loan

Extend ONID Account Access

Students who have recently left but whose ONID accounts are still around can request temporary access to ONID. Often this is done to give the person time to grab their files, or to allow them to sign in to Online Services and retrieve pay stubs or tax forms. We escalate these requests to IAM. IAM cannot extend access to allow a former employee to get to their Exchange email. See “Former Employees” below.

This is also a good time to review one of our most requested knowledge articles, very popular at this time of year: ONID – Account Eligibility and Duration

Former Employees and Email Access

Former employees – people who have no current job and have been “terminated” in Banner – are not allowed to access their former Exchange email (this control does not apply to Gmail at the moment).

If someone has retired and needs access to some personal items in their mailbox, or if their department needs access to work items in their account, we can grant their former supervisor or other department contact temporary access to the mailbox in order to retrieve the items. See: Exchange Online – Former Employee Can’t Access Outlook; Error “You cannot access this right now” or “Error Code: 53003”

If the former employee is still doing some work for the department, or will be again soon, the department can sponsor their ONID account. Sponsoring the account restores access to Exchange email.

Special cases:

• Retirees who show with “retiree” affiliation in RefTool are eligible for a special retiree mailbox. Before they can sign up for that, their original ONID account has to be deleted and recreated. It is recommended that all former employees, including retirees, grab any items they need before their job ends.
• Emeritus have a special status with their department and will show with “emeritus” affiliation in RefTool. They are treated basically like employees and maintain access to their ONID account and all typical services.

Pro tip: sometimes people claim they have a status but they actually don’t. Check RefTool. If what they say doesn’t match what you see, they should talk to their department to get the right paperwork processed.

P: or S: Drive Keep Disappearing

If we have re-mapped a drive for a customer but it keeps disappearing for them, ask if they have changed jobs recently.

When a person moves from one department to another, we need to move their account to the right OU in Active Directory to ensure they get the right drive mappings. If we miss that step, group policy will not be able to auto-map their drives for them. The symptom to look for is: it’s not mapping automatically, or it keeps disappearing, but we are able to manually map just fine.