Welcome to a New School Year

Welcome to a new year, and welcome back for those of you who have been away for a bit. A lot has changed over the past year, so please stay tuned for blog posts and orientations to help get you back up-to-speed.

Service Desk Updates

For health safety reasons, we will have the Welcome Desk in the hallway right outside 201 for the first two weeks of the term. Our intent is to keep the burst in foot traffic in a more airy space. Milne appointments are still available as well – those customers can walk right in to Milne 201 and do not need to wait in line.

CN and Cosine customers can also request that we meet them at their office instead (a.k.a. “Field Appointment”).

Please remember to offer appointments to customers as it helps to spread out the busy-ness and ensure they receive quality support.

With the start of Fall, we will be open evenings and weekends again, but our weekend hours will be remote support only. Please don’t tell a customer to go to walk-up on a weekend. Signs will be posted on the outside doors informing customers to call during weekend hours.

As a reminder, beav.es/help always provides our open hours, as well as parking and other info.

ResNet

As a reminder, the Service Desk is the first point-of-contact for network support in OSU residence halls. Please do not refer customers with questions about the residence hall network. If we can’t resolve their issue, we can escalate to UHDS IT Support by notifying them on the ticket. For details, see the ResNet service infosheet.

Students will start moving in to the residence halls on Sunday, 9/19. All wireless access points in the dorms have recently been upgraded. The Gem is now owned and managed by UHDS, and network registration for the Gem is the same as other residence halls.

OSU Wifi in the residence halls is very similar as to the rest of campus. One important exception is the OSU_Unsecured wireless SSID, which allows residents to connect consumer devices such as game consoles.

Registration for the wired network in residence halls has changed over the past year. All buildings now use the same process. Residents can register their devices at https://my.uhds.oregonstate.edu/resnet or go to https://my.uhds.oregonstate.edu and click on “Manage your ResNet internet connection.” This registers their devices in Cyder. Service Desk staff can manage ResNet registrations at https://my.uhds.oregonstate.edu/resnet/admin.

Cosine Reminders

We have merged with Cosine. Cosine customers and Community Network customers are both CX customers, and will show that way in RefTool. We provide all the same desktop support services to Cosine customers as we do to CN customers, including computer purchasing, imaging and management, software installation, printer setup, network setup, in-office appointments, IT surplus, and account management.

For new computer builds for Cosine, use the CN image and place the computer in the tss.oregonstate.edu domain.

Cosine customer ONID accounts are in onid.oregonstate.edu/onid/_cosine.

For help with Cosine-related requests, please ask in the SD Internal Talk channel. All of the former Cosine staff are in the channel to help.

For more information, see: Cosine Department InfoSheet (Internal)

Strand Ag Break Area

As part of our merger with Cosine, we now have access to a spacious break area in the daylight basement of Strand Ag, just across the quad from Milne. Please check it out! It is a much nicer place to eat than the cramped galley in Milne 213A or the cave in the Milne basement.

Cosine Transition

The big news today is the transition of Cosine support point-of-contact happening Thursday, August 26 at about 10:00am.

We will be forwarding calls, emails, and web form submissions for Cosine customers to the Service Desk. A reminder email will be sent to Cosine customers about the changes around 11:00am.

As a reminder, Cosine customers are CX customers, and will show as such in RefTool. We provide the same level of service to them as CN customers.

A few things are not standardized yet, so please review the infosheet for important details: Cosine Department InfoSheet (Internal)

Cosine student employees will be shadowing with Service Desk employees (Max is working on setting this up now) and eventually moving to Milne.

All of the former Cosine team members are in the Customer Experience team; the best place to ask for help is in the SD Internal Talk channel.

Ray Hall

OSU-Cascades in Bend has a new building: Edward J Ray Hall.

https://osucascades.edu/campus-expansion/edward-j-ray-hall

Customers will start moving into the building this week, and we may get some IT questions. If you need to escalate something to our on-site IT team, please review the OSU-Cascades IT escalation instructions: https://oregonstate.teamdynamix.com/TDClient/1935/Portal/KB/ArticleDet?ID=32120

Mac Updates

Starting the evening of Tuesday, August 17, the Endpoint team will be re-enabling application and OS updates for Macs managed by Community Network. This does not include OS upgrades, nor Office version upgrades. If there are any concerns or issues, please contact James Dudzik or ask in the “Endpoint and Labs” channel in Teams: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/channel/19%3a721a1dfa2c5246a8b53a1383f1201c24%40thread.skype/Endpoint%2520and%2520Labs?groupId=9f90b11a-61df-45f3-ab04-62b395eafba7&tenantId=ce6d05e1-3c5e-4d62-87a8-4c4a2713c113

Cosine Transition Update

We will be transitioning points-of-contact for IT support for Cosine customers on Thursday, August 26. This will include moving email, phone, and in-person support to Service Desk. Cosine customers will be notified of this change this week. If customers have concerns, you can ask Andrew Wheeler to contact them.

For general questions about Cosine issues, please ask in the SD Internal Talk channel. The Cosine students are in the channel and can help! Devin and Robin are also great resources.

Note: new computer builds for Cosine customers should be done with the CN imaging process. New account setups for Cosine customers are going through the Service Desk form and process, with help from Mark Cohen for security group modifications.

This week, changes were made to the Adobe licensing process. These changes apply to individual (also known as “named user”) licenses for Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Creative Cloud.

Licensing Process Changes:

Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Creative Cloud licenses are now controlled by two grouper groups, adobeAcrobat and adobeCreativeCloud, respectively. These grouper groups are the source of truth for Adobe licenses. Any license additions/removals should be made there, and will need to be done by an admin or the Software Licensing Coordinator.

Membership will be synced to the Adobe console at least once a day in the morning. This sync is what will actually grant the user the license, so depending on when they were added to the grouper group, the change could take a while to process. In an urgent situation, an Adobe admin can grant a user a license in the Adobe Console (as long as they also grant grouper group membership).

Acrobat Licensing:

Employees are now automatically granted Adobe Acrobat named user licenses. Specifically, the licenses go to people in the following three groups

• Employees – Classified
• Employees – Unclassified
• TS – Temporary Support Staff

Users with a Creative Cloud license are excluded, as Acrobat is included in Creative Cloud.

These licenses are used to install Acrobat on personal devices. The license is not required to use the serialized Acrobat that is installed by default on CX supported computers.

Creative Cloud Automated Licesning:

The TDx form Software – Adobe Creative Cloud License Request can still be used by customers to request a Creative Cloud license. If they request a license for themselves and provide a valid index & activity code, their request will be automatically processed and they will be granted a license within minutes. Otherwise, the ticket will be sent to the Software Licensing Coordinator for manual processing.

RefTool Service Offerings Changes:

You can now see a customers Adobe licenses in the Service Offerings block in RefTool. See below for an example of someone who has a Creative Cloud license. This is controlled by grouper group membership, so there could be a delay between Reftool showing that a user has access and that access actually being granted in the Adobe console.

Please contact OSU TeamDynamix Support with any questions.

Please read for a few important updates.

Service Desk Walk-in Relaunch

Starting Monday, July 19, we will be accepting walk-ins in Milne 201 again. I will be updating our webpage and email templates to reflect this change.

Customers who have a Milne appointment scheduled can come into 201 to meet us. They no longer need to ring the bell.

If you are helping a customer on the phone and decide they need help in person – or they ask for help in person – you can provide the following options:

1. Offer to make an appointment for them to meet a technician in Milne. Use Bookings to make the appointment.
2. For CN customers, we can schedule a technician to meet the customer in their office.
3. Customers can drop in to the Milne walk-up any time Monday-Friday 8am-5pm during the Summer.

Please reach out to me, Max, Jeff or Andre if you have any questions about this.

CN Build Email Templates

I’ve made several changes to the email response templates related to computer builds:

• There is a new category called “SD – Builds”
• The template that was called “Computer pickup” is now called “Computer is ready” and has correct options for pick-up, placement or shipping. Please use this one when notifying a customer that their computer build is done.
• The templates for Windows and Mac interviews have been moved to the SD – Builds category.
• The “Computer Shipped” template has been moved to the SD – Builds category.
• I removed several defunct templates, including: Schedule PC Placement, Schedule PC Placement (Extension), Stop tag authorization, Schedule PC Interview, and Schedule PC Interview (Extension).
• I still need to update several places in the KB.

Cosine Transition Update

We now have access to the Cosine ONID organizational units, so we can move Cosine user accounts with ONIDMover if needed.

If we have a Cosine computer that needs a rebuild, go ahead and build the computer with the CN image. Computer objects for Cosine should be placed in tss.oregonstate.edu/CN/Cosine.

We now have limited access with our admin accounts in the science.oregonstate.edu domain. We can manage computer objects and have admin access to Cosine lab computers. For security group changes, contact a full-timer and we will escalate the request.

Guest Access in Teams

It is now possible to request guest access be enabled for a team. A request form has been added to TDx.

For details, see: Teams – Chat with External Members or add Guests to a Team

Changes to CN New Account Form

The CN new account form now includes two date fields – a start date for the new employee, and a date the changes are needed by (if earlier than the employee start date).

The “account type” field has been updated to include these three options:

1. Employee
2. Grad Student
3. Undergraduate Student Employee or Other (Intern, Volunteer, etc.)

In the case of the third option, we will create a CN Active Directory account. The account can only be used for Windows login and Exchange email. If the customer needs more services, such as VPN, Zoom, Teams, or Box, they should request a sponsored account instead.

For details about new CN accounts, see: CN – Setup a CN Account for a New Employee

For details about sponsored accounts, see: Sponsored ONID Accounts (Internal)