Hello team!

We have a number of usability improvements to Reftool going live this week. Please see below for complete details:

Improved Readability for Small Windows

Previously, resizing the window to certain sizes led to both attribute labels and attribute values being cut off like so:

Furthermore, only the attribute values were expandable. This behavior has now been changed so that longer strings for both  attribute labels and attribute values will carry over to the next line by default. We have also added the ability to contract and expand attribute labels and a larger subset of attribute values via clicking. Note that attribute labels expand and contract as a group, whereas the values remain individually manipulable.

‘View LDAP’ Button in Account Details

Following up on the changes to the ‘View LDAP Entry’  button in the last set of Reftool updates, we have added a second copy of this button to the ‘Account Details’ block.

This is intended to increase visibility of this feature in Reftool.  Note that clicking this button will also move you down the page to the LDAP info display section.

Bug Fix

Lastly, we have identified and fixed a bug involving the display of password expiration info. Specifically, a small number of users had both a password expiration date set and a flag on their account which indicated their password does not expire.  Do to a flaw in the existing logic, this resulted in Reftool displaying something like this:

This issue has been fixed, and users should now have at most one ‘Password Expires’ field per entry. Note that the flag which indicated their password does not expire (a userAccountControl status of 66048) has been given precedence.

Well, that’s all for now. As always, please don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions, comments, suggestions, or concerns.

Hello team,

We have several updates to Reftool going live this week. Please see below for complete details.

TD Button Changes

The biggest change concerns the various buttons on the account view which allowed for rapid Team Dynamix ticket creation. Previously, these appeared like so:

In an effort to simply the Reftool-TD workflow, however, this has been changed. The “Major Problem (Outage)” and “Incident” buttons as well as the “Service Requests” dropdown have all been removed and replaced by a single consolidated “Create TD Ticket in IT App” button.

Clicking this new button will take you to a Team Dynamix form selection page which will allow you to select the appropriate form for the type of request you wish to create and then populate the selected form with relevant data.

Search Link Highlighting

The second group of changes this round is intended to make the process of searching just a bit more user-friendly. Specifically, the links to access Advanced Options and Search Help have been bolded and underlined.

These come after anecdotal reports of IT pros overlooking these buttons. While the Advanced options are pretty basic at present, the Search Help is an particularly useful feature, especially for newer users who are still learning how to form effective Reftool Queries (and vets who just can’t seem to find a certain account).

Changed LDAP Button Appearance

Continuing the theme of highlighting useful yet under-used features, the “View LDAP Entry” button at the bottom of the account view page has been changed to make it appear more button-like.

This button is, in my opinion, the coolest mostly unnecessary/largely unused feature in Reftool. Clicking it dumps the raw data received by Reftool from various services straight to the screen. In addition to containing much more info than is displayed in the pretty-fied boxes above, this also shows what that data looks like prior to Reftool’s processing, useful for those times when you find an entry with some weird looking data and want to figure out where it came from.

Offer Search Help if Search Returns 0 Results

Finally, we have added another link to the search help modal that will appear any time a search returns 0 results. There are, after all, few things more frustrating than the apparent inability to find an account which you are sure exists.

The plan is to push these updates to production around midday on Friday. For those of you with access, they are currently live and usable on the Reftool dev instance.  As always, if you have any questions, comments, concerns or suggestions for future improvements, please don’t hesitate to let me know!

– Rick Menzel

Hello all,

Another week, another push forward on BT! The change this time is minor, just a simple checklist step addition. Special thanks to Patrick McCrary for the suggestion!

What’s New?

This change adds a checklist step to the Pre-Image Checklist to ensure SATA operation is set to AHCI. This was already in the build documentation but we have received reports that it was being forgotten and leading to BSODs on certain models of computer when the SATA operation was set to RAID. See the image below for placement.

Why Can’t I See This?

Note that because of the way build data is stored, new/updated checklist steps will only affect builds created after the change was made. In this case, that would mean that the change will only show up on builds created after approximately 12:05 PM on Monday, March 18th.

As always, feel free to contact me with any questions, comments or concerns as we work together to improve these tools. Hope everyone has a great week!

Happy Friday Team!

As some of you may have noticed, a number of small changes to BuildTracker went live this week. These broadly fall under a couple different categories:

Updated Wording

• Updated a checklist item’s wording to reference Asset ID rather than Inventory ID.
• Updated the printed interview sheet to reference Asset ID rather than Inventory ID.
• Updated the Cyder checklist step so that it no longer prompts technicians to create an interface for wireless MAC addresses (except for checkout or multi-user machines). This reflects a policy change whereby explicit managerial approval is required to configure/utilize OSU_Access (including wireless Cyder entries) unless granted a specific exception.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug where finalizing/updating interviews never changed the build last modified date. Previously this led to issues where finalizing an interview would result in the corresponding build appearing as if it had not been touched since the date/time the interview was begun. Particularly in cases where there was a wait for hardware, this created the false sense that the build was being neglected. Now, any update to either the interview or the build will change the last modified date to appropriately reflect that there has been work done on the ticket.

Please note that the changes to checklist wording will only have an effect going forward. Builds created before 5:00 PM on Wednesday Mar 13th may retain the original verbiage. As always, if you have questions, comments or concerns, please let me know (or, in the case of the wireless interface policy update, speak to your supervisor/manager fur further information).

Hello all. The latest change to Reftool is here. In response to difficulties observed while trying to locate certain users, we have implemented the ability to search for users by email alias.

Why is this helpful?

The most obvious use case for this feature is finding users who have an email which differs from their current name on record (such as a user who has undergone a name change and has retained their original email). Previously, email searches were limited to primary addresses, which could be an issue when all you had was an email with no apparent matching user (because the user provided an email other than their primary account). Compounding this issue further was the obvious inability to just search by name (if the only name you had was the email, and it differed from the name on record, a name search could return either nothing or the wrong person). Previously the solution was to try searching combinations of partial first and last names, hoping to shake out the correct account. With the new alias search, as long as the email is a valid address, it should be possible to find the associated account.

How do I use this feature?

To include email aliases in your search, you must first expand the ‘Advanced Options’ dialogue.

There should now be a new option to ‘Include Email Aliases’ next to the existing ‘CN User Type’ radio buttons.

Changing this option to ‘Yes’ will enable email searching by alias. You can now continue with your search as usual.

Why isn’t it working?

Have you specified that aliases should be included using the instructions above? Note that by default, this functionality is disabled and must be explicitly selected to be used. Rather than subjecting every email search to the performance hit incurred by scaling the list of potential matches by a factor of around 5x, it was decided to make this feature something you have to opt in to use. Basically, it’s there if you need it, but otherwise it should remain inactive and unnoticed. If you have enabled the feature and still don’t see results, please check that you do in fact have a valid email (i.e. free of typos, not an ONID email-only user making up a first.last account, not deleted, etc.).

Misc.

In addition to the above changes, this update also includes a minor adjustment to the previously-announced IT Pros reflector whereby Student IT workers no longer have their associated department listed under the reflector (i.e. it will appear as below).

As always, please feel free to contact me with any comments, questions or concerns.