Tag Archives: helpdocs

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Helpdocs Moved to TDx KB

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Team,

The move of Helpdocs articles into the TeamDynamix knowledge base is almost complete. We are now working on redirecting individual pages from the old Drupal site to the new KB.

Two things to note:

  1. When helping a customer, search the TDx KB for information first.
  2. Articles in the “Internal” category or that have “Published: No” cannot be seen by customers. You can use those articles, but you should not send the link to the customer.

Tips on Searching in the TDx KB

I am aware that the search in TDx is not good right now. The next release coming out this month addresses many of the issues with search. For now, see the following for help with search:

https://oregonstate.teamdynamix.com/TDClient/KB/ArticleDet?ID=40759

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Service Desk Digest 8/11/2017

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Collect Computer Information

When helping a CN customer, ALWAYS record the computer name, inventory ID or serial number in the ticket.

While we’re at it: always ask who the customer is, too, like this:

  • Tech: “IS Service Desk, this is <name>. How may I help you?”
  • <Listen to user request>
  • Tech: “Okay, before we get started can I get your OSU ID or name?”

(See Call Processing Workflow.)

If we don’t know who the customer is or what device they are using, it’s hard to help them properly.

Box Update

OSU has standardized on Box as the official cloud storage and collaboration platform. Over the coming months, we will be working on updating the IS web site, documentation, and apps we install on CN builds to reflect this change. If customers ask whether they should use Google Drive or Box, please advise them that Box is the preferred platform.

As a step in that direction, Client Services will be standardizing on Box as our storage and collaboration platform. You should all have received an invite today for a box folder called “ISCS All” – please let Kirsten know if you did not.

Coming Soon: Duo

Duo is multi-factor authentication that will soon be available to all OSU employees, including student employees. We will be promoting Duo during our fall engagements at University Day and other events.

The Service Desk will provide tier 1 support for Duo. For more information, see the Duo Service InfoSheet.

Coming Soon: Localist

Localist is a tool being implemented soon to replace the OSU event calendar located at calendar.oregonstate.edu. Users of the current system were contacted today about this upcoming change. If you get questions about Localist, please make a ticket and assign to Jill Swenson.

HelpDocs Moving to TD KB

Some time before fall term starts the HelpDocs customer-facing documentation site will be moved to the TeamDynamix Knowledge Base. This project is still in the planning phase.

What’s in it for you? After this change, all of our documentation – internal and customer-facing – will be in one place. I am aware that there are serious problems with the way that the search works in TeamDynamix. Part of the project involves addressing that issue, and I will post more about that later.

Status of macOS High Sierra

High Sierra has been added to our OS Life Cycle page, and an announcement is going out shortly to the CN-Announcements list about it. High Sierra is in preview, and while we are not recommending it for CN customers at this time, we will do our best to help them if they need to install it for some reason. We will fully support it for CN customers when it is released for general use in the fall.

Register Docking Stations for Wired Network

Please remember to register docking stations for the wired network. If we miss that step, customers will be connecting to the wireless network without realizing it and may have unpredictable results.

In Other News…

In case you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to work at CERN (and I mean, really, who hasn’t?) here you go:

https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-work-at-CERN

Happy Friday, everybody!

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ITKnows, HelpDocs and TeamDynamix KB

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I had feedback today that the recent reorganization of content in ITKnows has caused some trouble – particularly where articles had been linked elsewhere (e.g. in Canvas) and the articles were later combined into guides.

As of a couple months ago, we had over 400 articles in ITKnows, many of them were repeats, and given our reorganizations over the Summer, the layout no longer made sense. With help from Todd and others we worked to collapse those articles into guides organized by topic, clarified the categories into which new articles should go, added templates to facilitate creation of new content, archived duplicates, and published many articles that were pending review.

The reorganization of documents in ITKnows is done, now, for the most part. Things should not continue to move. However…

TeamDynamix has a built-in knowledge base that comes with several benefits. (It has some limitations, too.) One of the benefits is that we can put all of our documentation – public and private – in one place, meaning we only have one place to search across both sets. TD’s KB also has the concept of Article IDs, which will make linking to and sharing documents easier.  Referencing an article by ID number gets us away from the problem of linking to a URL that might one day change.

We are in the process of reviewing the features of TD’s KB right now, and I do not plan to immediately move our ITKnows content there. What we have in ITKnows is working for the most part. However, we are looking at TD as a possible new location for the HelpDocs pages. An important dependency for that is to have the TD client portal enabled, and we are hoping to have that accomplished by January. HelpDocs is currently on Drupal 6, and I think is higher priority at this time.

One issue I am aware of for the new format of the guides in ITKnows is that you cannot do a Ctrl-F and search the page to quickly locate content. The guide format looks nice, but is not friendly for quick reference. I will be working on some alternative layouts to make that easier. It’s worth mentioning that if TeamDynamix’ KB looks like it is going to be a winner, we may end up moving our internal documents there soon. I just don’t have enough experience with it yet to speak to that, and don’t want to over-promise.

So, TL;DR:

  • I will be working on the guide format to make searching in ITKnows easier.
  • I’m sorry I broke your links. It was necessary to get ITKnows under control. The breakage should not continue until/unless we move to TD’s KB.
  • We are evaluating TD’s KB as a replacement for HelpDocs (customer-facing documentation) first so we can get off of Drupal 6.
  • The client portal needs to be turned on for TD, and that should be happening in the next few weeks.

Let me know if you have questions or concerns about documentation that I have not addressed.