Tag Archives: Office 365

Call Center Update – 4/21/2016

Colleagues,

Lately I have been less of a funnel of information and more of a black hole.  We have a lot going on, and I will do my best to hit the highlights here. If you ever want to know more about something, please contact me or your manager.

Speaking of managers:

Some of you who are student workers may not know who your manager is. To clarify: Max Cohen, Samuel Rudin and Jeff Bonnichsen are the current student supervisors. You will work with one or more of them on a daily basis; they will assign you tasks, review your work and give you feedback regularly. Lucas Friedrichsen, Chris Sinnett, Ed Ostrander and I (Kirsten Petersen) are managers. We are responsible for hiring/firing, discipline, conflict resolution, as well as performance feedback. If you have a question or problem, you should generally take it to your supervisor first. If you work in more than one area, take the problem to the supervisor you work with most. If your problem is *with* your supervisor, take it to your manager. If you don’t know who your manager is, please look in the TSS Management tool (linked from RefTool).

Please note that all of the full time staff also have a lead role and may assign you tasks and provide feedback on your work. They may share that feedback with your supervisor or manager as well. They are also a fantastic resource to you if you need advice. Just… read the section below about asking questions first.


 

Asking questions is a good thing.

There is an art to asking questions. You need to be respectful of the other person’s time, you need to bring them the right information to approach the problem, and you need to be willing to learn.

Kirsten’s Guide to Asking Questions:

  1. Gather all the pertinent information and have it ready. The first thing I will ask you is: who is the customer, and what are they trying to do? If you can’t answer that, it’s back to the drawing board for you, and a pointless interruption for me. Also, it’s a delay in resolving the customer’s problem. You should know if this is a laptop, or a Mac, or if the customer is in Hermiston. You should know if they have another computer to use or are dead in the water. You should be so intimate with the problem and what the customer is trying to accomplish that you can speak for them.
  2. Tell me what you have tried. I hope it goes without saying, but: you should have tried some things first. And I don’t mean random things. You should have looked at our documentation and troubleshooting templates (TemplateHub). You should have asked the customer a lot of questions. You should have seen the error they are seeing, or checked the logs. When you come to ask me for help, tell me what steps you have tried and exactly what the outcome was. Be as specific as possible. There could be important clues there to help solve the problem.
  3. Tell me how urgent this problem is. If the customer is still waiting on the phone and they can’t do their job and you have tried everything and are stuck, this is probably urgent. If the customer has a work-around and you are just curious what the right answer is, that’s a very different thing. If I know how urgent this is, I will probably respond differently.
  4. Be willing to learn. Don’t just punt a problem to me and then wash your hands of it (not that any of you would do that, right!?). You should be coming to me because you want to know how to solve this yourself next time.
  5. Help others. Let’s say you went looking for an answer in our documentation and could not find it. You had to ask for help, you got the answer, and you learned. That’s great for you, but doesn’t help your coworkers much. Take the initiative and update the documentation – or at a minimum, let your supervisor know that the documentation is lacking.

 

Things Going On in Client Services, Information Services and OSU

Note: you can always check on the status of large IS projects here: http://is.oregonstate.edu/strategic-plan-projects/project-management

Box

Box is a cloud storage and collaboration platform provided via Internet2 NetPlus. OSU IT leadership met at a storage summit last year to discuss the merits of Box, OneDrive and GoogleDrive, and came to the conclusion that Box provides the best features to meet the university’s needs. In particular, Box should provide better business continuity, better local synchronization tools and better cross-platform feature parity.

In addition, Box is expected to integrate with Office 365 (replacing OneDrive), with Canvas and with Kumo. The project team are targeting Fall term 2016 to make Box available to campus.

A sole source justification has been done for the purchase of Box, and the contract is presently in PACS. A project team has been established, and I am on it. I will provide regular updates here. Currently, we are in a pre-pilot testing phase. The features in the pre-pilot are not what we expected and the implementation team are looking into that problem (it may because we are not under contract yet).

Initially there was much conversation about this service replacing CN-Home and CN-Share, in addition to ONID-FS (the Z drive). CN-Home and ONID-FS home directories seem like a no-brainer, but whether department shares will move to the cloud is a bit unclear at this time.

While it is true that Google Drive is not going away, it is my understanding that the university will declare Box the preferred, supported cloud storage solution.

Exchange Online

The Identity & Access Management team have confirmed that OSU will most likely be migrating to Exchange Online around Fall 2016. They ran into some legacy configuration that held them up, and are working through that now.

Getting all employees unified and enabled for Office 365 is still a pre-requisite for Exchange Online, but is almost complete.

Service Desk, ITIL, ITSM and Team Dynamix

Most of the full-time staff in Client Services attended ITIL and ITSM training this week. All of the directors in Information Services and staff from many other units also attended. The goal of the training is to get to a shared understanding of ITIL principles among IT staff who will use Team Dynamix on a regular basis. We couldn’t send student workers to the training, so I will be doing my best to share what we learned with all of you.

ITIL is a set of best practices that is about aligning IT with the needs of the business it supports, and ITSM is a discipline that breaks down IT management into specific processes.  The adoption of the new Team Dynamix tool for ticket tracking has been a catalyst for us adopting more ITIL practices. In particular, we will be adopting Incident Management, and will be transforming much of Client Services into a Service Desk that serves as the single point of contact for all services provided by Information Services.

Our director, Andrew Wheeler, will be sharing more information with all of you about these changes soon. I know many of you are concerned about what this means for our service to our customers, and for your daily work, so I am working to share as much information with you now as possible. Please be aware that this project is still very much in the planning phase.

The first stage of creating the Service Desk will be to consolidate workflows of the OSU Computer Helpdesk, CN call center and CN field team. This will be my primary focus for the coming weeks. I am working now on mapping out detailed tasks in TeamWork, and you will all have access to view the project there soon.

ITC Recruitment

The recruitment to fill Tom Loveday’s vacant position is in progress. The position has been posted and is open until Friday, April 29th.  The posting is here, and you are welcome to share this with anyone you think would be interested:

https://jobs.oregonstate.edu/postings/23568

The hiring committee members are: Kirsten Petersen, Max Cohen, Keenan Carr and Kaelan Rasmussen. I am also working to add a search advocate from a department outside of Information Services.


Training and Skills Assessment

I will be following up with many of you soon to put together a detailed profile of your skills and to work up a formal training plan. If you already have a LinkedIn profile with that type of information in it, please connect with me there.


Kudos

Kudos to Chris “CJ” Johnson for suggesting that we shift the student field techs to same-day appointments only. This has allowed us to have greater flexibility in responding to urgent site visit requests.

Kudos to Josh Zheng for advocating for the “call assist” role in the call center. We are still ironing out the mechanics, but the idea is that there will always be a seasoned tech in the call center who is available to assist people in calls. This person stays out of the phones, works the queue, and helps on difficult troubleshoots. This is helping to improve the quality of our service and increase first call resolution. Kudos to Robin Castle as well for helping to make this work.

Kudos to Ken Howard for suggesting that when process changes are made, the impact is clearly spelled out for each of our workflows. This came up when we decided to implement named user licenses for Adobe Creative Cloud and I neglected to consider how that would impact computer imaging. I have committed to follow Ken’s suggestion on future communications of changes.

And a sincere “thank you!” to all of you for patiently answering my many questions, putting up with the massive amount of changes we have been going through, and making suggestions that will ultimately make us all more successful.

 

Box Cloud Storage

The university is in the process of purchasing Box via Internet2 Net+.

Box will be the officially recommended cloud storage and collaboration tool starting Fall term 2016. A significant advantage of Box over both Google Drive and OneDrive is the fact that files can be owned by the institution and not evaporate when user accounts are deprovisioned.

The plan is to move most personal and department shares (e.g. CN-Home, CN-Share, and ONID-FS) to Box storage.  We will be testing a number of use cases to ensure that everything will work well.

Edit (3/9/2016): Box will not be approved for any PII data, so not all storage will be on Box. It is a bit unclear at this time how much of our department share data will be moved there, and that probably won’t happen by Fall.

Also in the scope of this initial deployment is integration with Office 365 and Kumo.

We will have access to test Box soon, and I will share that information as we get it.

 

Call Center Digest, 10/9/2015

New Things:

Exchange support at OCH – the Helpdesk should be helping folks with Exchange email questions. There are documents in Helpdocs. Let me know if you have any questions about this.

Exchange forwarding to OSU Gmail – there is a new Helpdoc about how to do this, but it is not recommended. It’s better for people to forward from Gmail to Exchange. Also, for CN customers, please get LRP approval before setting up a forward.

Exchange Archiving – the server admins have notified us that we should not be adding new users to the Exchange online archive. Anyone who is using it now can continue to do so. For people who are running out of email space, please give them the usual mailbox clean-up and retention tips, and after that we can increase their quota up to 5GB (at no charge). There will be announcements to the DCA list and CN customers about this soon.

Office 2010, 2013 and 2016 – Office 2010 is end-of-life on 10/13/2015, however the software will continue to work and we will continue to support it for some time. We have a self-serve install option for Office 2013 for CN customers and will be announcing that to them soon. Office 2016 is now available on \\software.oregonstate.edu and activation is configured.  Office 2016 is now the default install option in Office 365 and for the Home Use Program.

Student Success Collaborative (SSC) predictive analytics tool  – this new tool will help the university predict the success of students and intervene to ensure better retention and graduation rates. You can learn more about this at https://www.eab.com (go to Member Login, New User to gain access).


General Notices:

Office 365 sync issues – Jason resolved another sync issue in Office 365 this week (thank you Jason!) that was impacting a large number of users. Scott will be reminding students about this service in a mass email soon, so we may get another bunch of calls.

Office 365 Helpdesk Access – Jason is working on getting all of use limited helpdesk access to the Office 365 administration dashboard, which would hopefully allow everyone here to see whether an account has been synced and licensed properly.

Google Apps XML – the feature to access calendar via XML has been deprecated.  Chances are not too many people were using it.


Question for you all:

We have been crazy busy all summer and the past couple of weeks. If anyone has feedback on what would make the work experience less stressful or more positive for you, send your ideas to me or your supervisor.


Fun Fact:

When children learn that 2*3=6, it measurably slows their response time on calculating 2+3=5 because our brains like patterns and this confuses them. So, the more math you learn, the worse you get at arithmetic.

Have a great weekend everybody!

 

Call Center Digest, 10/2/2015

New Things:

SCF support – OCH is now the official point-of-contact for support in the labs (other than Milne lab). Escalations will be via split ticket to the SCF queue in Coho. The Endpoint Management (EPM) team under Jason Appah will be handling those escalations.

Citrix XenApp (apps.oregonstate.edu) – escalations for XenApp should also be via split ticket to the SCF queue.

XBox issues – Apparently the Xbox services have been having some outages lately, which may account for problems we have been seeing.  For Xbox status info, see http://xbox.com/status and https://twitter.com/XboxSupport.

Gmail IMAP auth problem – Andy Morgan researched this and provided a fix. It requires enabling two-factor auth and setting an application-specific password for IMAP. This affects people trying to use Outlook and Mac Mail to access Gmail. (See ticket#0355359 for detailed steps – this will be added to Helpdocs soon.)

Cascades number added to CN queue signature – the automatic signature for the CN base queue now includes the Cascades number (thanks to Tom for suggesting this).

Office 365 Sync issues – This is still on-going, but it sounds like Jason is zeroing in on a fix. For now, please continue to escalate to Jeff or Kirsten if people do not have a license (make sure they are registered for classes first).


Highlights:

Dorm Visits – Kudos to Ed, Jorge, Meera, Jazmyn and Jade for all the dorm visits they did last week. They met with a couple hundred students and helped a lot of new students have an easier start of term. Thank you!

New student employees kicking butt – Welcome to all our new employees! You all are kicking butt and taking names (and making tickets).  Keep up the good work.


Upcoming Events:

Saturday 10/3/2015, 6:00AM – 8:00AM – Wireless network maintenance 

Saturday 10/3/2015, 6:00AM – 6:15AM – Maintenance for CORE, MyDegrees, Evals, MyOSU, and others (More Info)


Some Stats for Fun & Profit:

  • There are 1,023 unresolved tickets across all Helpdesk and CN queues. (We started the week with 1,138.)
  • Li spent an hour on the phone helping a faculty member with Canvas. Be nice to him. He earned it.

 

 

Call Center Digest, Friday 9/4/2015

We have a lot of changes coming up and a lot of information to share. I will be doing a weekly digest from the call centers. If you want more details about any of the below, ping me!

Labor Day weekend maintenance for Banner, Banner Apps, MyOSU – OSU Banner and all Banner Apps, including MyOSU, will be down over the Labor Day weekend for maintenance.

Google logins, Google email addresses, and student UPNs changing 9/12/2015 – Everyone (students and employees) will start logging in to Google Apps as username@oregonstate.edu. Primary email addresses for Google will change to username@oregonstate.edu in Google and in OSU Online Services. The UPN for students will change to username@oregonstate.edu, and this will impact how students log in to Office 365. All of campus will be notified early next week.

More info about Google and UPN changes: http://oregonstate.edu/helpdocs/landing-page-students

OSU Cascades tech support changes 9/16/2015 – Starting mid-September, tech support calls and emails from OSU Cascades in Bend will be directed to OCH and CN call centers in Corvallis. Please be kind to the OSU Cascades folks!

RemoteApps being replaced by Citrix XenApp  – As of start of Fall term, the RemoteApps service will be redirecting to Citrix XenApp. This is the apps.oregonstate.edu service, previously run by College of Engineering, currently managed by IT Infrastructure.

Comcast Infinity (IP TV) coming to OSU Housing – University Housing & Dining is deploying IP TV this Fall term. Only students who live in the residence halls will be able to access the service, and only from on the campus network.

Canvas and TurnItIn integration – The Canvas team will be implementing a piracy prevention component called TurnItIn. This may result in some calls to OCH.


 

Office Moves:

OCH 5PM-7PM shift moving to Service Desk – The evening shift at the OCH call center will be moving downstairs to the Comms desk area at the Service Desk, sometime during Fall term (date TBD).

IS Client Services moving to Milne Computer Center in November – all ISCS employees in the Library will be moving to offices in the Milne Computer Center around November 2015. Exceptions: the Service Desk and Student Multimedia Services will stay in the Library.


 

Upcoming Events

Labor Day, September 7, OSU Closed – The university is closed on Monday. Don’t come to work!

Monday, September 14 – Grad Fair

Saturday, September 19 – Talk Like a Pirate Day

Sunday, September 20 – Housing Move-In Day – The OCH Call Center will be open for a few hours this day.

Monday, September 21 – University Day

Thursday, September 24 – Beaver Fair

Thursday, September 24 – First day of Fall term classes