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| Quick Notes
Congratulations to the following people for their years of service at Syracuse University:
Stephen Bonomo, IT Analyst - 5 years
Sharon Darling, Senior Administrator - 5 years
Peter Rounds, Senior IT Analyst- 10 years
Glenda Ranallo, IT Manager - 15 years
Nasser Masrouri, IT Analyst - 20 years |
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IT Professional Development
Staff on the cutting edge
Training & Education Heather Ketcham attended Access training at New Horizons. Lee Badman recently completed Spotwave Cellular Repeater Installation and Support training. Which we hope is great news for any of our readers who spend time in ITS's conference room in the basement of CST. Kevin Bom completed his Upgrading Your System Administration Certification and his Web Server Certification at the OnBase Training and Technology Conference September 21-25 in Orlando.
Conferences & Forums Glenda Ranallo was recently named to the TeamDynamixHE Advisory Council. The self-governed council, which is comprised of TeamDynamixHE customers, will serve as the product governance committee for the company, providing insider insights and ideas that will help drive future innovation for TeamDynamixHE's web-based project and portfolio management solution. John Capozzolo and Liz Moore attended the New York State Computing and Higher Education Symposium (NYCHES) held at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY on October 30. Representatives attended from Elmira College, Broome County Community College, Cornell University, SUNY Geneseo, Lemoyne College, Nazareth College, Onondaga Community College, Rochester Institute of Technology, St. Lawrence University, University Of Rochester, and Syracuse University. Topics discussed included:
- ITunes U - In general, people agreed on too much contract rigidity, and ambiguity concerning who owns content and intellectual property
- Outsourcing with Google - More concerns with contractual obligations
- W7 Adoption - Most schools are optimistic about going to W7. Most schools will be rolling out for fall semester 2010
- Economic Hardships - Most schools are still being affected by the "Great Recession"
- Virtualization - Most of the visiting schools are still not using for labs
- Streaming Media - Some schools have discussed using as an emergency teaching tool in case of a H1N1 pandemic
Dave Tiedemann participated in the annual international convention of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology in Louisville, Kentucky October 27-30. The theme for the convention was Integrative Approaches: Meeting Challenges. |
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IT Ethics Training a Success
Sessions Focused on New Code of Ethics for IT Staff at SU
IT professionals at Syracuse University potentially have access to many types of data across the computing systems they operate and manage. High ethical standards are essential to earn and retain the trust granted to IT staff by Syracuse University and its faculty, staff and students.
This past summer Christopher Croad, Director of Information Security, put together and launched an IT ethics training program consisting of an hour-long presentation focused on the new Code of Ethics for IT Professionals at Syracuse University. The sessions delved into the meaning of what it means to be ethical in an IT environment, and discussed real world scenarios where the ethical choices of IT professionals have come into question.
Running from August 10 until November 2, about 300 IT professionals attended the sessions. There were 14 sessions at SU, and, after being invited, another at ESF. Since essentially all IT staff has participated, no additional classes are scheduled.
"I hope the message of "stop and think" when it comes to utilizing our privileges to do our day-to-day job hit home with people," said Croad, "and I hope the University as a whole sees this program as reassurance that the trust they place in their IT staff is well founded."
Attendees were enthusiastically positive about the class and the Code of Ethics. Many mentioned that similar training would be good for all staff members, in addition to IT personnel.
Croad hopes to see this type of training expanded on campus, with face-to-face sessions as part of the on-boarding of new IT employees, and with the development and implementation of online annual refresher training in ethics for all IT staff.
Contact Christopher Croad at ccroad@syr.edu with any questions about the Code of Ethics for IT Professionals at Syracuse University, or related training.
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Gaining Traction
Atlassians's JIRA being piloted as SU's new enterprise issue tracking system
Information technology support groups across campus use numerous issue tracking or ticketing systems to help manage customer support and other activities. While these systems enable the creation, updating, tracking, and resolution of reported customer issues, they each do so in slightly different ways, and may or may not communicate easily with one another.
With the goal of improving IT support responsiveness and performance campus-wide, in the fall of 2008, the Technology Leadership Council formed a team to assess the IT community's ticketing system business requirements, and to identify and evaluate alternatives in order to recommend a solution that all stakeholders could accept. Facilitated by Cindy Hoalcraft of Enterprise Process Support, the team gathered and ranked requirements from IT support groups, identified and evaluated several potential solutions based on their adoptability, functionality and technical fits, usability, and cost.
The Orange Tracker initiative, as it has become known, established a long list of requirements for candidate systems, the top ten of which were that the chosen solution would:
- be web based
- have the ability to define queues and groups
- maintain request history
- monitor status of requests, responsibility
- work on popular browsers
- import directory information from the enterprise
- transfer/re-delegate to another queue
- enable file attachments
- search and modify my incidents (self-serve)
- have "Google-like" search capability
Subsequent discussions with units across campus indicated that, compared to their current tools, everyone wanted:
- better transparency
- better accountability
- better search functionality
- better reporting/dashboard
- robust email support
Several solutions were evaluated and the clear conclusion was that many of them would fulfill many if not most of these requirements if implemented correctly. Numara and Request Tracker were installed and tested under the original effort. Following that the Orange Tracker prototype team installed and tested JIRA. All had their strengths, but JIRA was chosen for continued evaluation and development due to its rich features, flexibility, menu-driven configurability and relative low cost. JIRA is a proprietary enterprise software product from Atlassian, the developers of Confluence. It has been developed since 2004 and is commonly used for bug tracking, issue tracking, and project management. JIRA has over 12,000 customers, including many colleges and universities, in over 100 countries. JIRA is widely used as a way to manage bug tracking for many large scale open source and public projects, including Linden Labs' Second Life. The product name, JIRA, is not an acronym but rather a truncation of "Gojira", the Japanese name for Godzilla. At an Open House attended by IT support personnel from across campus on November 10, Jenny Gluck, Director of Academic Applications and Service Centers and the sponsor of the ongoing Orange Tracker project, announced that Don Little will be the Project Manager moving forward. Don has been working with the prototype core team consisting of Deepak Atreya and Rakhi Bakshi, graduate students in the iSchool, and Chris Dranchek and Jeff Phillips of the ITS Service Center, who built a JIRA prototype and created several typical support scenarios to test ways in which the software might be used. At the Open House, the JIRA Orange Tracker prototype was demonstrated as it addressed the scenarios. Don asked for volunteers to join him on the Orange Tracker implementation team, whose first tasks will be to identify and address planning issues, including provisioning; standards for workflow, fields, escalation, and priorities; and developing the overall implementation approach, which could range from cloning current functionality to re-engineering the entire issue tracking process on campus. He also noted that access to the development system would be provided on request to any IT staff who are interested. An email account has been set up to receive and manage Orange Tracker inquiries. Please send to othelp@syr.edu your:
- Willingness to be part of the implementation team
- Questions, concerns, and feature requests
- Request for access to the Orange Tracker development system
If you have questions or want more information about Orange Tracker, contact Don Little, Manager, ITS Service Centers, at (315) 443-1849 or dmlittle@syr.edu.
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ITidbits
Facts and figures about IT
Bird Library typically has around 400 wireless users nightly connected to AirOrangeX, and has become the busiest non-residential wireless environment on campus.
Since the semester start, ITS has found and mitigated around 35 interfering rogue wireless devices- including a few in non-residential spaces.
Average wireless session time per user in a typical day runs around 75 minutes
68% of our wireless traffic is 802.11g, 32% is 802.11a
97% of all wireless traffic occurs over AirOrangeX, with 2% on AirOrange and less than a half percent on AirOrangeHelp
At any given time, around 45% of connected wireless devices on SU's network are Apple (Mac/iPhone/iPod Touch)
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SharePoint Use Grows at SU
Hard at work for academic and administrative units
Last winter Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) went into production at SU, making available to schools, colleges and departments its capabilities for comprehensive content management, powerful search tools, and facilitated information-sharing. SharePoint provides a secure online environment for collaboration, including file sharing, document management, shared calendaring, team and meeting collaboration, workflow, indexed search, announcements and discussion boards, and project management. SharePoint supports all intranet, extranet, and web applications enterprise-wide, within one integrated platform. SharePoint is available to all SU students, faculty and staff at https://sp.syr.edu; NetID and password are required for access.
On campus, SharePoint has been implemented for production use in 11 academic and 6 administrative units, and over 250 people have already created their own personal SharePoint sites. Academic and administrative groups across campus continue exploring SharePoint's capabilities and features, and have put it to use in many ways, including:
- The iSchool is primarily using SharePoint for group collaboration with sites for committees, teams, student and research groups. SharePoint has also been added to some class curriculum. Students have been using SharePoint as collaborative spaces to produce shared wikis, blogs, and discussion boards. The iSchool is also developing portions of their school intranet using SharePoint.
- In the College of Arts and Sciences SharePoint houses the Honors program thesis proofreading. AS Computing uses it as collection spaces for reporter and print tracking email.
- The College of Human Ecology employs SharePoint as their full intranet, as well as for internal announcements, committee work, computing FAQs, and a college-wide calendar.
- The College of Law runs their Information Technology and Support Services collaboration on SharePoint
- The Division of Student Affairs is taking advantage of SharePoint's shared calendaring, and ability to support committee collaboration. Expansion is planned to include intranet sites for the portfolio groups and central services in the future.
- CISAT, the Center for Information Systems Assurance and Trust at the CASE Center, is setting up a collaboration portal using SharePoint.
- The Program Management Center at the Library is using some project management and online collaboration features of SharePoint. They are also investigating the use of the Report Site template to gather, organize and display statistics about library usage and collections. They are considering using SharePoint to make parts of this information available to library administration, staff and the public, including a knowledgebase, and a dashboard for project reporting and tracking.
- OIRA, the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment, is evaluating SharePoint primarily as a tool for electronically delivering exam scoring reports and files to instructors. The proof of concept includes evaluation from various perspectives including, but not limited to: whether the instructor can retrieve their files regardless of their location; whether it meets university security policy as related to type of data being managed; ease of use for the instructor; ease of use for OIRA staff; and ITS endorsement and commitment to long term support. OIRA is continuing to collect feedback and a decision is pending. Additionally, OIRA has identified other opportunities of use within the department and is continuing to evaluate those as well.
The Whitman School of Management, the Maxwell School, and Business, Finance, and Administrative Services (BFAS) are also SharePoint users, taking good advantage of collaboration, information sharing and calendaring capabilities. Other groups on campus are currently testing and investigating SharePoint, including the School of Architecture, L.C. Smith College of Engineering and Computer Science, S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, School of Education, and the College of Visual and Performing Arts.
Getting Started with SharePoint
You can create your own personal space and browse through the areas to which you have access by logging into https://sp.syr.edu. Here you'll also find links to self-help documentation and other support resources. When you're ready to set up a group or department, please email the SharePoint team at sphelp@syr.edu.
Documentation and Support
Documentation is under development https://sp.syr.edu/userhelp/. All suggestions are welcome; please email your ideas to sphelp@syr.edu. ITS's Core Infrastructure Services group provides support for SharePoint and its infrastructure. They can also provide advice and "best effort" help with content development, as time and resources allow.
Need help or have questions?
Email your questions to sphelp@syr.edu.
There is a wealth of information and training available from Microsoft at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/.
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IT Connections is published monthly by Information Technology and Services at Syracuse University. Please submit story ideas and news items to Chris Finkle. |
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