Staff Happenings

Congratulations!

Jason Cowart was awarded one of the two 2011 Business Affairs Superlatives Awards at the Business Affairs Managers meeting held on December 14, 2011. This was a new initiative from the Business Affairs leadership team to recognize individuals who have made outstanding contributions to Business Affairs and to Stanford over the past year. Nominations were solicited from managers and staff and Jason was one of the two individual contributors selected by Randy Livingston's direct reports.

Here is the excerpt that was read in recognizing Jason's contributions:

"Jason is an outstanding resource to everyone on campus. He consistently goes above and beyond to ensure the client gets what they need, and carries the clients' needs back to IT Services to better inform project decisions going forward. He frequently turns his insomnia to productivity, replying to questions from me at all hours (like 1:55 a.m. this morning). He's willing to take the heat, even when defending the client means that his opinion may not be popular with leadership that just wants to get things done. He stood up for the client's needs throughout our Cloud Discovery project, and ensured that we fully understood what we stood to lose in addition to what we stood to gain. This is a rare quality and I value his voice on every project."

Congratulations to Jason on this very appropriate recognition of his contributions to our Business Affairs success!

Comings and Goings

The following person has left Information Technology Services. Please contact his manager if you need to follow up on any open items.

James Hsu (Jimmy Hale)

its in bits welcomes more detailed employee news submissions from all staff. Please submit to itsinbits-submissions@lists.stanford.edu

Tech Briefings

Fridays
2:00–3:30 p.m.
Turing Auditorium

Friday, January 20
FarmShare—Shared Computing Environment

Friday, January 27
HTML Newsletters

Check the Tech Briefings home page for future sessions and to subscribe to the mailing list.

Technology Training Courses

Upcoming Tech Training classes of interest to IT Services staff January 18 to February 1:

Note: Click class title for more information or to enroll in STARS.

Winter Techie Festival
January 23–27, 2011
Turing Auditorium
Half-day lectures for only $125 each

COMPUTING FUNDAMENTALS

Getting Stated with YouTube

Accomplishing More with Less

Managing and Organizing your Email Inbox, Electronic Documents, and Papers (Techie Festival Lecture)

Social Media and Business Applications (Techie Festival Lecture)

Upgrade Your Computer Literacy: What You Need to Know Now (Techie Festival Lecture)

Social Media in a Nutshell (Webinar)

iPhone and iPad Apps to Improve Productivity (Techie Festival Lecture) 

MICROSOFT

Office 2010 Crash Course (Webinar)

Excel 2010 (PC): Formatting Professional-looking Spreadsheets (Techie Festival Lecture)

Office 2010: New Features 

Excel 2007 Techniques (Webinar)

Word 2007 Techniques (Webinar)

Advanced Excel 2007 Pivot Tables (Webinar)

MS SharePoint Techniques (Webinar)

PRESENTATIONS AND PUBLICATIONS

Photo Editing Basics: Best Uses for Photoshop and Free Alternatives (Techie Festival Lecture)

Using PowerPoint as a Powerful Communication Tool (Techie Festival Lecture)

WEB DESIGN/CONTENT and DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT

Web Design with "Stanford Modern" Templates (Techie Festival Lecture)

Editing a Drupal Site at Stanford

Understanding Basic HTML

The full listing of Current Courses is available at itsupcoming.stanford.edu, or on the Tech Training website. Find us on Twitter and Facebook!

Sign up at axess.stanford.edu.

Classes with low enrollment may be cancelled one week in advance. More information on courses, registration, and training is available at the Technology Training Services site.

- Don Cameron
Technology Training Services

IT Employment Opportunities

There were no new job postings for IT Services this week.

To view the current listings or to apply for a position, visit the StanfordJobs web site at: jobs.stanford.edu.

There are other open Information Technology positions at Stanford. To see what other opportunities exist on campus, link to the full list of all open IT positions at Stanford.

Quote of the Week

“Give thanks for what you are now, and keep fighting for what you want to be tomorrow.”

- Fernanda Miramontes-Landeros

News

Virtual First

The primary benefit of our investment in virtualization technology has proven to be the additional space it makes available in the Data Center. In addition, the entire University benefits from efficiencies in power and cooling consumption. Virtualization of our servers enables IT Services to better use the capacity of the existing data center space.

Virtualization allows IT Services to reduce the physical resources required to maintain an operating system and makes it easier to provision additional instances of operating systems, thereby lowering costs for support as well. And, virtual technology can provide a level of fault tolerance, depending on the application, by offering the ability to easily redeploy to a new virtual machine if the original one fails.

There may be times when we need a physical server (for example, database servers). When you make a decision, please keep in mind that our data center has physical limits. Our ability to leverage virtual servers rather than use physical ones helps us to extend the data center's life.

When possible, "Virtual First."

- Shirley Hodges
System Administration/Desktop Systems Group

New Version of Remedy on the Way

A cross-functional team is hard at work on "Remedy Refresh 2012" to upgrade our installation of BMC's IT Service Management Suite from version 7.1, which we've used since February of 2008.

We plan to install version 7.7, which the vendor has scheduled to go into general availability in March 2012. Because we only get to upgrade Remedy every four or five years, the team wants to install the most recent release.

Remedy Version 7.7 will introduce these changes:

  • The application and web servers run on virtual devices, with the only physical server housing the Oracle database.
  • A changed interface removes many of the tabs and displays more data on simpler screens.
  • The Remedy User Windows client is replaced by browser access.
  • Ad hoc reporting through the Web client (previous releases required the Windows client for ad hoc reporting).
  • New integrations with the Oracle eAM application to replace the Pinnacle system interfaces.

The new version of Remedy will go live in August 2012 or during Winter Closure 2012.

The project team consists of:

  • Application Support: Anne Pinkowski, Jose Rocha, Tracy Neil, Tim Torgenrud
  • Contractors: Suresh Kannan, Steve Kallestad, and Poovizhi Mohandoss
  • Systems Administration: Victor Chavez
  • Project Management Office: Vacilis Kollias (Project Manager)
  • Client Support: Chris Lundin (Project Sponsor) and Thuylynh Nguyen

We'll keep you informed as the team makes progress.

- Chris Lundin
Client Support

Get Cash for Shutting Down Servers

Are you able to shut down servers after your big virtualization and consolidation project? Keep track of those servers and you can get paid for each one that you decommission.

Stanford’s Facilities Energy Management (FEM) group launched a new Energy Retrofit Program (ERP) that pays a rebate per server removed. The typical rebate is $650 per server removed, less $1,957 for each server added. For example, if your newly virtualized environment reduced your server count from 20 to 2, then the ERP program would pay you $9,086.

Are you removing servers but not virtualizing? You still qualify. As long as you remove and decommission a server (hardware refreshes don't count), you can apply for the rebates. Now is the time to make sure you really need all those machines you run 24 hours a day.

Find more information on ERP Express for Server Virtualization on the VMware @ Stanford web page.

- Joyce Dickerson
Sustainable IT

Free VMWare Training

Want to build your skills for working in a VMware environment? You can now take any self-paced VMware online training class for free. Prefer your training in person? Stanford has secured a special 15% discount for all faculty, staff, and students on all classroom training completed by June 30.

Find out more and sign up at VMware @ Stanford.

- Joyce Dickerson
Sustainable IT

Annual Penetration and Vulnerability Scan Completed

During the first two weeks of December, IT Services worked with SECNAP Network Security Corporation to complete our annual penetration and vulnerability scan. SECNAP executed this scan from outside Stanford to penetrate our systems and identify vulnerabilities in the securing of Stanford data. In the past, this scan focused on the Data Center and Electronic Communication Hubs (ECH). This year, we added the IT Services office buildings and executed the scan during traditional business hours.

During this scan, 1,651 devices were alive and responding. The outcome identified 5 critical and 176 high-severity issues to address. As we worked through the critical issues, three were identified as false positives and the remaining two issues were addressed by retiring a device.

The next step is to identify a team to work through the high-severity issues.

- Shirley Hodges
System Administration/Desktop Systems Group

Business Services Update

Business Services continues to evolve with two exciting new additions: a manager for IT Services’ mobile device business and a manager for vendor relations.

Cell phones and mobile devices. Effective January 11, Nancy Baumann added management of the cell phone program to her scope of responsibilities. Over the past few years, this program experienced a threefold increase in subscribers and became significantly more complex. We now have four carriers addressing campus needs, an external vendor providing support services, and new policy changes to absorb. In addition, we've been changing our business models and moving toward fixed pricing at the organizational level.

Until now, we haven't changed our organizational structure to accommodate and better administer this rapidly changing business. The time is right to make those changes. Appointing Nancy to this new position allows IT Services to leverage her successful track record of managing all aspects of a complex business while ensuring continued growth and financial health. Nancy will report to me in this new role. She will retain her duties as manager of Technology Training and Campus Readiness, and will continue to report to Jim Knox for those responsibilities.

The support team of Nancy Gutgsell and Mellani Miller will report to Nancy. This unites all the elements of service ownership, service management, and operations of this important business.

I want to thank Suzanne Schiessler, who guided the cell phone program to this point in her role as Service Manager. Her advice and counsel on future needs for this important business are deeply appreciated. As she transitions out of the Service Manager role, Suzanne will join the Project Management team full-time and continue to report to Nancy Ware.

Vendor Relations. I am excited to announce that on January 23, Tracy Yuan will be joining IT Services in the newly created role of Manager of Vendor Relations, reporting to me. In this new position, Tracy will coordinate critical vendor relationships, develop and implement vendor-related policies, complete business case analyses to determine vendors of choice, and orchestrate RFQ/RFP and associated processes. She'll also negotiate contracts with all major hardware, services, and cloud solutions providers, including telecommunications, cable TV, servers, storage, and networking tools vendors.

Tracy comes to us from the President’s office at the University of California at Berkeley where, for the past five years, she worked as the team leader for system-wide IT strategic sourcing initiatives for IT hardware, software, and services. Prior to working at UC Berkeley, Tracy spent eight years in various procurement positions at Siemens. Tracy’s office will be in Polya Hall.

- Sam Steinhardt
Business Services

Client Support Quarterly Ops Reviews

Client Support now publishes quarterly ops reviews. These reviews include accomplishments over the past quarter, project updates, metrics, planned work, and open or resolved issues. Future reviews will include our roadmaps.

You can find the reviews in Confluence on the 2012 Academic Year Client Support Ops Report pages.

Please let me or any of the Client Support Leads know if you have any questions.

- Jan Cicero
Client Services

Common Solutions Group Conference

From January 11–13, Stanford hosted the Common Solutions Group conference at Paul Brest Hall. The Common Solutions Group is a consortium of IT leaders from about 25 top-tier US research universities who meet twice annually to share insight on technology trends, service delivery, business models, and policy that affect higher education. Each institution is represented by their CIO or other executive IT leader, along with a lead technology architect.

Typically, there are themes of discussion and some presentations given over the course of three days. A few of the highlighted topics this time were:

Beyond the planned topics for the meetings, it was very helpful to share insights more informally. Of particular note were the number of our peer universities that are adopting Software as a Service products. Sometime these online products replace some legacy product, however, as often as not, they are additional services that didn't even exist and now supplement centrally-provided offerings. Beyond technical insights on implementation, it's equally useful to understand what policy (e.g., privacy, information security) implications similar institutions are considering before adopting such a "brokered" service strategy.

- Bruce Vincent
Strategy and Architecture

About its in bits

A regular summary of IT business, news about personnel, and pointers to other information of interest to IT Services staff. its in bits is published by Information Technology Services on the first and third Wednesday of the month.

Submissions are due by Noon on the Friday before the scheduled issue, to itsinbits-submissions@lists.stanford.edu for consideration. its in bits is distributed by email to its-all-staff@lists.stanford.edu and the subscription list itsinbits-subscribers@lists.stanford.edu People outside of IT Services can self-subscribe via mailman.

The next its in bits will be published on Wednesday, February 1, 2012.