Staff Profile

Noah Abrahamson

Noah Abrahamson started working at Stanford in 2006.

 


How would you describe your current job responsibilities?

I work in the Computer Resource Consulting Group, on the Humanities & Sciences field support team. I'm currently working closely with the Cantor Arts Center. I work primarily with Mac OS X stuff, server and lab management things, and a smattering of other interesting projects. I'm really invested in cross-platform integration right now.

Which aspects of your job do you enjoy the most?

Nothing stays the same—there's always something on the horizon. Apple is a dynamic company and the open source projects they include with Mac OS X are diverse and constantly evolving. I like discovering the logic in things and following where my curiosity leads me. I've grown to appreciate elegant solutions.

What did you do before you came to Stanford?

My first job in California was in Berkeley at a small Mac-centric consultancy in 2004. Prior to that, I was working in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan. I had a fantastic time. I managed hundreds of Macs across the entire campus. Working at a huge, liberal state university is a very different experience. It's fitting I work with H&S, as my background is in cultural studies, communications, and graphic design.

What do you like to do when you're not at work?

I'm a wine geek. I also enjoy cooking and backpacking. I hope to do the Lost Coast trail this summer up near Arcata. I went kayaking again over the holiday break in Kauai, which was awesome.

What is your favorite movie, book, song?

There's a movie from Quebec called "Léolo" from 1993. It's set in Montreal, where I used to live. The protagonist, a young boy trapped in a crummy neighborhood with his lunatic family, goes a little insane himself by blurring real life with his fantasies.

Unsurprisingly, Catcher in the Rye is one of my favorite books, as well as Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. For music, I can listen to the subversive group The Hidden Cameras anytime.

Tips From Your Admin

Did you know that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) doesn't allow travel meal expense for one-day travel (no overnight stay)?

However, a bona fide business meal may be reimbursed.

Staff Happenings

Leni Silberman's last day was 1/31/08. She is retiring from Stanford after many years in Tech Training as the Manager and for the last year as a Curriculum Analyst. Her long and dedicated service and especially her interest in promoting TechPort was important to the Tech Training program.

We wish her well as she embarks upon the next phase of her life—more time for bird-watching, to play music, and most importantly, to be with her grandchildren.

Luvien Tran will be joining Technology Training on 2/11/08 as our Financial Associate. She will handle our billing, reconciliation, purchasing, and all other financial transactions. Luvien will continue in her role as the Executive Assistant to Jan Cicero plus providing administrative support to the organization in the mornings. She will join Tech Training in the afternoons. We are all excited for Luvien as she furthers her career goals within IT Services.

- Nancy Baumann
Technology Training Services

Starting February 11, Prescilla Young will be the new Lead for the Administrative Services team. She will be replacing Luvien Tran, who will spend 50% of her time handling financial activities for the Tech Training group, and the other 50% assisting Jan Cicero and other staff members in Client Support.

- Cholada Chenhansa
Administrative Services

Please help us welcome the newest member of the Project Management Office, Pamela Ross. Pamela joins us from Stanford Hospital and Perot Systems, where she was Director of the Infrastructure Program office at Stanford Hospital & Clinics. She and her group have migrated data centers, rolled out wireless LAN, deployed infrared asset tracking, tackled security vulnerabilities, upgraded core software applications and moved facilities, among other things.

She brings strong project management and broad technical skills to IT Services, as well as a solid understanding of the Stanford culture & environment. 

Pamela will be project manager for the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) project, and will be sharing an office with Caren Kammeyer in Polya Hall 262.

- Joyce Dickerson
Project Management Office

Jaime Walter accepted a position with the office of the Vice Provost for Student Affairs and has left Computer Resource Consulting (CRC). Although CRC will miss him, this is a great opportunity for Jaime and will allow him to further expand his technical skill sets. He'll continue to provide stellar client support as he's done for CRC during the past four years, but his new position will provide him with a new cultural experience, which should be exciting for him. And he'll still be at Stanford, which is a big win for us all.

Eric Deskin will join the CRC on February 11, 2008. Eric comes to us from UC Santa Cruz, where he recently completed his B.A. in Business Management Economics. While working toward his degree, he worked in the IT Services department as a Residential Networking Assistant, a HelpDesk Associate, and for the past year he was Technical Support/Server Administrator and Budget Analyst for the UC Santa Cruz Educational Partnership Center.

I'm very excited to welcome Eric to the CRC team and believe he will be a great asset to Stanford.

- Karen Zack
Computer Resource Consulting

Comings and Goings

The following people have joined Information Technology Services. Welcome.

Clifford Yee (Dan Stillmaker)

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

Tech Briefings

Tech Briefings

Fridays
2:00–3:30 p.m.

Turing Auditorium

Friday, February 8: InDesign CS3

Kathryn Chinn, from Adobe, will demo the creative possibilities and new levels of productivity using the Adobe InDesign CS3 page layout software. InDesign integrates Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, InCopy, and Dreamweaver.

Friday, February 15: Drupal

Tim Torgenrud and a panel of experts will discuss Drupal—a free, open-source, modular framework and content management system (CMS) written in PHP. Drupal allows system administrators to organize content, customize presentations, automate administrative tasks, and manage site visitors and contributors.

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

 

Technology Training Courses

The full listing of Current Courses is available on the Tech Training web site.

Upcoming Tech Training classes of interest to IT Services staff.

Blogs: Setting Up a Blog at Stanford, Tue, Feb 12, 1:00–4:30, $195

Excel 2007 Level 1, Tue, Feb 12, 9:00–4:00, $325

Flash Levels 1 and 2 (Two Day Class), Wed Feb 13 & Thu Feb 14, 9:00–4:00 both days, $525

OrderIT Site Training, Thu, Feb 14, 8:30–12:00, Free

PowerPoint 2007 Level 2, Tue, Feb 19, 9:00–4:00, $325

SQL Basics, Wed, Feb 20, 9:00–4:00, $325

Security: Basic Computer and Network Security Awareness for Non-Techies, Wed, Feb 20, 10:00–12:00, Free

Excel 2007 Level 2, Thu, Feb 21, 9:00–4:00, $325

Sign up at http://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.

- Nancy Baumann
Technology Training Services

IT Employment Opportunities

There were two new job postings for IT Services this week.

Req. #28915: Order Processor (non-exempt), 100% FTE, Range 4P1, Suzanne Schiessler, hiring manager.

The Order Processor works primarily with the following organizations: Installation and Maintenance (I&M) for creating and distributing daily workload packages and assisting technicians in the field regarding records and bible sheet location lookups; Facilities Engineering for cable orders; Systems Engineering for LEN adds and balances.

Req. #28916: Computer Information Systems Analyst, 100% FTE, Range 4P2, Karen Zack, hiring manager.

This position provides computer support, including desktop and local server consulting, with expertise in Mac and Windows desktop computers as well as Windows and Mac-based servers. Computer Resource Consulting supports University schools and departments on a contract basis or for short-term projects.

To view the complete 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

“The covers of this book are too far apart.”

- Ambrose Bierce

News

A Note From Bill...

On Thursday afternoon, January 17, we honored staff who have contributed ten or more years of service to Stanford at our annual Service Awards ceremony. This event provides a wonderful time to pause and thank these staff members for their dedication and contributions. It was remarkable to hear the tales of accomplishments.

Please take time to congratulate the following staff on their Stanford anniversaries and to acknowledge these remarkable milestones.

10 Years of Service: Russ Allbery, Andrew Romey, Chauncey Smith, Relu Vasiliu, Javier Villegas, Clinton Wiley, Ross Wilper, William Wong, Carlos Zertuche, and Christina Zuffinetti.

15 Years of Service: Mark Branom, Ed Horrigan, Nuriya Janss, Pamela Morrow, Erich Snow, and Steve Tingley.

20 Years of Service: Michelle Collette, John Gruver, Dave Ream, and Nancy Ware.

25 Years of Service: Fred Hansson, Robin McClish, Bob Moya, Greg Smith, Greg Steiger, and Anh Tran.

30 Years of Service: Christine Moe.

35 Years of Service: Jim Stosick.

- Bill Clebsch
IT Services

Remedy 7 Launches February 19th

The Remedy 7 project will launch the new version of Remedy over President's Day weekend. The new system adds the ability to:

  • login via your SUNet ID and password (instead of a separate Remedy password)
  • store multiple email signatures
  • work with an improved web version
  • assign tickets to new locations
  • add larger attachments (limit increased to four megabytes)

Cutover starts Friday, February 15th at 6 p.m. Remedy will not be accessible over the weekend and all requests that arrive via HelpSU will queue and become the first tickets created in the new system. All existing tickets from Remedy will be converted to the new Remedy system.

To be ready for Tuesday morning, staff have various training opportunities available. These include live and WebEx sessions. A complete list of training opportunities was emailed to all Remedy users on February 1st and it can also be viewed in the Bulletin Board section of the management console in Remedy.

- Ammy Hill
Campus Readiness

Integrated Email & Calendar Project

Last week, you may have read or heard about Microsoft's unsolicited proposal to purchase Yahoo! and wondered how it might affect Stanford's plans to install the Yahoo!-owned Zimbra Collaboration Suite as the University's enterprise-wide email and calendar tool.

While it is too early to speculate on the impact of Microsoft's plans, initial indications suggest that Microsoft's proposal is primarily intended to leverage Yahoo! to improve Microsoft's internet search capabilities and to increase its share of the Internet advertising business. We do not expect this acquisition, should it be successful, to affect the Zimbra product in the near term.

Stanford will continue to move forward with its Integrated Email and Calendar project and will monitor the Microsoft/Yahoo! developments closely through its contacts at Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Zimbra.

As additional information becomes available, the team will update the project web page.

- John Freshwaters
Shared Application Services

Information Security Test Completed

Back in September of 2007, IT Services embarked on a massive effort to improve the security around the data in our care. This included running our own security scans against equipment (servers, networking equipment, voice systems; anything with a presence on the network) under our management, responding to any issues found, reviewing firewall rules, focusing on process improvements for determining and responding to risk, and making sure security is a part of our job descriptions. One of the most significant milestones we committed to was a penetration test conducted by a professional security firm.

A penetration test is another way of saying we hired good guys to try and hack our systems. The third-party firm spent several weeks identifying possible points of weakness and then attempting to break in to those points. I'm thrilled to report the vendor was unable to break in to our systems. While they found some areas that were a bit more vulnerable than others, no actual break-ins were successful.

Information security cannot be taken for granted. The huge efforts of the last several months helped bring us up to where we need to be, but that does not mean the work is done. We are still conducting our own scans every few weeks, and every scan points out something that needs to be addressed. Our policies will need to be continually reviewed to make sure we're responsive to the changing environment. And this kind of third-party review of how we are implementing information security is now a regular part of what we do. In addition, we will be working with a variety of vendors to conduct penetration tests every three months.

If you have any questions, please feel free to drop me a note.

- Heather Flanagan
Systems Administration

Results from the OrderIT Survey

Nine months after going live with our new Order Management environment and processes, we wanted to check in with the departmental Client Contacts to see if they have noticed the improvements to the system and solicit suggestions for future improvements to the ordering process.

In early December, we sent out an online Zoomerang survey to all of our active Client Contacts (about 1,400 individuals) and we received 323 responses; an impressive response rate. According to the respondents, the most noticeable improvement is the automated email notifications that go out at every step of the order fulfillment process. Other improvements mentioned were the new format of the billing statements, the ability to download reports to Excel, the ability to schedule automatic delivery of reports via email, and being able to call the Service Desk to request information about their orders.

The survey pointed out that a majority of Client Contacts use the OrderIT site on an infrequent basis (less than once a month), and many do not take advantage of OrderIT classes or online tutorials. The Order Management Governance team will be reviewing ways that we can reach out to clients to improve their abilities to order our services. We will begin issuing a newsletter (they've given us 81 suggestions for newsletter topics) offering tips and tricks and other information on a regular basis.

Based on this client feedback, we can see that the Order Management Redesign project has had some major successes, and we are proud of everyone's efforts to achieve streamlined processes and improved customer service.

- Suzanne Schiessler and Nan McKenna

Update on Projects

The Portfolio Management Team (PMT) has reviewed and approved the starting of a number of projects now that we've made it through the first quarter. There are 46 active projects that the PMT is tracking, eight projects in planning and eleven projects on hold status.

Recent additions to the Active list include Integrated Email & Calendar, Pinnacle Upgrade, Big Fix for Macs, and Mass Notification. The PMT also approves Charter Change Requests, which change time, scope, or budget for projects.  You can see the full list of Active, Planning, and Hold projects in an Excel file.

Additionally, the Project Management Office publishes a status report on active projects on a weekly basis. You can subscribe by sending email to the list, or view the current version (Excel).

- Joyce Dickerson
Project Management Office

Professional Development Courses

Technology Training is embarking upon a more substantial professional development training program for IT staff. We plan to offer at least one higher-end course per quarter to IT Services that is pertinent and needed for the professional growth of IT staff.

In future its in bits, these courses will be listed under the Technology Training Courses section of this publication. If you have specific training that is needed by you and/or your group, please contact your manager.

Watch for details on these upcoming professional development opportunities for IT staff:

  • VMware Jumpstart (one day) during the week of February 25-29 (exact day to be determined)
  • Ruby (one and 1/2 days) and Ruby on Rails (three and 1/2 days) training during the week of March 10-14
  • Mac OSX Leopard training (troubleshooting and more for technical consultants and help desk staff) during the week of March 31-April 4

If you are interested in any of this training, contact Nancy Baumann in Technology Training.

- Nancy Baumann
Technology Training Services

Client Relations Update

Effective February 1st, Susan Arsenault, Dominga Zepeda, Frances Locke, Greg Steiger, and Nancy Ansaldo moved into the Shared Communication Services (SCS) organization and are reporting to Suzanne Schiessler, Director of Order Management. This will be a familiar environment for the group. They have been a part of the Client Relations team for the past 18 months, and were previously located in Shared Communication Services.

Their roles will continue to be consulting with our clients on IT Services as experts on the implementation of voice and networking services. The reporting relationship is changing to recognize the close ties which they maintain within the SCS organization, and it will facilitate the order management process and communication to clients of the SCS services. In addition, Suzanne will be moving to an office in Forsythe to be closer to the entire Order Management team.

The Service Consultants will be missed within the Client Relations (CR) group, and we hope that while they aren't a part of CR going forward, we'll continue to have the excellent working relationship we've developed over the last few years.

- Suzanne Schiessler & Nan McKenna

New Stanford-Dell Support Agreement

After almost a year of negotiation, IT Services has signed an agreement with Dell for Platinum support. This agreement covers critical servers previously under Active Gold warranty. Over time, more servers will be added to this level of support. This agreement is not limited to core infrastructure. Clients whose servers are managed by IT Services can also take advantage of this as they acquire new servers by working with their account manager.

Platinum support isn't just about fast turnaround with parts. It also includes a dedicated Dell Technical Account Manager, a full review of our computing services, and more. Dell is working with us with everything from business practices to better marketing with our clients.

More information about Platinum support is available on the Dell site.

If you would like more information about Platinum support here at Stanford, please contact me.

- Heather Flanagan
Systems Administration

Town Hall

The next Town Hall will happen on Tuesday, February 26 at 10 a.m. to noon in the Oak Lounges at Tresidder Union. The meeting should already appear on your Sundial calendar.

Our special guest speaker will be Joe Stagner, the Executive Director for Sustainability and Energy Management at Stanford. In addition, Bill will discuss the current strategies to support Scientific Research Computing needs and other strategic planning topics. As always, we will introduce new staff members and there will be time for questions and answers.

A post-Town Hall gathering is planned for 3:30 p.m. on the grassy area outside Turing (this is also on your calendar).

Please make plans to attend both events. Additional details will follow as we get closer to the date.

- Nancy Ware
Planning & Communications

About its in bits

A regular summary of IT business, news about personnel, and pointers to other information of interest to IT Services staff. Coordinated, compiled, and published by the Communication Strategy and Standards Team. its in bits is published 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 via 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 20, 2008.