Staff Happenings

Tai Chi Class

We would like to start another basic Yang-style Tai Chi class on Thursdays at noon starting in mid-April on the lawn outside Turing Auditorium. The class would be taught by Master Shu Dong Li, one of the top Tai Chi masters in the world.

Tai chi is great for stress management and improves immunity, balance, and brain function.

We need a minimum of ten people for the class, and six have already signed up. If you are interested, please contact Mary Donoghue right away.

- Mary Donoghue
Technology Training Services

Comings and Goings

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

Yashna Ram (Debbie Garcia)

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, April 3

Stanford Whole Disk Encryption (SWDE)—Due to the recent loss of University data, Stanford is in the process of revisiting the level of protection for campus desktops/laptops and associated Stanford data. Across campus there is no single solution to protect the University's data. IT Services is focused on providing alternatives for campus users to increase the protection of Stanford data while providing alternatives that are secure and not overly burdensome, increasing the likelihood they will be used. The alternative service provided by this project is Stanford Whole Disk Encryption (SWDE). It is recommended for faculty and staff who must store Restricted and/or Confidential Data on their computer. Please check the Information Security Office Data Classification Guidelines to determine if you might have Restricted or Confidential Data on your computer. This session will introduce you to the new IT Services alternative solution for SWDE using PGP’s Universal Server. If you know you need this solution, think you need the solution, are part of an IT support group at Stanford, or are just interested, please attend.

Friday, April 17

Mathematica: A Technical Overview—Come hear author and educator Paul Wellin talk about Mathematica 7 and beyond. See how Mathematica is used for everyday computation as well as high-performance computing from the bio-sciences, finance, engineering, and mathematics. Mathematica features include built-in parallel computing, image processing, information and data visualization, computable data sources, and much more.

Check the Tech Briefings home page for future sessions and to subscribe to the mailing list. Also see the Tech Express home page for information on upcoming presentations.

Technology Training Courses

IT Professional Development:

NEW! Introduction to Drupal (choose one of two sessions) (ITS-3020), May 5, or May 19, 9:00–4:00, $395

SQL Basics (ITS-2521), May 7, 9:00–4:00, $325

PHP Workshop (2 days) (ITS-2511), May 26–27, 9:00–4:00, $525

NEW! Perl Programming Plus Workshop (2 days) (ITS-2522), June 22–23, 9:00–4:00, $525

Upcoming Tech Training classes of interest to IT Services staff:

Dreamweaver 101: Start Here (Dreamweaver Lite) (ITS-2601), Mon, April 6, 9:00–12:00, $195

Adobe Acrobat & PDFs: Creating, Collaborating, and Saving (The Basics) (ITS-1401), Tues, April 7, 9:00–12:00, $195

Word 2007: So You Think You Know Word? (Level 1) (ITS-0931), Tues, April 7, 9:00–4:00, $325

Wikis: Setting Up a Wiki at Stanford (ITS-0804), Tues, April 7, 1:30–4:30, $195

* Web Design Level 1: HTML Your Way to the Web (The Basics) (ITS-2501), Fri, April 10, 9:00–12:00, $195

Access 2007: Essential Time-saving Skills (ITS-1724), Fri, April 10, 9:00–4:00, $325

FileMaker Pro Level 1 v9.0 (ITS-1801), Mon, April 13, 9:00–4:00, $325

ReportMart1 Introduction (ITS-8401), Mon, April 13, 1:30–4:30, Free

OrderIT Site Training (ITS-8301), Tues, April 14, 8:30–12:00, Free

Word 2003 Tips and Time Savers Lecture (ITS-0926), Tues, April 14, 1:30–4:30, $125

Excel Transition from 2003 to 2007 (ITS-1137), Wed, April 15, 8:30–12:00, $195

Word Transition from 2003 to 2007 (ITS-0927), Wed, April 15, 1:00–4:30, $195

Blogs: Setting Up a Blog at Stanford (ITS-0802), Wed, April 15, 1:30–4:30, $195

* Dreamweaver Level 1 (ITS-2610), Thurs, April 16, 9:00–4:00, $325

Wikis: Using a Wiki at Stanford (ITS-0805), Thurs, April 16, 1:30–4:30, $195

* Class is part of the curriculum to help prepare for:
Certification Workshop:
Web Professional in the Stanford Environment (ITS-2606), Fri, June 26, 9:00–4:00, $325
More information at webcertificate.stanford.edu.

Free Email / Calendar Training:

Apple Mail (ITS-2113), Wed, April 8, 1:30–4:30

Stanford Email (Webmail) (ITS-2110), Thurs, April 9, 1:30–4:30

Thunderbird Mail (ITS-2112), Tues, April 14, 9:00–12:00

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

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 four new job postings for IT Services this week.

Req. #33986, 33987, 33995: Telecommunications Attendant Trainee, Bargaining Unit, 100% FTE, Range A00, Debbie Garcia, hiring manager (Three jobs available, only #33986 is posted).

The Telecommunications Attendant Trainee reports to the Operations Supervisor of the Operator Service Center (OSC) within IT Services Shared Services Operations; routine call processing direction is provided by each shift’s Leader. The Telecom Attendant Trainee participates in a 12-month on-the-job training program that is designed to prepare them to be fully functional as the voice of Stanford, answering main published phone lines for the University, Stanford Hospital and Clinics, and the Lucile Salter Packard Children's Hospital.

Req. #33994: Sr. Applications Engineer, 100% FTE, Range 4P5, Anne Pinkowski, hiring manager.

This position will function as the technical lead for the team and will report directly to the Manager of Application Support. Duties include installation, configuration, and support of applications as well as developing and enhancing off-the-shelf applications by either leveraging custom integrations via application APIs or by developing custom interfaces or "helper" applications. The purpose of this role is to quantifiably streamline operational support, reduce overhead resulting from the manual processing of data, and improve the overall customer experience.

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 first of April, some do say,
Is set apart for All Fool's Day.
But why the people call it so,
Nor I, nor they themselves, do know.
But on this day are people sent
On purpose for pure merriment.”

- Anonymous

News

A Note From Bill...

At our last Town Hall, we discussed how we live in times of immense and constant change. Our guests from the Children’s Hospital made clear to us how fast our clients’ needs are changing and how quickly we must adapt to meet their growing expectations.

The greatest challenge facing IT Services in a time of huge challenges is: How must we change to remain a valued partner to our clients around campus?

The journey from a central IT organization to a valued IT partner is not an easy one. Our clients are facing difficult times. They need us to help them make the tools they have work. They need us to give them new tools to help them work smarter, while at the same time reducing their costs. This will not be easy, but it is a challenge that we must meet if our organization is to remain a key competitive advantage for Stanford. Otherwise, we will be reduced to a cumbersome IT commodity, providing no real advantage to the University over an outsourced solution.

Last week, the directors, managers, and I spent time wrestling with these challenges. Our conclusion is that these are not new; most are explicit in the Strategic Plan, and all are challenges we have already discussed. They do not change our strategic direction, but rather put emphasis on some additional considerations we must have when making strategic choices.

I see this larger challenge as being made up of eight key components:

  1. Plan which services might be best moved beyond edge of campus to the cloud, making sure we improve the client experience while reducing cost.
  2. Integrate our services more quickly and more seamlessly with the existing consumer technologies and services that our clients already have.
  3. Find ways for our clients to order and receive our services directly through an intuitive, incredibly simple self-service mechanism (like that provided by most successful service providers).
  4. Accelerate our work on converged communications.
  5. Further reduce the costs of IT, especially in the areas of energy and service delivery.
  6. Implement a complete range of talent management tools and processes across our organization to improve our strengths and to shore up our weaknesses.
  7. Simplify our business model.
  8. Manage this constant, discontinuous change, and create an organization that embraces change, that leads change, and that is a real competitive advantage to Stanford University.

I have asked your managers and directors to discuss these challenges with you in the coming weeks, and we look forward to your input. We know from our experience with the realignment last spring and the budget reduction effort last fall that the best ideas for meeting such challenges inevitably come from the work groups most closely involved with them.

While these challenges are large, I have every confidence in our ability to meet them in ways that exceed even our clients’ expectations. I know that with your creativeness and dedication to our organization we are up to the challenge. I look forward to working on it with you.

- Bill Clebsch
IT Services

Sundial Migration for Campus

Stanford Email & Calendar received an update on Friday, March 27. In addition to fixing some day-to-day problems like the "Network Service Errors" that we saw in the last version, this update also gave us the critical fixes and enhancements needed to proceed with the Sundial Calendar migration.

Working closely with the Campus Partners team, the migration has been set for the Independence Day weekend. Since IT Services migrated last year, no further IT Services data will be migrated. However, the migration will likely affect much of IT Services in various ways. Most notably, we will no longer need to maintain both the Sundial and Stanford Calendar. This comes as a big relief to everyone who has been trying to keep them in sync.

While the Integration and UNIX teams work tirelessly to complete the technical work, the Help Desk, CRC, Documentation, Design, and Development, and Campus Readiness teams are gearing up to support the campus through this transition. Additionally, our admin support team is planning to partner with other admins across campus to help them learn special tips and tricks for managing executive calendars and large meetings. Everyone is looking forward to a successful transition and working together to make Sundial’s retirement a reality.

- Ammy Hill
Campus Readiness

IT Services Duty Manager Role Established

As a critical campus service provider, IT Services monitors and attends to its services 'round-the-clock.

From time to time, service interruptions or degradations require communication during the wee hours and over weekends and holidays. Most of that responsibility is handled by our 24/7 IT Operations Center. However, to assure that some client communication components are handled in a timely manner without an over-reliance on any particular manager, we have established the new role of the IT Services "Duty Manager," which will rotate through the IT Services directors.

The IT Services Duty Manager's role is to assist with handling:

  • after-hours responses to critical system emergencies;
  • client escalations; and, when necessary,
  • activation of the IT Services Satellite Operations Center (SOC).

The specific duties (and schedule) of the IT Services Duty Manager are available online.

During business hours, this role is performed by the manager and/or technical lead of our IT Operations Center. This new role will share after-hours responsibilities across the Leadership team. The directors will evaluate this new function in a few weeks after we've had some experience with it.

- Chris Lundin
Client Support

New Lenovo-Stanford CWA

In February, the University signed a campus-wide agreement with Lenovo, the China-based PC vendor that purchased IBM's PC division in 2004. In addition to exceptional pricing on enterprise-class ThinkPads, ThinkCentres, and other products, Lenovo's lauded environmental standards, excellent reliability rating, and international support infrastructure will be well-suited to student, faculty, and staff efforts for years to come.

The agreement marks the end of a year-long effort with Lenovo, involving groups such as IT Services, Procurement, Office of the General Council, ISO, and MedIRT. Stanford precedents were set around computing vendor security requirements, support, and pricing. Data security and computing requirements have risen dramatically in the past few years, and this agreement ensures Lenovo's products and services will match our standards.

Stanford's Lenovo pricing comes in two tiers: Stanford Standards and Open Catalog, each with identical discount for both personal and institutional purchases.

  • Stanford Standards are eight super-discounted configurations designed by Stanford for Stanford. These are suitable for a variety of use cases right out of the box—whether student, faculty, or staff in offices, dorms, or labs.
  • Open Catalog orders are more traditional custom build-to-order configurations that give Stanford users any options they desire. From time to time, special offers will be made available as well.

For more information, please visit lenovo.stanford.edu or contact Mike Hagerty, our Stanford Lenovo representative.

- Jacob Pierce
Computer Resource Consulting / Desktop Systems

Unified Messaging Project Update

The Unified Messaging team has gotten a lot of feedback from the IT Services pilot. The biggest issue that has emerged is with .wav files and iTunes. iTunes really wants to be the default player for all audio types on both Windows and Macintosh machines and is very persistent about resetting itself to maintain that dominance. Whenever an update to iTunes is received, it usually resets the settings to play .wav files via iTunes again. The team is working with the vendor and with Apple to find a better resolution to the problem prior to the campus rollout.

We’re still depending on IT Services staff to put the system through its paces, trying out features including Find Me, Follow Me, receiving faxes, and receiving voicemail via the phone, web, or email. Instructions for all of these functions are available on the project web page. Additionally, frequently asked questions about the Unified Messaging project are answered at Stanford Answers. Report any unexpected problems or issues via HelpSU.

- Ammy Hill
Campus Readiness

New Buildings Active on ACES

We are expanding the ACES (Access Control Enterprise System) program to the Wilbur complex as well as two buildings in Governor's Corner. Effective March 30, the following buildings are in a soft go-live: Arroyo, Cedro, Junipero, Okada, Otero, Rinconada, Soto, Trancos, Adams, and Schiff.

For the initial two to three weeks, students will be able to use keys as well as cards for access, and all alarms are silenced. This process allows us to work out any access issues without keeping students from their residence. Full go-live will occur in mid-April, when keys are collected and alarms are audible.

Thanks to all the groups in IT Services and R&DE (Residential & Dining Enterprises) who worked together to bring these buildings up!

- Jay Kohn
Hospital Liaison/Card Services

Buying and Procurement Support Center

Stanford University, via the Controller and Procurement Offices, is launching a new Buying and Purchasing Support Center (BPSC) to provide customer support for internal and external customers of the Purchasing and Payments Departments. The offices plan to centralize the point of contact for the new center, which will be located at Porter and initially staffed with ten agents. They are targeting a go-live date in early June 2009.

The two offices have identified four key contact center technologies needed to launch the BPSC. IT Services is working with them on the first three.

  1. Remedy will support their ticketing management and queuing.
  2. Stanford Answers will have a link in Remedy and be accessible by internal and external customers on the web site for self-service.
  3. Call routing and upfront automation will use automated call distribution, Avaya ACD.
  4. Post-interaction customer satisfaction software will gauge overall success and individual and team performance.

We are currently working with them on additional functionality that will enable routing of email requests to the agents, also via eACD service. This is using a product called Contact Center Express and will allow email requests forwarded to CCE to be queued to the agents via eACD. There is no current delivery date for this work.

If you would like more information or have any questions, please contact Chai Ho or me, Jan Cicero.

- Jan Cicero
Client Support

C-ACIS

The Committee on Academic Computing and Information Systems (C-ACIS) is a Faculty Senate-appointed group that formulates University computing and information systems policies for faculty, students, and academic staff. It also reviews the implementation of those policies.

This year, the committee heard presentations on security tiers and data protection, IT Services' storage and backup direction, the Integrated Email and Calendaring project, and the Collaboration Tools topic.

C-ACIS, now broadened to include the head of IT from the Schools, is working to develop a campus-wide IT Strategic Plan. The committee is also developing some Guiding Principles for technology direction and development for campus. The final list of Guiding Principles is still pending; however, these items will be included:

  1. New technology implementations should include faculty representatives to confirm the viability of the project and to insure successful dissemination and acceptance.
  2. The committee gives strong support for the engagement of third party service providers to drive service costs down.
  3. Projects should start with a set of 'Use Cases' to insure the project results delivered meet real campus needs.
  4. To prioritize projects ask the question, "How does this project help with research or teaching?".
  5. Schools should work to share their internal applications to avoid redundant development and improve compliance.

The C-ACIS yearly final report is available online.

- Phil Reese
Faculty and Research Computing Strategist

iStanford 2.0

In case you missed it, here is a recent announcement from Tom Black, Associate Vice Provost, Student Affairs and University Registrar, and Tim Flood, Director, Student Affairs Info Systems:

The creative minds at Terribly Clever Design have written another chapter in innovation with the release of iStanford 2.0! If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, download it now for free from the App Store. New features include a more attractive and completely redesigned user interface, an all new Stanford events search, directory search filtering, and more.

Terribly Clever's unique collaboration with Stanford technical and administrative staff is not stopping here. Upcoming releases will include adding and dropping courses; viewing the student bill, Marguerite bus stops, and GPS locations; Stanford on uTV; and much, much more.

- Suzanne Schiessler
Order Management

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, April 15, 2009.