Tips From Your Admin

Did you know that...

Cart Safety Training (PTS-1000) is now available through STARS? It is self-paced, web-based training.

Managers are still responsible for assuring that cart operators have a valid driver's license and that they sign the Departmental Golf Cart-Type Vehicle Operator's Agreement each year. The Agreement is available on the Environmental Health & Safety web site.

Staff Happenings

Comings and Goings

Elizabeth Santisteven recently joined the VoIP Applications and Services team as an IP Telephony Engineer reporting directly to Jimmy Hale. Elizabeth hails from Colorado Springs, Colorado. She brings both advanced Avaya eACD and Cisco CallManager, Cisco VoIP experience to Stanford IT Services. While at Oracle, Elizabeth engineered and supported both Avaya eACD and Cisco VoIP globally. Prior to Oracle, Elizabeth was an Avaya Software Specialist in the United Kingdom, consulting and supporting a diverse community of Avaya customers throughout the UK. She brings years of client-facing, client consulting experience to the table.

- Jimmy Hale
Voice Applications and Services Team

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

Scott Wildy (Bryan Wear)

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, May 8

Working in Second Life—Glenn Fisher, Linden Lab. Second Life is a free 3D virtual world where users can socialize, connect, and create using voice and text chat. Many people are discovering that Second Life is not only a great place for social interaction and creating virtual content, but provides an effective platform for meetings and training. Over 5,000 educators use Second Life for everything from research to collaboration; many hold classes in Second Life. Take a tour of Second Life to see some of the many uses that have been created—from virtual museums to custom training situations. We'll discuss some of the advantages—and disadvantages—of working in a virtual space. Deni Wicklund, Stanford Libraries Tech Support, will give a tour of the Stanford University Library's virtual island—one of the largest created by a university.

Friday, May 15

Load Balancing—Ray Cooper, Network Specialist. IT Services provides provides a managed load balancer service for firewalled systems residing in the White, Forsythe, and core operational zones. Utilizing distributed pairs of F5 BigIP Load balancers (6400), the load balancer service provides clients with the ability to easily remove servers from pools for maintenance without affecting the availability of a service, distribute inbound traffic across multiple back-end destinations and act as a proxy from the Internet to local private addresses. In this session, we discuss what the service provides how to obtain it, as well as provide an overview of the architecture and how the load balancers are integrated with the firewalls.

Tech Express

Once a month
12:00–1:00 p.m.
Turing Auditorium

Thursday, May 21

Stanford Voice Messaging—Ammy Hill, IT Services. On May 17th, Stanford University will replace its voicemail system. The old system has reached its end of life and will no longer be supported by the vendor. This Tech Express will focus on what is and is not changing about voicemail at Stanford, and will give you an early look at some new features including receiving faxes in your voicemail, forwarding your voicemail to email, and Find-Me, Follow-Me.

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:

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

TechPort: Online Technology Training for Stanford—techport.stanford.edu (ITS-0611), through Aug 31, $195

Introduction to Drupal (choose one of two sessions) (ITS-3020) July 20, or July 28, 9:00–4:00, $395

Upcoming Tech Training classes of interest to IT Services staff:

Mac OS X Fundamentals (ITS-0401), Mon, May 11, 1:30-4:30, $195

Excel 2007: Getting Started with Macros (ITS-1145), Mon, May 11, 9:00–4:00, $325

Word 2007: Document Formatting (ITS-0937), Tues, May 12, 8:30–12:00, $195

PowerPoint 2007: Seven Essential Time-saving Skills for Effective PowerPoint Use (ITS-1334), Tues, May 12, 1:00–4:30, $195

* Web Design Level 3: Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) (ITS-2506), Wed, May 13, 9:00–12:00, $195

InDesign Level 1 (ITS-1457), Wed, May 13, 9:00–4:00, $325

Excel 2007: Seven Essential Time-Saving Skills for Effective Excel Use (ITS-1146), Thurs, May 14, 9:00–4:00, $325

Podcasts: Creating Audio Podcasts at Stanford (ITS-2652), Mon, May 18, 1:30–4:30, $195

Using Technology to Increase Your Productivity (ITS-0803), Wed, May 20, 1:30–4:30, $125

OrderIT Site Training (ITS-8301), Wed, May 20, 8:30–12:00, Free

TechPort Open Lab (ITS-0601), Wed, May 20, 9:00–12:00, Free

Excel 2007: What? You Don't Know Excel Yet? (Level 1) (ITS-1141), Wed, May 20, 9:00–4:00, $325

Excel 2007 for Finance Level 1 (ITS-1133), Thurs, May 21, 9:00–4:00, $325

Contribute (ITS-2612), Fri, May 22, 9:00–4:00, $325

* 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:

Stanford Email (Webmail) (ITS-2110), Tues, May 12, 1:30–4:30

Thunderbird Mail (ITS-2112), Wed, May 13, 1:30–4:30

Introduction to the New Stanford Email and Calendar (ITS-2115), Thurs, May 14, 9:30–11:00

Outlook 2007 Email (ITS-2111), Tues, May 19, 1:30–4:30

Apple Mail (ITS-2113), Thurs, May 21, 1:30–4:30

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 no new job postings for IT Services this week.

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

“Ability may get you to the top, but it takes character to keep you there.”

- John Wooden

News

A Note From Bill...

We recently completed our 2009 Client Satisfaction Survey, and now have the results. While we will all spend time together going over the survey results in our workgroup meetings and at Town Hall, I would like to share some initial observations from the survey with you now.

2009 marks the sixth year in a row that we have completed a client satisfaction survey. I am glad to report that this year the response rate to the survey exceeded our expectations. This is true across all of the cohorts—be they faculty, students, or staff—and demonstrates, once again, the vital importance of IT to the University.

The main trend in this year's survey is that the satisfaction scores leveled off after several years of continual improvement. A few scores were up, and a few more were actually down. I think the chief message we can take from this is that we are going to have to do more to meet the rising expectations of our clients.

Once again, I am glad to say that our clients gave us top marks on keeping IT systems up and running. This is important for our credibility around campus, and it is a strength we need to build on. They also remain impressed with the reliability and scalability of our systems, and give especially high marks to the network.

That said, clients have made it clear that it is critical for us to improve our responsiveness, especially in solving technical problems, ordering, order fulfillment, and billing. They want us to innovate now, and help them solve their business needs. We had already heard this from some clients, but the survey makes it clear that we need to make plans, at the work group level, to address client feedback and expectations.

In the coming weeks, your managers and directors will go over the results of the survey with you and talk about how your workgroup can help IT Services better meet client needs. I urge all of you to review the survey results and to think about ways that we can truly transform some of our services.

- Bill Clebsch
IT Services

Axess Timecard Punches In May 5

On May 5, Stanford launched a new time and leave reporting system. Axess Timecard replaced Kronos, which was retired at the end of the April 16–30 pay period.

The Axess Timecard interface has been designed to be intuitive for users and will be considerably more stable than Kronos. You will login to Axess Timecard from the Employee Information tab in Axess, the same location where you find the link to Kronos now. Stanford time and leave policies, procedures, and deadlines will remain the same.

For a preview of the new system visit the Axess Timecard Online Learning Center at the Financial Activities web site. The Learning Center contains animated system demos, job aids, and step-by-step instructions. Please bookmark this site for your reference when you begin using Axess Timecard.

If you have questions about using Axess Timecard, please contact us by submitting a HelpSU request.

- Nilda Bonet
Human Resources

Web Collaboration Tools Project Update

The Web Collaboration Tools project recently released production versions of three of its deliverables.

WebAFS—this tool allows anyone using AFS to access directories and files using a web browser. Go to afs.stanford.edu, enter your SUNet ID and password, and you'll be connected directly to your AFS home directory. You can navigate to other directories for which you have permissions, create directories, upload and download files, set permissions…almost all the most common AFS tasks. For many clients, WebAFS provides a more convenient method for accessing AFS and does not require an application (e.g., SecureFX, OpenAFS) other than a browser to be installed on your desktop computer. (And coming this summer, the WebAFS infrastructure will include additional security features that make AFS appropriate for storing Restricted and Confidential data.)

Collaboration Tools Central Installer—this tool allows Stanford departments and groups with AFS space and a cgi-bin directory to use a central, do-it-yourself web form to more easily install a few supported applications. The main advantage of the installer is that it's quicker and easier than a self-install of any of these applications. For example, initializing one of the applications with the installer takes only a couple of minutes of filling out a web-based form. Contrast this with a self-install that, when configured properly for the Stanford environment, could otherwise require as many as 50 steps, command-line expertise, and more than 30 minutes of your time. Additionally, the installer ensures that the application is properly configured for the Stanford environment, provides "skins" that match Stanford's web theme, and provides you with support from IT Services for future application upgrades. There is no charge for the service.

The installer is available at tools.stanford.edu and currently includes installers for a couple of popular tools already used by many campus departments:

  • MediaWiki—a free software wiki package for collaborative document creation and information sharing.
  • Drupal—Drupal is an open source content management system for web publishing and collaboration.

A test version of an installer for WordPress (a blog tool) and phpBB (a bulletin board/forum tool) is currently out for testing and expected to be ready for release in the next month.

Thanks to Jon Pilat, Jon Robertson, Dave Ream, Marco Wise, and Brian Young, as well as all the many testers for their work on these recent releases.

- Jim Knox
Client Support

Wrap-up for Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day

We had 18 children of IT Services employees join us to participate in Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day on April 17. It was a fun and informative event for the children, giving them a glimpse into working within IT Services at Stanford.

After a welcome message was presented by Bill Clebsch, the children divided into two groups for the morning's activities. On a walking tour of the campus, the children saw the New Guinea Sculpture Garden, Stanford's main Inner Quad, Memorial Chapel, Hoover Tower, and other buildings of interest. The children also toured the Forsythe Data Center and were able to see the impressive number of rows of racked computing systems, as well as the backup power facilities and large cooling fans in the third floor of the data center. The children toured the cable TV plant at Puichon, where they learned how cable TV operates behind the scenes, and they were able to observe a cable satellite dish rotate to a new position to pick up alternative stations. The children participated in a "Careers in IT" panel, where they heard from IT Services and ISO employees about their career experiences.

View photos of the event.

Many thanks to those of you who brought your children to work for the event, and to those of you who volunteered in supporting the event, including: Bill Clebsch, Bob Drewes, John Freshwaters, Liz Goesseringer, David Hoffman, Bill Johnson, Lucrecia Kim-Boswell, Chris Lundin, Nan McKenna, John Nelson, Joerg Pope, Tom Prussing, Matthew Ricks, Andrew Romey, Sonia Siu, Jai Suengsumpathan, and Bryan Wear.

- John Freshwaters, Business Services
Matthew Ricks, Computing Services

New Cell Phone Policy

IT Services is in the process of implementing a new cell phone policy for our organization, which will be effective in May.

For phones provided by IT Services:

  • All AT&T and Sprint phones will be transferred to the lowest pooled rate
  • We will add unlimited data plans to all PDAs and smart phones, and will add unlimited text to all phones
  • International plans will be added when necessary
  • Staff still must complete the cell phone form and pay $10/month for declared personal usage over 15%

We will limit reimbursement to $75/month for phones not provided by IT Services, and will allow no reimbursement for an additional phone if the staff member also has an IT Services-provided cell phone or PDA.

The Cell Phone group will handle setup of rates and plans. We will notify all IT Services staff by email before the new policy goes into effect.

- Nan McKenna
Service Management

Campus Transition to Stanford Voice Messaging on May 17

With the success and the learnings from the IT Services pilot, the Unified Messaging team is now preparing for the voicemail replacement phase of the campus roll-out. On May 17, all campus voicemail at 3-0000 will transfer to the new Stanford Voice Messaging system. Hospital voicemail at 3-1111 will transition later this year.

Campus voicemail users affected by the change received a message in their voicemail this week. Starting Monday, May 11, they will have access to set up their new voice message mailbox by dialing 5-0000. Instructions for initializing your mailbox are linked from the voice messaging Getting Started web page.

Some of the new service features tested by IT Services are immediately available to the rest of campus. Subscribers can request that their voice messages be forwarded to email or that they can receive faxes in their mailbox. These features are requested by submitting a HelpSU request. If mail forwarding is enabled, it is set to not keep a copy. The subscribers receive messages only via email and the message-waiting lamp on the client’s phone does not light when messages come in. This avoids the problem of having to manage messages in two locations. There is no charge for these new features. Additional features will roll out later this summer.

Department Contacts for OrderIT and Expert Partners were notified of the upcoming change and are spreading the word across campus. Meanwhile, the engineers are working tirelessly to finish contacting clients with unusual mailbox types or configurations to ensure a smooth transition to the new system. Starting the week of May 11, the project team is poised to staff a cross-functional command center to manage incoming issues. With representatives from the engineering team, the Help Desk, the Service Desk, the CRC, and the project team, incoming issues will be handled quickly and effectively as the different specialties work together to best serve the campus community.

- Ammy Hill
Campus Readiness

Storage Strategies

How about saving a half million or so dollars in operational costs… How? Simple, let's just do some "dedupe" and "D2D." Actually it's not quite that simple, but it has and is being done.

The industry trends in storage these days are about improved utilization, pooled storage, and leveraging the famous "cloud." The buzzwords that go along with these trends are "deduplication," "thin provisioning," "SaaS," and of course ILM and HSM are back in the form of "automatic data migration." I encourage you to Google some of these buzzwords… or better yet, the next time one of the Storage Team is trying to impress you at the water cooler or a cocktail party, press them for some details.

In data protection it is all about "disk" instead of "tape." Pressed by the need to have faster recoveries with smaller gaps between the recovery, the last time you backed up your data, and the massive capacities that need protection… things needed to change. To accomplish this, the use of disk is overtaking the use of tape in the world of backup and data protection (Virtual Tape Libraries or VTL and Disk to Disk or D2D). Continuous data protection tools (CDP) are improving and being used much more than the traditional backup methods that use longer intervals (such as daily).

Back to the point… the "half million dollars." In the face of incredible capacity growth, at Stanford we are actually shrinking our footprint in the data center for Storage and Data protection.

Through VTL we are rapidly eliminating tape libraries in Forsythe. Today we have reduced annual spending by over $500 thousand per year in data center charges and reduced media (tape) purchases compared to two years ago. With our second phase of VTL this summer, we will add more than another $500 thousand through reductions in floor space, labor, license, and maintenance costs.

Leveraging the utilization improvements along with increased disk sizes, we are also consolidating our storage systems and shrinking the footprint for storage systems.

In future months, you can look forward to hearing about how we said "goodbye" to the Tier 1 DMX, and also what "Cloud Storage" is all about.

- Dan Stillmaker
Storage and Backup

Tech Training Offered at SLAC

Tech Training is working with staff at SLAC to provide on-site training. This is a collaborative effort among Tech Training staff, our vendors, and SLAC staff to provide a convenient way for our friends up the hill to get the training they need on a regular basis.

Tech Training started this venture in April and plans to offer training at least two days per month at the SLAC facility. As SLAC begins migrating to MS Office 2007 in the near future, Tech Training is poised to meet their need with hands-on transition training from Office 2003 to 2007. More and varied classes are planned through the calendar year.

If you're interested in what we're doing and would like to view the schedule, go to slac-classes.stanford.edu.

- Nancy Baumann
Technology Training

IT Services Pandemic Preparations, (and your part)

IT Services is working closely with the University-wide team that is updating our campus pandemic plan, which is a part of our overall campus Emergency Response Plan.

There are two small, but important, items that we would like all staff to double-check to make sure information is current:

  1. Your basic Directory and AlertSU emergency contact information.
  2. Your external Emergency Contact Information.

Login to stanfordyou.stanford.edu.

Click "Maintain your directory and AlertSU emergency contact information" and update as necessary. Because more and more staff work from home or are mobile on- and off-campus, consider adding your Mobile Contact information and/or your home phone number to make it easier for colleagues to contact you. Note that you can restrict access to almost all items in the StanfordYou/Who display. Click "All your visibility settings" on that page to get easy access to those settings. If you set the Visibility level to "Stanford," only those with SUNet IDs can authenticate to see non-public information.

Click "Maintain your external emergency contact information." Please update as necessary so that we have your current information on file should we need it.

- Chris Lundin
Client Support

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, May 20, 2009.