A Note From Bill...
CRC Security Incident Response
New Guest Accounts System
Ivy+ Infrastructure
Stanford Email and Calendar
Internet 2
Staff Profile
Tips From Your Admin
Staff Happenings
Client Interaction Skills Tips
Tech Briefings
Tech Training Classes
IT Employment Opportunities at Stanford
Quote of the Week

Past Issues

Karla Louis started working at Stanford in 2004.

 

How would you describe your current job responsibilities?

I work as an Administrative Assistant and I report to Cholada Chenhansa. My main responsibility is to support staff in Acacia, Oak, Laurel, and Serra Modular. I create purchase orders, process reimbursements and petty cash, verify PCard transactions, reconcile different project task accounts and make sure that the accounts are allocated to the right account, create iJournals, place orders through OrderIT, purchase supplies, arrange travel, coordinate events, monitor the status of any purchase orders, and deal with any building problems.

Which aspects of your job do you enjoy the most?

The aspect of my job that I enjoy the most is the working environment. The directors, managers and staff in the Forest are very nice, helpful, and pleasant to work with. I am very happy to have a supportive supervisor and to be part of the Admin Team; my peers are all ready to help anytime.

What did you do before you came to Stanford?

Before I came to IT Services, I worked in the Disbursement Department Auditing PCards and as an Admin for the Payroll Department. I have been working at Stanford for almost four years. Before I came to Stanford, I worked as a Sales Associate at Gap Kids. It was really fun being around children.

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

I love to spend time with my husband when I am not at school. We like to do a lot outdoor activities like hiking, biking, rollerblading and jogging. We usually jog to the Stanford dish or at Shoreline Lake. On the weekends, we like to have barbeques at home and spend time with friends. I usually go to yoga class.

What is your favorite movie, book, song?

I enjoy watching action and comedy movies. One of my favorite movies is Mr. and Mrs. Smith. I like to read fiction and financial books, and my favorite authors are Isabel Allende and Susan Orman. I don’t have a favorite song, but I like Il Divo, Edith Piaf, Gypsy Kings, Shakira, Santana and Mana.

Anything else that you'd like to share with us?

This has been a very big year for me: I got married in March to a wonderful Frenchman, Nicolas Louis, who I met through his cousin. And on May 22, I became a U.S. citizen. It took almost a year for me to complete the process (after waiting for five years [!]) while I gained residency. The citizenship ceremony was held at Heritage Theater in Campbell, with more than 400 people from many, many different countries. It was a very exciting moment to me, and I feel very proud to be a citizen of this country!

Did you know that...

Any business trips of less than 50 miles one way from Stanford, or from the traveler's residence, whichever is greater, are considered local travel and do not qualify for an overnight stay or food reimbursement.

Comings and Goings

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

Blake Barnett (Heather Flanagan)

Raymond Chow (Anne Pinkowski)

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

This is the fourth in a series about the four steps to quality customer service.

Step Four: Ensure Satisfaction

• Follow up with client (by phone, email, or face-to-face) to check for satisfaction within two days. Give the client an opportunity to provide feedback.
• Close the Remedy ticket (generates a survey to client). Feedback helps us find out what we're doing right as well as what we need to work on.

Key Tips: If you have to break a promise to a client or miss a deadline, let the client know as soon as you know and be up front and open about the reason. Agree on a new deadline.

If you need to escalate or otherwise delegate a problem, make sure that you pass it to the person who is able to deal with it. Let the client know that this is what you've done. Check periodically with the consultant and the client to make sure the problem is being resolved.

- Dani Aivazian
Organizational Effectiveness

Tech Briefings

Fridays
2:00–3:30 p.m.

Turing Auditorium

Friday, June 6

Safety and Security at Stanford

Rick Rondeau, a deputy at the Stanford Department of Public Safety, will talk about safety at Stanford. He works as a motorcycle officer and is a bicycle patrol team member. Rick has motorcycled solo across the US and climbed to the summit of Mt. Whitney.

Friday, June 13

No Tech Briefing (Commencement)

Tech Express

Once a month
12:00–1:00 p.m.

Turing Auditorium

Thursday, June 19

This summer, IT Services will begin to transition the Oracle Calendar (Sundial) and Webmail services to a new integrated email and calendar solution. Ammy Hill will provide a demonstration of the new service and answer questions.

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.

Tech Training Courses

IT Professional Development:

MySQL Workshop, Wed, June 18, 9:00–4:00, $325

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

Upcoming Tech Training classes of interest to IT Services staff:

Encryption Technology, Wed, Jun 11, 10:00–12:00, Free

Photoshop Lite, Tue, June 17, 1:00–4:30, $195

Dreamweaver Level 2, Thu, June 19, 9:00–4:00, $325

OrderIT Site Training, Thu, June 19, 1:00–4:30, Free

Adobe Acrobat: Beyond the Basics, Thu, June 19, 1:00–4:00, $195

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

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

Req. #30572: Service Manager, 100% FTE, Range 4P5, Sam Steinhardt, hiring manager (Two positions).

The primary responsibility of the Service Manager is to manage an assigned set of service lines. The Service Manager will lead a cross-functional service team, including technical, business, financial, and project management, to ensure that services are delivered to clients. The Service Manager works directly with clients and with IT Services staff across organization lines to enhance existing services, create new services, and sunset services which are at end-of-life.

Req. #30440: Director, Service Management, 100% FTE, Range 1M4, Sam Steinhardt, hiring manager.

This position is responsible for managing the service line strategy, creating service line road maps, managing the service line development lifecycle, rolling out new service lines and enhancements, working with technical teams and process owners to ensure quality service delivery, and sunsetting services. The Director manages a team of senior service managers and business partners to ensure that services meet Stanford’s business needs.

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.

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells."

- Doctor Seuss

A Note From Bill...

It was great to see so many of you at Tuesday's Town Hall meeting. You can find the Be Well and IT Services meeting presentations on our Staff Meetings web page. In addition, we have also posted the archived version of the Web Ex session.

The updated organization charts were also published on Tuesday. We will continue to update them throughout the summer to reflect additional staff changes. Please contact me, the other EDs, or any of the Directors if you have questions about any of the priorities or changes discussed during the Town Hall.

- Bill Clebsch
IT Services

CRC Security Incident Response

Computer Resource Consulting (CRC) has partnered with the Information Security Office (ISO) to develop a standard Security Incident Response process in accordance with Admin Guide 67 [PDF]. The result is a process that all CRC consultants will follow when they are notified of a security compromise involving a CRC-supported system that contains restricted data.

The process focuses on working closely with ISO to provide timely information required to do necessary investigations and limit the amount of downtime a client will experience. We have used this process with success. We hope we do not need to use it in the future but, if it is needed, it will make the management of such incidents smoother for our clients.

A special thanks to Noah Abrahamson, Rosy Alvarez, and Anthony Hom for their contributions to the creation of this process.

- Kim Seidler
Computer Resource Consulting

New Guest Accounts System

In late May, Stanford's new Guest Accounts identity management system for affiliates and infrequent visitors to the University was quietly rolled out. Using a non-Stanford email address, the Guest Accounts system lets users authenticate to web applications, services, or computer clusters. Unlike SUNet IDs, Guest Accounts are not granted any default privileges or access to services; access must be set up by the system or service owner.

Any Stanford faculty, student, or staff member can invite anyone with an email address to create a Guest Account. When the Guest Account email address is added to a workgroup, access to specific web pages and resources is granted.

The technology behind this service is a new Active Directory realm and a Shibboleth/WebAuth infrastructure that handles web authentication for Guest Accounts. Guest Accounts can also be added to groups in Workgroup Manager. Shibboleth allows both SUNetID owners and Guests to authenticate to the same web site and use the same group memberships for authorization.

Thanks to the guest accounts team: Russ Allbery, Michael Dave, Quanah Gibson-Mount, Kevin Hall, Digant Kasundra, Christopher Kittle, Jay Kohn, Greg Koss, Brad Lauster, Scotty Logan, Bill MacAllister, Paul Pavelko, Jon Pilat, Dmitri Priimak, Roopa Sastry, Bruce Vincent, Tom Wiggins, Ross Wilper, and Brian Young from IT Services. Madhu Gottumukkala, Lynn McRae, Phong Nguyen, and the entire Middleware team from Administrative Systems were also part of the Guest Accounts team and were instrumental in bringing this service online.

To learn more about the Guest Account system, please see the Guest Accounts service page.

- Jonathan Pilat
Systems Administration

Ivy+ Infrastructure

Ivy+ Infrastructure is a group of peers from the Ivy+ schools that support services like systems administration, email, and middleware. The Ivy+ schools include Harvard, Yale, Princeton, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth, MIT, Duke, Columbia, Cornell, and Stanford. From May 6 through May 9, we met at Duke University to discuss what's going on in our areas. We focused on data center changes, IT reorganizations, major ongoing projects, and where we see disruptive technologies emerging that will change how we provide services.

There is quite a bit of commonality among the schools. Everyone talked about the different tactics they are pursuing to alleviate the common data center space problems. Every school seems to be going through a reorganization.

The disruptive technologies concept was one of the most interesting threads in our meetings. A disruptive technology is one that fundamentally changes how (or even if) a group does business. As an example, students and junior faculty no longer look solely to their home institution to provide services. Instead, they are taking all of the resources at their disposal—like Facebook, Twitter, Google Apps, and Amazon EC2—and using them to take communication and learning to a whole new level. We have to be prepared to let our services integrate with non-institutional resources—that's a huge change with major challenges for us.

Other potentially disruptive, or at least revolutionary, technologies include e-discovery. E-discovery is the ability to discover and retain information in response to legal action. As more and more information is stored in electronic format only, IT departments have a new set of challenges in storage, identity management, logging activity, and other requisites. After the Virginia Tech shooting a few years ago, the University had the need to retain huge amounts of data. They did not have the storage available and had to spend a large amount of money to get additional storage installed to keep data intact and be able to continue to support the business of the University. They still have that storage set aside.

The chance to meet with our peer institutions and discuss these issues is a great way to get help with current challenges and finding out what issues might be coming at us in the next few years. We will be meeting again in November. Topics will include metrics, staffing, and service portfolio management. If you have any questions for our peer institutions and would like some feedback, please contact me.

- Heather Flanagan
Systems Administration

Stanford Email and Calendar Suite

The Stanford Email & Calendar implementation is making brisk progress towards the initial pilot with IT Services on June 23rd. Functional and load testing tasks are going well. Of course, some bugs and quirks are being uncovered, but the team is working with Zimbra to fix or mitigate issues as they arise.

As we approach the June 23rd email conversion, now is the time that we ask a lot of our colleagues in IT Services. Not only will you be the first to use the new tools in a production environment, you will also be our ambassadors to the rest of campus. For this project to be successful, we ask all IT Services staff to promote a positive impression of the product to the campus community and also to report issues and problems via HelpSU.

For the initial mail-only conversion on June 23rd, you may not notice a change except for the new interface to Webmail. On July 21st, data from Sundial will be converted to the new Stanford Calendar, and IT Services staff will be asked to maintain information in both calendar systems until October 27th. IT Services locations and resources will be reserved in the new Stanford Calendar, but for the convenience of our clients, we will need to keep our calendars updated in Sundial as well, and clients may still use Sundial to make appointments with you. The team knows this will be inconvenient for many of our staff, but this real-world test is key to discovering and correcting issues so that we can provide the best service possible when we release these tools to our clients.

The project team will send additional communications via email to help prepare for this transition. Check the web site at iec.stanford.edu for more information or send questions to iec-questions@lists.stanford.edu.

- Ammy Hill
Campus Readiness

Internet 2

Heather Flanagan, Bruce Vincent, Scotty Logan, and Jon Pilat represented IT Services at the Internet2 member meeting in Arlington, Virginia last month. Internet2 (I2) is a consortium of higher education institutions as well as corporate and nonprofit partners that research and develop advanced networking and middleware technology. Stanford is part of the I2 research network backbone and a leading member of the middleware community.

Many of the I2 middleware projects were originally based upon products developed and used at Stanford. Grouper, the I2 group management solution, shares common roots with our Workgroup Manager. Signet, the I2 privilege management solution, is an evolution of Authority Manager. Stanford's commitment to collaborative middleware solutions continues with COmanage: a new product that incorporates many of the I2 middleware products and a variety of "well-behaved" (i.e., willing to "trust" I2 middleware) external applications that are configured to create an all-in-one infrastructure.

The COmanage framework can support the authentication and authorization needs of a virtual organization within a single identity management framework such as a cross-institutional research team or other far-flung collaborative enterprise. Digant Kasundra and Scotty Logan are working on the initial design and implementation of the COmanage framework. This includes building a virtual machine-based COmanage appliance that can be installed and configured quickly. Heather Flanagan and Bruce Vincent are the project coordinators for COmanage.

Other highlights included hearing about how other institutions have rolled out Shibboleth and Grouper, a method for pulling together attribute sets from disparate identity providers into a single authorization event, and the use of Second Life as a research and collaboration tool.

- Jonathan Pilat
Systems Administration

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, June 18, 2008.