Survey

Have you been out to a movie theatre in the past month?

Yes
No

Results from last issue's survey question: Do you think the new IT Services home page and service catalog are user-friendly?

There were 27 responses. 22 said "Yes," 1 said "No," and 4 said they haven't
checked them out yet.

Staff Profile

Jay Heyman

Jay Heyman started working at Stanford in 1990.

 

How would you describe your current job responsibilities?

I am working with the Departmental Firewall project to roll out firewalls to just about every network on campus. My task is to be one of three Firewall Support Specialists. We work with the individual departments before their migrations to identify which rules need to be created, and then work after the migration to input any requested changes to those rules. I have been assigned to the project for two years, but continue to be part of the CRC.

Which aspects of your job do you enjoy the most?

Besides the fact that I am working on a project that I feel is of great utility to the campus as a whole, I enjoy meeting the LNAs and departmental administrators from a wide variety of clients. Over my many years at Stanford, I have had the opportunity to meet many great people and this project will allow that to continue.

What did you do before you came to Stanford?

There is no "before" Stanford. There is only "between." I received my Bachelor's degree from Stanford in Drama in 1990. I started working for at the University that fall after a rather short try at making a living in theater in the Bay Area. I was originally at Residential Education/Computing, then I moved to the section on Medical Informatics in the Medical School, before moving to the Help Desk in IT Services as a Technical Analyst.

I had a brief five-year sojourn from Stanford when I was lured away by a former colleague at SMI. I tried to make my fortune at two start-ups (one in online fantasy sports and one in bond trading desk software) and like so many others, failed to do so. I returned to Stanford in 2004 and have been here since then.

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

I rarely get out nowadays since I have a three-year-old. I spend lots of time in parks watching him play and taking him to various playmates' houses. I spend my "free" time in World of Warcraft and occasional forays into social dancing.

What is your favorite movie, book, song?

Movie: (this is a hard one) I cried at The Jazz Singer (the later one), my jaw dropped in awe at Kill Bill Volumes 1&2, and I cheered uproariously for the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Book: I think Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card was one of the more sublime books ever written. I also have a weakness for The Princess Bride.

Song: I am rather old school—either Immigrant Song or Bohemian Rhapsody.

Staff Happenings

Alicia Kirton, who has worked at the IT Help Desk since the Sweet Hall days, is graduating from University of Phoenix at the end of June with two Bachelor of Arts degrees: Business/Management and Business/ Marketing. She has also accepted a position with Merrill Lynch in San Jose in an SQL reporting role.

We want to congratulate Alicia on her six year career at Stanford (and four more years at the Hospital), where she outlasted (wore out?) several Help Desk managers: Dwayne Virnau, Kevin Collins, Catherine Knipe, and Steve McLenegan. Alicia has most recently worked for Vicki Hallett on the Service Desk. She was also our resident party-planner, a skill which we will sorely miss.

Congratulations to Alicia on her diligent pursuit of her degree in the evenings over five years while holding down two jobs and raising two wonderful kids, Roy and Janiece. We plan to stay in touch.

- Chris Lundin
Client Support; Help Desk Services

Please join me in welcoming Virginia Tang to our Administrative Services team. Virginia will be Jay Kohn's executive assistant and will also be assisting staff in Forsythe Hall. Her office will be in Forsythe 190.

Virginia comes to Stanford from the banking industry and has many years of experience in customer service. Her primary responsibility at Washington Mutual bank was managing a group of staff handling day-to-day operating systems and resolving customer issues.

Virginia received a Computer Science degree from San Jose State University in 2002. We are very happy our search resulted in finding Virginia. We believe she will be a valuable asset to the organization. Please stop by to say hello and welcome her to IT Services.

- Cholada Chenhansa
Finance and Administration

With construction on and off campus booming (as you may have noticed in your travels around the campus) Facilities Engineering (FE) has the need to staff-up to meet these growing demands. After a fruitful search we have found a great candidate to fill our new FE position: Gary Gutfeld.

Gary comes to Stanford with over 18 years in the telecommunications industry. His specialty is in the fiber optics field. He was the project manager for the contractor that installed some of the initial SUNet backbone cabling back in the late 80s/early90s. He has worked on campus for most of his career as a contractor starting as a technician, then project manager, estimator, and operations manager of his company’s fiber optic division.

Welcome Aboard Gary!

- Erich Snow
Shared Communication Services; Facilities Engineering

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

Tech Briefings / Tech Express

Tech Briefings

Fridays
2–3:30 p.m.

Turing Auditorium

June 22: Universal Accessibility

To help web designers and online content creators produce material that is accessible to the greatest audience possible, The Stanford Online Accessibility Program (SOAP) provides guidance to those who share information via the Web. The recommended standards and best practices enhance the user-experience for everyone, including those with disabilities.

June 29: Home Networking

Kent Reuber will present some basic info on setting up home networks on Stanford DSL, Stanford West, and non-Stanford DSL/cable modems. He will talk about the basics of print servers, wireless access points, and routers. He will also present some example home network diagrams that you may want to follow.

Kent won't be covering specific products; there are simply too many products out there. He will, however, give you some recommendations on home network configurations that can be used with many different products.

Tech Express

12–1 p.m.
Turing Auditorium

June 21: iTunes at Stanford

Stanford on iTunes provides access to a wide range of Stanford-related digital audio and video content. The project includes two sites: a public site which includes Stanford faculty lectures, learning materials, music, sports, and an access-restricted site for Stanford affiliates delivering course materials, academic computing help, HR Training sessions, and much more.

Mark Branom will give you a tour.

Check the Tech Express 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.

Thurs, June 21, Dreamweaver Lite, 1:00–4:30, $150

Mon, June 25, Excel Level 3, 9:00–4:00, $275

Mon, June 25, Introduction to ReportMart1, 1:30–4:30, Free

Wed, June 25, Security: Encryption Technology, 10:00–12:00, Free

No classes are scheduled for the week of July 2.

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.

- Leni Silberman
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

"Habit is the nursery of errors."

- Victor Hugo

News

A Note From Bill...

Next week, we all gather for our summer Town Hall. I am delighted that Mike Keller, University Librarian, will join us as our guest speaker. Mike has a compelling vision of the future for the libraries and digital content at Stanford that includes important and innovative uses of technology. He will talk about this future and entertain questions at the very beginning of the gathering, so be sure to arrive a little early. Don't forget: The Town Hall is in Fairchild Auditorium (map) this time, right across Campus Drive in the Medical Center.

Also at Town Hall, we will discuss the results of our recent Client Survey. I think you will be pleased at much of the results and intrigued by what our clients think are the important areas in which we need to direct our energy and resources. We will also review the results of our Employee Survey. While that survey was particularly focused on workgroups, there were definite themes that emerged across IT Services. Both of these surveys provide critical input to our three-year Strategic Plan for the future. We will talk about that plan and our future goals as they relate to the direction of the University.

Finally, we are trying to make this more of an old-fashioned New England town hall in that we are leaving much more time for questions and discussion. I have visited many of your workgroups and have enjoyed the lively input and discussion from all of you. I urge you to bring that same spirit so we can all share in that open expression of opinions and responses to your questions.

See you on Monday over at Fairchild. Snacks and dessert start at 12:30, with Mike speaking at 1:00 p.m.

- Bill Clebsch
IT Services

Department Firewall Project

The Departmental Firewall project kicked off in earnest during Spring Quarter, successfully completing the migration of twelve departmental networks behind the firewall infrastructure. First to take the plunge was the Center for the Study of Language and Information, with LNA Emma Pease serving as a partner with the project team throughout the initial firewall deployment.

Shortly thereafter, the following Schools and Departments successfully completed their migrations: Stanford Law School, School of Education, School of Earth Sciences, Office of Research Administration, Carnegie Institution, Hoover Institution, Procurement, School of Engineering Dean's Office, Vaden Health Services, Athletics Department, and the Pine Hall network.

Each of the migrations provided us with an opportunity to improve both the pre-migration and cut-over processes. The cut over into the firewalled environment consists of a brief network outage of only a few minutes. We are committed to refining these processes even further.

After a brief hiatus for the Commencement freeze, the project team will resume migrations with another 30 departments scheduled to complete their migration preparations over the summer. Also in the works is a significant project with the Medical School to migrate approximately 60 of their networks to the Departmental Firewall infrastructure. By December of 2008, estimates are that the project team will have migrated approximately 300 networks to the new infrastructure and will have worked collaboratively with technical support staff from each of the networks.

Successful firewall migrations are highly collaborative efforts among the firewall project team, departmental LNAs, and CRC staff. We would like to acknowledge and thank each of our local tech support partners for doing their part so well and helping to ensure the success of their migrations.

- Michelle Collette
Client Support; Project Management Office

Integrated Email and Calendar

The Integrated Email and Calendaring project achieved a major milestone this week: presentation of their findings to the Systems Governance Group (SGG). Essentially, the project findings resulted in two viable solutions that would work best for Stanford.

These two solutions include Microsoft Exchange and Zimbra. Both solutions are considered by the project team as viable for Stanford, and functionally there were few differentiating factors. For example, Microsoft Exchange is a mature solution with significant market share. There are currently a number of departments running Exchange and we have skilled staff in IT Services who support Exchange. However, Exchange does not provide the same experience across all browsers and works best with Internet Explorer.

Zimbra is a smaller company with less market share. However, Zimbra provides a consistent experience across a variety of web browsers and is based on open standards architecture. The SGG members are currently considering the information that was shared and, in particular, how the few differentiating strengths and weaknesses of the two solutions impact their respective schools and organizations. Their feedback will be shared directly with Randy Livingston over the course of the next two weeks and a decision will be made at that time. Stay tuned....

- John Freshwaters
Shared Application Services

UNIX Group Update

This month, two of our staff will be heading to Scotland for "DebConf," an annual conference for Debian Linux developers to discuss and collaborate on issues and goals for that operating system. Stanford's representation at this and similar conferences is an important part of what we do. In providing ideas, time, and technical guidance in this and other areas, we are promoting Stanford's tradition of giving back to the community and setting an example.

Last month, the UNIX group coordinated two multi-day instructor-led training sessions on Ruby, an increasingly popular object-oriented programming language. This training was brought in to help the group work with our configuration management system for the Linux environment. Additional training may be brought back onsite (at a very reasonable cost) if there is enough interest.

There is a wealth of information, training, and conference resources for Linux, open source, and other systems and applications in use at Stanford. Contact Heather Flanagan if you are interested in training in any of these areas.

- Heather Flanagan
Shared Application Services; UNIX Systems and Applications

Project Management Office Changes

Over the past several months the Portfolio Management Team has been working with project managers, project sponsors, and workgroup managers to update resource needs and availability for project work. The goal was to get a realistic look at the remaining project work for FY2007 to set realistic project end-goals for our August 31 target.

As a result of this analysis, we have delayed three projects until next year, and extended the end-date of eleven projects into FY2008. Details on these changes to FY2007 Projects are available (Excel XLS file).

Just to keep things busy, we added three new projects that have just kicked off: Server Virtualization, Emergency Text Messaging, and iPass service completion.

The project managers have updated the Weekly Project Status report to include FY2007 deliverables and launch dates for each project.

We have two new project managers who have joined the Project Management Office. Heather Ramamurthy will be working on the Remedy, Self-help Knowledgebase, and System Monitoring & Reporting projects. Michael Dave will be working on the K4/5, Workgroup and Org, and Guest Accounts projects.

We also have a Summer Intern. Chris Jacobson, a Junior at Stanford in Engineering, will be aggregating end-of-year data to track project completion status and start-of-year data for project planning. Welcome Chris.

- Joyce Dickerson
Client Support; Project Management Office

Picnic Invitation

There will be an IT Services picnic under the shade of the oak trees this summer. Enjoy icy cold beverages and tasty delights.

Bring your kid(s) and play silly games.

Mark your calendar now for the IT Services Summer Picnic:

Thursday, August 9, 2007
3:00 – 6:00 pm
Jordan Quad
Under the trees and on the lawns...

- Your Picnic Planning Friends

Next its in bits July 5th

its in bits is published on the first and third Wednesdays of the month. However, Wednesday, July 4th is a University Holiday. The next edition of its in bits will be published on Thursday, July 5th.

- The Editors

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 Thursday, July 5, 2007.