Staff Profile

staff

Cheryl Miller started working at Stanford in July 2008.


How would you describe your current job responsibilities?

  • Collaborate with the organization on staff-related issues, policies, programs, and processes.
  • Coach/advise employees, managers, and supervisors.
  • Assess organizational/individual staff development needs.
  • Determine appropriate classification levels and pay for new and existing positions.

Which aspects of your job do you enjoy the most?

Partnering with the business, enabling the attainment of organizational objectives.

What did you do before you came to Stanford?

Prior to joining Stanford, I worked for Cisco Systems in a role similar to my current job. The early part of my career was spent with Bechtel Corporation, where I rotated in and out of HR specialty areas that focused on organizational strategy.

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

Read, bake, run, and exercise.

What is your favorite movie, book, song?

Back to the Future series, many books, anything Beatles.

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

Glad to be here!

Staff Happenings

Comings and Goings

Joyce Dickerson, Director Sustainable IT. Joyce's position is jointly funded by IT Services and Sustainability & Energy Management (Joe Stagner). In IT Services, she reports to Matthew Ricks. Joyce is in Polya 206 except for Thursdays, when she's over in Bonair with Joe's team.

George Dias (Karen Zack) joined Information Technology Services. Welcome.

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, October 17

Stanford Web Forms Service

Marco Wise, IT Services, will demonstrate the new Stanford Web Forms Service, now available to community members for making contact forms, short surveys and polls, instructor evaluations, and other forms, free of charge. No knowledge of HTML, JavaScript, or SQL is required. The form-building application provides a selection of pre-formatted fields and elements (both general-purpose and Stanford-specific), as well as pre-defined actions, that make it quick and easy to construct web forms. Data collected through the forms can then be emailed to the form owner and/or stored in a MySQL database, where it can be viewed through a secure web interface.

Friday, October 24

What's Changed at Stanford — Sophos on the Desktop!

Sophos Anti-Virus is Stanford's site-licensed anti-malware software. It can protect your computer against viruses, adware/spyware, and other malicious software. Representatives from both IT Services' Technical Analysts Group and Sophos will discuss this new software and answer questions from the user community about it.

Tech Express

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

Thursday, October 16

Stanford Email and Calendar

Ammy Hill, IT Services, will give a quick demo geared toward day-to-day use of the new Stanford Email and Calendar. There will be a quick tour of the system with plenty of time for questions and answers.

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

Tech Training Courses

IT Professional Development:

XML Introduction, Wed, Oct 22, 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:

ReportMart1 Introduction, Mon, Oct 20, 9:00–12:00, Free

Mac OS X Fundamentals (Leopard), Mon, Oct 20, 1:30–4:30, $195

Using Technology to Increase Your Productivity, Wed, Oct 22, 1:30–4:30, $125

*Web Design Level 1: HTML Your Way to the Web, Thurs, Oct 23, 9:00–12:00, $195

Adobe Acrobat & PDFs: Creating, Collaborating, and Saving (The Basics), Thurs, Oct 23, 1:30–4:30, $195

Office 2007: What's New?, Thurs, Oct 23, 9:00–12:00, $125

Vista Overview, Thurs, Oct 23, 1:00–4:00, $125

Excel 2007: What? You Don't Know Excel Yet? (Level 1), Fri, Oct 24, 9:00–4:00, $325

Wikis: Setting Up a Wiki at Stanford, Fri, Oct 24, 1:30–4:30, $195

Excel 2007: Seven Essential Time-saving Skills for Effective Excel Use, Mon, Oct 27, 9:00–4:00, $325

TechPort Open Lab, Tues, Oct 28, 9:00–12:00, Free

Access 2007 Level 1, Tues, Oct 28, 9:00–4:00, $325

PowerPoint 2007: Seven Essential Time-saving Skills for Effective PowerPoint Use, Thurs, Oct 30, 8:30–12:00, $195

Dreamweaver Level 1, Thurs, Oct 30, 9:00–4:00, $325

Word 2007: Seven Essential Time-saving Skills for Effective Word Use, Thurs, Oct 30, 1:00–4:30, $195

* class is part of the curriculum to help prepare for: Certification Workshop: Web Professional in the Stanford Environment, Thurs, Dec 4, 9:00–4:00, $325. More information at webcertificate.stanford.edu

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

Email and Calendaring Classes

Stanford's NEW Email and Calendar System — Fall Quarter Training

To see the current offerings, there are three sources of information:

  1. STARS (axess.stanford.edu):
    Click on the Training tab.
    SEARCH for the course title or course number OR
    BROWSE for Computing and Computer-Related and then Email and Calendaring courses.
  2. IT Services Technology Training web site (techtraining.stanford.edu):
    Click on the box Current Courses 2008 Class Schedule.
  3. For the complete listing of classes, see the Integrated Email and Calendar web site (iec.stanford.edu).

You must register for courses in STARS.

Questions? Visit techtraining.stanford.edu or iec.stanford.edu.

Call 723-4391 for more information.

IT Employment Opportunities

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

Req. #32625: Principal Network Engineer — VoIP Engineer, 100% FTE, Range 4P4, Jimmy Hale, hiring manager.

This position will serve as a Convergence Subject Matter Expert (SME), and represent a principal strategist role for both Voice and Data technologies architecture and engineering that will host applications associated with Voice services — VoIP, Contact Center, WiFi VoIP, Mobile Convergence, Unified Messaging, and the many possibilities of integrated applications.

Req. #32746: Senior Computer Information Systems Analyst, 100% FTE, Range 4P3, 1 yr fixed term, Kim Seidler, hiring manager.

This position reports directly to the Contract Services Manager and Team Lead within Computer Resource Consulting. It 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.

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

“Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise man to be able to sell it.”

- Samuel Butler

News

A Note From Bill...

The volatility of the financial markets and the economy over the last couple of weeks has taken its toll on many areas of of our lives. Many of us have felt the effects through such things as the tightening of the credit markets and reduction in the value of real estate investments and retirement accounts. We should all take a little more time, pay more attention, and give more help to our colleagues as we go through these difficult times together.

This instability has also had significant effects on higher education. Because Stanford depends so much on the return of its endowment investments and the generosity of our donors, the University is also feeling the effects of the downturn in the economy. On Thursday, Stanford's Vice President for Business Affairs and CFO, Randy Livingston, will come to our Town Hall to explain the impact on Stanford and what we should expect in the near-term. I urge you to join me at the Town Hall to help gain the financial context to our organization's future.

In unsettled times, when it is difficult to see the future clearly, it seems even more important to understand our organization's roadmap, how our daily work fits into it, and why that work is directly critical to the goals of the University. In the previous issue of its in bits, I discussed the connection between accountability and our ability to function as a high-performance team. But accountability can also have a somewhat broader business meaning. When we think organizationally, accountability is more related to our services: are they available, reliable, efficient, and scalable. By being so, we demonstrate that we are an accountable organization. Our clients can count on our services and they can count on us!

In times like these, we also need to consider what is IT Services' core strength or competitive advantage, if you will. We need to leverage that strength at all times to provide the most value for Stanford. Three key areas constitute our fundamental strengths: our knowledge of Stanford, our knowledge of technology, and our ability to deliver that technology at scale. Of these three, it is our knowledge of Stanford—our knowledge of our clients and their needs—that most distinctly sets us apart from other external IT providers. It is our ability to deliver technology at scale that most distinctly sets us apart from other internal IT providers.

That ability to deliver at scale is directly related to a set of unique assets and services that we deliver. Those assets include our knowledge of Stanford, but they also include technical talent and expertise, the campus computing infrastructure, the voice and data network, and economies of scale when collaborating with internal clients and leveraging the resources of external vendors. As we think of our future services and continue to develop our strategic roadmap, it is important to remember that we need to continue to make use of these key unique assets to be of unique value to the University.

At Town Hall, we will continue to explore exactly how our mission and strategy align closely with the University. Now that our individual goals are closely linked with the newly developed workgroup goals, and those to the strategic roadmap, we are poised to take another step forward to deliver maximum value to the University while creating a truly premier IT organization.

- Bill Clebsch
IT Services

IT Open House Focuses on Sustainability

Now in its seventh year, the IT Open House offers a once-a-year opportunity to join with colleagues and clients in a unique campus-wide event. Promoted as "one-stop-shopping" for IT services and vendor options, the event gathers into one exhibition hall IT services from all over campus and vendors from throughout the Bay Area. Concurrent with the exhibition, we will again feature the popular speakers' series inaugurated last year.

This year's event, to be held in Arrillaga Alumni Center on Thursday, October 23 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., explores "Getting to Green: IT Paths to Sustainability at Stanford," with Stanford's Sustainable IT Group joining IT Services and Campus Wide Agreements as a co-sponsor. Since the event will emphasize the green theme by highlighting services and practices that support sustainability, we're encouraging exhibitors to think about how their organizations or services contribute to sustainable IT at Stanford. Key paths to IT sustainability to be featured are: consolidated administrative data centers, the Green Research Data Center at SLAC, Work Anywhere tools, BigFix Power Management, and hardware lifecycle planning.

Whether you participate as a service provider or as an attendee, we hope you will find the event valuable, informative, and fun!

For more information, see, itopenhouse.stanford.edu, or contact the IT Open House planning group.

- Nuriya Janss
Documentation, Design, and Delivery

IEC Update: You've Been Upgraded!

If you've noticed a few differences in performance from Stanford Email and Calendar this week, it's likely a result of the recent software upgrade. After an intense testing period last week, the latest version was installed on Saturday morning.

Though many of the fixes are behind the scenes, there are several you may notice right away, including:

  • The Find Locations and Find Resources tabs now include free/busy information and accurately report availability of selected resources on the Schedule tab.
  • Faster load times for the Find Attendees tab.
  • Significant improvements to recurring meetings (for example: changes to a recurring meeting are retained after additional modifications).
  • Hovering over a meeting loads and displays attendee status on the first try.
  • Attendee status displays on the daily calendar print view.

Though the migration from Sundial to Stanford Calendar has been deferred, staff and faculty email migrations will resume at the end of this month with the goal of converting everyone to the new servers prior to Winter Closure. You can track the progress on the IEC Project page.

- Ammy Hill
Campus Readiness

Code Call Service for SHC & LPCH

If you're a fan of "ER," you're probably familiar with the term "Code Blue," the common designation for a cardiac arrest intervention process. The overhead announcement is heard, pagers go off, staff hasten to a bedside, and with grace, a life is saved. What you may not realize is that IT Services personnel play a key role in these dramas as they occur at Stanford Hospital and Clinics and the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital.

Operator Services Center attendants have memorized the response procedures for more than 50 different code and emergency notification processes. (There is no time to look up a process when seconds count!) All Operator Services Center attendants learn (six months into their training) to handle emergency calls that ring on our "code" line. The emergency line rings on all consoles and also on a wall-mounted loud bell. Typically, the call is answered before the first ring has ended. For each shift, several attendants are scheduled to act as code operators, a tactic to ensure that everyone maintains their skills in handling these calls. We dispatch emergency response teams, on average, more than 450 times a month. Sometimes, calls on the emergency line exceed 900 in a month.

Besides Code Blue, there are codes for stroke, child abduction, security alerts (unruly visitor, for example), bioterrorism, and many more. Each year, more are added. About 18 months ago, Packard instituted a "rapid response team" notification group and procedure. This team of people is designated to intervene on behalf of a patient in distress before cardiac or respiratory arrest has occurred. As a result of this new procedure, Packard reduced the number of cardiac arrests that occur in units other than intensive care by more than 70 percent. Child mortality was reduced by about 24 percent—that means that two children per month who might have died before are now saved. Stanford Hospital has also adopted the rapid response team method with significant improvement in patient outcomes reported.

In addition to the hospitals' emergency calls, OSC attendants answer elevator emergency calls for the entire campus. Ten to 15 times a day, someone pushes the button in an elevator for help. Most of the time, it's someone who's just curious to see if it works or someone who has accidentally bumped the button. However, about once a week, OSC operators dispatch the fire department to rescue individuals who have become trapped in an elevator on campus.

The OSC processes about 110,000 calls per month. The numbers of the emergency calls are a very small portion of our workload, but the results of our efforts in emergency notification provide enormous gratification to all the operators. They know that what they do matters.

- Carolyn Kane
Operator Services Center

Safari Support for Remedy Coming Soon!

The Application Support Team is currently targeting a Remedy Upgrade for November 22nd. Why are we doing an upgrade when we just went live on Remedy this February? Well… as you may remember, the Remedy 7 project was a "forklift upgrade" and took approximately 16 months to execute. During those 16 months, BMC released a new version of the Action Request System (7.1). Unfortunately, ARS 7.1 was released too close to our Go Live to squeeze it in. So… while we are on the latest and greatest applications, at the core of it all (ARS), we are one revision behind.

What benefits will we see with this release? The release delivers numerous backend changes. The most notable benefit to Stanford is an upgrade of CMDB v 2.0 to CMDB v 2.1, which promises substantial performance increases in processing and reconciling CMDB data. With the CMDB Project under way, we believe that now is the best time strategically to do the upgrade.

Some notable benefits come in the form of increased browser compatibility:

  • Windows Vista support for Firefox 2.0 and higher
  • Mac OS X 10.5 support for Safari 3.0 and higher

As we start digging in and upgrading environments, we will update you on some of the subtle new features you might see with this ARS upgrade.

P.S. Do you have an affinity for testing or two–four free hours in early November? Please contact us to participate in the User Acceptance Test!

- Anne Pinkowski
Application Support

Sophos Migration by Windows Systems Team

In just six weeks the Windows Systems Team, led by Sean Hoffmann, Stacy Lee, and Leroy Altman, was able to meet the goal of fully replacing Symantec Antivirus (SAV) with Sophos on 250 servers by September 30. This project consisted of testing the Enterprise Console and client deployment with the least amount of manual interaction on a variety of servers running at least six different versions of SAV. The configuration needed to provide scalability and redundancy, while allowing secure-network servers to update without Internet access, using HTTP and CIFS protocols for updates, and supporting all versions of the client to be a managed client. (In the past this was not an option as 64-bit servers or servers running databases such as SQL and Exchange needed to run unmanaged.) And finally, to build a server with the Enterprise Console and migrate all the servers.

The overall migration was smooth and the SAV uninstaller worked very well with limited interaction by staff. The only notable impact was a conflict with the GSB Citrix servers and Wyse thin client display resolution. Within a couple of days of digging, Ed Nuqui was able to determine that the problem was caused by the order that DLL for Sophos was loaded on the severs impacted.

Now, the whole team is able to manage virus scanning across all servers from a single console with the ability to review configurations, report viruses/spyware files, and deploy new versions of the client as they become available. Our initial goal was replacement, and the team did a great job, more than meeting that goal and giving us a foundation to work from. We now have to start to move forward with Sophos. We will be reviewing all the features and options of the client and Enterprise Console so we can update our operational processes on how to govern the configuration of clients. As we proceed, we will define and publish our day-to-day tasks and actions.

- Sean Riordan
Windows Systems

Web Self Help Resources

In Winter Quarter 2008, members of the Documentation, Design, and Delivery (DDD) group began working with the Office of University Communications' Web Team to merge and expand our two organizations' self-help resources for people who make web sites at Stanford. This September, just after the new Stanford home page and Admissions sites debuted, we launched a new web.stanford.edu to be the one URL where users and administrators can find everything they need for publishing and developing on the IT Services-provided University web infrastructure.

The launch marked the beginning of a new formal role for the DDD group and IT Services: to maintain and publish official University web templates and other authoring and development resources—and to promote standards and best practices for universal accessibility.

New things you can find at http://web.stanford.edu:

  • official Stanford Modern page templates as Dreamweaver/Contribute files and raw HTML/CSS;
  • a web-based application for creating a department/site custom banner graphic;
  • a prominent link to the new Stanford Web Forms Service;
  • a style guide for the Stanford Modern look-and-feel;
  • a web development "cookbook" of freshly-reviewed and up-to-date PHP "recipes" (scripts and/or modules, sample code, and documentation) tailored to making web applications work in Stanford's web infrastructure; and
  • a web services wiki "to facilitate communication and collaboration around the University's centrally-provided web services and to foster the practice of web standards at Stanford."

And a few more things coming soon:

  • a "web application toolkit" of centrally-installed functions and components that will make web applications on our secure infrastructure easier for developers to build;
  • a catalog of Stanford images and graphics to accompany the templates and style guide;
  • a set of "Sandstone and Tile" templates/skins/themes for individuals and groups needing an unofficial but Stanford-ish look-and-feel; and
  • "Stanford Modern" themes and skins to enable Drupal, MediaWiki, and Wordpress sites to match the official University look-and-feel.

The new web.stanford.edu was created by Brian Young, Marco Wise, Dave Donahue, and Dave Ream, with much-appreciated assistance and guidance from Scott Stocker, Randy Franklin, Jon Robertson, John Foliot, Tim Torgenrud, Steve Bean, and the following IT Services groups: the WWW Team, DDD, Campus Readiness, Tech Training, and Support Strategies Planning (SSP).

- Dave Ream
Documentation, Design, and Delivery

Winter Closure

Stanford plans to shut down to the fullest extent possible from Monday, December 22, 2008 through Friday, January 2, 2009. The University will re-open with the start of business on Monday, January 5, 2009. During the 2008 Winter Closure period, the following dates have been designated as University holidays:

Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Thursday, December 25, 2008, and
Thursday, January 1, 2009

Except where operations must continue, all areas of the University are asked to close down beginning December 22, 2008. For areas that close for the entire period the University will provide one additional day off with pay. IT Services has designated Friday, December 26, 2008 as the additional day off with pay for our organization. Additional information about Winter Closure is available.

We are commmunicating now to help as you plan your vacations and days off through the end of the year. We will follow up with more specific information as the time draws nearer.

- Nancy Ware
Planning & Communication

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, November 5, 2008.