Wednesday, November 8, 2006

FAQ: Communicating with University Computing

Hello, everyone--



After a year-long hiatus, the Friday FAQs are back! In case you weren't here when we last sent these out, the basic idea is that we take one technical topic per week and work through it in as non-technical a manner as possible. For more information, including why we call these documents "FAQs", please see the FAQ archive at "http://www.wou.edu/faq. Some of you, of course, are reading this on paper; since we wanted as many people as possible to see this particular FAQ, we are sending it out by multiple methods.



This week's topic is communication with UCS; how you talk to us, and how we talk to you. At the end is a link to a survey so you can give us feedback.



I have a question for UCS. What is the best way to make sure I get a response?


That depends on the question.


- If you have a new problem to report, or want an update on an existing problem, please contact the Service Request Desk (AKA the help desk or the SRD) at ucshelpdesk@wou.edu or extension 88925.


- If it's about something where you're already working directly with someone in UCS, you can ask that person about it; however you may get a faster response by contacting the Service Request Desk. This ensures that your request is sent to an alternate person if the primary technician is not available right away. This is especially important with student workers, who are not on duty full-time.


- If it's a general question about technology, or about UCS policies or practices, feel free to send it to me at faq@wou.edu; I will do my best to answer questions either individually or in one of these FAQ documents, and if I can't answer a question, I will refer it to someone who can.


- If it's about a virus, or email spam, or spyware, or fraud, or any other such nastiness, send it to virusinfo@wou.edu. That also happens to be me, but those questions might not always be my job, so please use the virusinfo address so your question gets to the right person.


- If you're not sure where to send a question, the Service Request Desk will be happy to help you! When in doubt, just call 88925.


Why should I contact the Service Request Desk instead of directly calling a UCS worker I know?


The Service Request Desk is the best way to make sure your request gets to the right person as quickly as possible. We sometimes rearrange job responsibilities among our staff, so (for instance) the person you talked to about an email list last year may not be the correct person to call now. The people answering the Service Request line can make sure your request gets to the right person. If that person is not available, the SRD can often find someone else to solve the problem.


Going through the SRD also means that your request is documented. We are all human, and sometimes forget to write down things we are told over the phone or in face-to-face conversation, so having documentation helps remove the human-error factor.


Why is it called the "Service Request Desk" anyway?


We used to call it the Help Desk, but we found that created some unrealistic expectations. The Service Request Desk exists to take your service requests and direct them to the person who can help you; we can't possibly train all our student workers to provide direct help for every situation.


What happens to my request once I give it to the Service Request Desk?


The worker (generally a student) who takes your request will enter it into our Service Request System, and assign it to a technician, who will immediately be emailed a notification message. Wherever they are on campus, the tech can log into the Service Request system and take action. Once the request is handled, the tech records that fact, and may include any notes on the issue to help other techs who may have to deal with similar issues in the future.


The Service Request System also lets us track how well we are doing. These statistics are available publicly at "http://www.wou.edu/servicerequeststats.


OK, so what about your communications with us?


Right now, our main method of communicating with faculty, staff, and students is through the allfacstaff@wou.edu and students@wou.edu email lists. We use this both for urgent messages, such as emergency server maintenance or scam warnings, as well as for more routine communications, such as announcements of planned upgrades; basically anything we need to announce to a large part of the WOU community will go out on one or both of these email lists. We recognize that this does not necessarily work for everybody, especially considering the amount of traffic on those lists, but we have not found any obviously better alternatives. We are always open to suggestions, though!


What about all these blog posts I see links to in my email? Am I supposed to be reading all those UCS staff blogs?


Everyone on campus has a blog, if they care to use it; most UCS staff use ours to talk about what we are working on, and sometimes to explain technical issues or policies. An example from Bill's blog may be found at "http://www.wou.edu/~kernanb/blogs/archives/2006/09/faq_-_frequentl.html. However, you need not feel obligated to follow everybody's blog. Whenever any critical information is posted in a blog, there will be an announcement with a link to that post, so that everyone will have a chance to see it.


What about other means of communication, like the wiki server and forums server?


Both the wiki and forums servers are open to any member of the WOU community. Currently, they are used by several departments for various purposes; if UCS puts anything there that is critical for the whole campus community to know about, we will notify you via email.


What if I don't read my mailing lists? Shouldn't you make more of an effort to get critical information to me another way?


Well, we are sending this one out on paper as well as by email list and blog, so you can see it even if you don't read the email lists. However, don't expect all communications from UCS to come this way. If email lists just plain don't work for you, and you feel UCS should use another channel to communicate with you, now is your chance to tell us so. We're looking over our communication practices to make them as effective as possible, so if you want a change, please fill out our survey and let us know!


Ideally we will settle on one or two communication methods for critical information, and then we will clearly state what they are. It will then be the responsibility of everyone on campus to pay attention to announcements made via those methods; that will ensure that everybody knows what they need to know and is caught by surprise as seldom as possible. Of course, some surprises are inevitable when dealing with technology; but when we have any advance notice of something important, we will do our best to pass it along when it can still make a difference.


So what about that survey you mentioned?


Now for the survey. This is mainly intended for faculty and staff, since we've gotten the most feedback from those groups, but students may respond as well. If you are reading this on paper, it should have come with the survey; if you are reading this online, you can get the survey in Microsoft Word format via this link:


http://www.wou.edu/~crowej/FacStaffSurvey.doc


This is a printable Microsoft Word document; if it does not load when you click the link, try right-clicking it and choosing "Save As..." or whatever equivalent your browser or email program offers.


That's all for this week! Upcoming FAQ topics will include phishing and scams, the use of the Thin Clients, and the new website system. Feel free to suggest additional topics by emailing me at faq@wou.edu; I also recommend checking the FAQ archives at "http://www.wou.edu/faq to see if your question has already been answered.


Thanks for your time and attention,


----Ron


Wednesday, November 1, 2006

Improving Communication

Recently we've been getting some feedback that UCS needs to improve communications with others on campus, particularly the faculty.

As part of this effort, I'll be starting up the Friday FAQs again, after a hiatus of about a year. They are a good bit of work, but I don't mind doing it if it helps things run more smoothly.

The FAQs will also be posted here on my blog, so that anyone who wishes may comment publicly. Naturally, private comments can also be addressed to me at faq@wou.edu.

Also, the week after they are sent out, each FAQ will be posted on the UCS website (which desperately needs to be revamped, but that's a different topic.)

The first FAQ will be about communicating with UCS, and how it can be done most effectively, and also about the various channels UCS uses to communicate with the rest of campus. We'll include a link to a survey, which will also be distributed on paper, so that you can help shape our communications practices.

The main thing is that we want to help everybody here. We're a service department; without the rest of campus, and especially without students, there would be no point to our existence.

So if there's a problem, we want to know about it. If anyone perceives that UCS is being a roadblock, we want to know about it; sometimes what seems to be a roadblock is actually necessary for reasons that are not obvious, but other times it is the result of miscommunication or misunderstanding that can be cleared up with a bit of honest communication and creative problem solving.

Wednesday, October 4, 2006

Another update on the web conversion

Things are rolling along. As you've no doubt noticed, more and more pages are going live with the new design. Things will slow down a bit as our student helpers have fewer hours to work, but you will keep seeing progress.

The next big issue is training the web editors in various departments to use the new system. The main differences from the old system are as follows:


  1. You create new pages using a web form. The new system depends on PHP code to load in the external files that contain all the header and footer design elements, but we don't want to force everybody to learn a new language. So we've designed a web form where you just input the title and location of the page, and some search engine keywords, and choose a side menu, and then hit submit; this creates the page and inserts all the necessary PHP code. From that point, you can edit the page without needing to know any PHP (or even any HTML, if you're using Contribute.)

  2. You need a special setup in Dreamweaver or Contribute to edit anything visually. If you are a code geek, you can use any text editor to change your webpage by editing the raw code, but most people probably aren't that hard-core, even if they had the time on their hands to learn to code. You can use Macromedia Dreamweaver or Contribute to visually edit pages, though either one will require some initial setup by UCS (though we are working on making instructions available on the web and through the TRC.)

  3. You need to be consistent with visual styles. The new system provides a menu of visual styles that look good with the new template. This makes it easy to add and update content and make it look nice; the flipside of this is that you won't be able to use huge green blinking italics to highlight important information. (Note that personal sites on the P: drive are exempt from this; you can do whatever you want there.)

  4. You are expected to keep your web pages up-to-date.In the old days, we were pretty lax about keeping everything updated, and requiring other departments to do the same on their own pages. Those days are done. With the new simplicity of Contribute, there is no excuse for pages to get stale. Most web editors will have responsibility for only a few pages, and tools to edit them easily, so you will be able to stay on top of things.


On top of all that, the biggest benefit of this massive update is that the next update will be much easier. We will be able to totally redesign the site without forcing everybody to update all their files all at once; since most of the design elements come from external files in a central location, we can just update those files and BAM! the whole site changes without you having to lift a finger. If we discover a problem with the new design, it will be easy to fix, unlike the previous template.
It will take us a lot of time and energy to get to that point, but the effort is already paying off. Once this is done, we'll have a site that will make other universities green with envy. More to the point, it will show that WOU is not stuck behind the times, which will directly translate to higher enrollment, which benefits everybody here.

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Vacation

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention I'm going to be on vacation next week; we're heading for the historic city of Deadwood, South Dakota, in the heart of the Black Hills. We've been looking forward to this for months!

I'll be back on September 5th. In the mean time, refer web conversion questions to Stewart Gilbert, and all other questions to the UCS Service Request Desk.

Major progress on the web conversion

So, again I've been too busy to blog much. The web conversion project is moving along nicely, but is eating up almost all my time. If any of you are waiting on me to do something and I haven't responded in some time, please feel free to bug me again. I know I've made some people wait too long for stuff; I apologize for that. Of course, these days we all know what it's like to be understaffed; people have been understanding, for which I'm grateful.

Anyway, we've made major headway on phase one of the process, which is creating the rough-draft PHP files. I have five UCS students working on this, who all deserve mention for their hard work: Jonathan Guillen, Ronni Luchterhand, Mark Lyons, Michael Orr, and Courtney Wehner. Read on for more about the project...

The page creation system (AKA "websmith") is just about ready to go. We've got a few people using it on a test basis already. In the new system you don't create pages by copying an existing one; you go to websmith and enter in a few details like the page location, the title, the search engine keywords, and so on; you also get to choose which set of side links you want, and what basic template you want for the page. The page is then created for you in the location you specified. (Naturally, you can only create pages in a location you have X: drive access to; there's no way anybody can break the whole site if they make a mistake.)
And tonight I'm working on the script to search out and change links in the whole website. This will be a vital part of phase two, where (after departments have given their approval) we move the HTML files in a given area into an archive folder, and make the PHP files into the real website.
We can't do this all at once, naturally enough; it will go piece by piece, and will take months. But progress will be steady; you may have already seen the changes in the Admissions and Financial Aid pages, and many others of use to prospective students. More pages will be converted in the next weeks and months, until the entire site is converted. We hope to train people in each department to work on their own web pages in the new system, which will help things move faster.
Note that personal web pages in your P: drive (formerly known as public_html) will not be affected at all. As the process nears completion, we will offer help to anyone who wants to use the new system for their P: drive website, but nobody will be required to convert those pages.
If you have personal pages on the X: drive, we strongly encourage you to move them to the P: drive. Eventually, all pages on the X: drive should be in the new system; if you don't want your personal pages converted, they will need to be moved to the P: drive. However, there's no fixed deadline for this; we are avoiding personal folders that we find on the X: drive for now. When the time comes (probably several months from now), we will ask for your decision; if you want to move the pages to the P: drive, we will help you with that; if you don't, we will help you convert them to the new system.
Anyway, that's all for now. I have miles to go before I sleep, and I need to quit writing and get back to work.

Thursday, July 13, 2006

Web conversion underway

Wow. Once again, it's been a long time between entries, but this time I have a valid excuse. I've been working my tailbones off now that the website conversion has finally moved out of the preparation stages and into full swing!

The first stage involves creating new versions of pages on the WOU website. These new pages end in .php instead of .html or .htm, because they are written in the PHP language. You may be relieved to know that PHP can have HTML freely mixed in with it, so you won't have to learn a new language to work with these pages.

These pages will eventually become the real pages on the website, but for now, the original HTML pages are still there and are not being changed. Each department will be able to look at the new PHP pages and approve or change them before we make them live, and the HTML pages will still be kept in an archive folder for reference, at least for the first while.

The first parts of the website to be fully converted will be the admissions process pages, in other words those that prospective students need to see during the admissions process. The home page will also be updated; you've seen its new look for months now, and that won't change much, but we have a lot to do "under the hood", so to speak.

Stay tuned for more info!

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Wiki server security

OK, user registration on the wiki server now requires a valid WOU login. I got a little sick of spammers crapping on our server, so this should lock them out.

If you have any trouble registering, please let me know at twikiadmin@wou.edu.

Oh, and I probably shouldn't mention this until I have it working, but I think I see a fix for the long-standing problem of the missing email notification of changes. With luck, that'll be taken care of soon.

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Wiki server is back up

Hey folks, you may (or may not) have noticed that the wiki server was down for a few days. This was because we got more spam on it. It's cleaned up again, and I've locked the guest account so it can no longer edit anything on the server.

In the near future I'll also be adding account verification to the user registration process; if you're already a user this won't affect you, but new people who want to register will have to provide a valid WOU login. If anyone finds this inconvenient, well, blame the spammers.

Monday, May 8, 2006

Another vacation?!?!

Well, this is extremely short notice, but I'm off to Crater Lake for the rest of the week. There's a place down there that we thought was going to come available next month, but it turns out the only time we can get is... this week!

So I'm working frantically to try to get stuff done that I'd promised would be "this week". We'll see how it goes.

Tuesday, May 2, 2006

Wiki spam

It looks like some spammer, and probably more than one, has been dumping their crap on our wiki server for the last couple of weeks. I just spent the last ten or so hours cleaning that up. I've disabled the guest account, which is where most of the damage came from, plus a few other spammer accounts that have crept in since Troy left.

Looks like I'm managing the wiki server now; if you see anything that looks like spam, or if you have any general wiki questions, please feel free to ask me!

Monday, April 24, 2006

Vacation

I'm going on a brief vacation starting Tuesday April 25; I'll be back on Monday May 1. Hopefully spending a few days on the coast, away from computers and the Internet, will help recharge my batteries.

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Changeover finally done!

Well, at long last the much-delayed webserver move is done! Even aside from the benefits of the new storage hardware, the new server is going to make the webmastering part of my job much easier. I hope the rest of you enjoy having web drives that map without you needing to click an icon or remember a different password.

Anyway, now it's time to go into high gear with the new template. The admissions pages will be the first to be converted; stay tuned for more on that. Meanwhile, I've got work to do if I want that done on time, so I'm going to go do it.

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Webserver changover delay

Well, as you know if you read your allfacstaff email, the webserver changeover has been postponed. This is essentially due to the administration's need to be free to post updates instantaneously; even an 18-hour delay (at the most) is too much for news about the negotiations and looming strike.

Maybe after this mess blows over we'll be able to get on with our jobs. I'm really having to bite my tongue about this whole strike business, at least in public like this; I feel stuck in the middle because I know people on both sides. It's all really frustrating and demoralizing; as far as I can tell, neither side has malicious intent, yet people on both sides seem to feel that the other has some sort of evil hidden agenda, and is intentionally telling lies.

That's all I'm going to say about that in public.

Monday, February 27, 2006

Web redirects and secure folders

I've been busy today.

The URL redirects have been applied to www3.wou.edu, so you can test them on the new server. This means, for instance, that you can get to the Registrar's website bu going to http://www3.wou.edu/registrar even though the real address of the site is http://www3.wou.edu/provost/registrar. There are 402 of these redirects on the server; someday I need to go in and try to figure out which are no longer used and delete them, but that will have to wait a while.

Also, secure folders should work. Any web pages that are password-protected on the current server are now also protected on the new one. Use the same username and password as on the current server; the only exception is if the username is the same as your WOU login. If so, you need to use your real WOU password, not the separate one you used for logging in to that webpage.

The new server gives us some new options for secure folders, by the way; we'll be able to specify "any WOU user", for instance, or have people log in with their normal WOU usernames and passwords.

And I'm still plugging away on the editing permissions script; I'm guessing that will be ready by the end of the week.

Correction about the W: drive

Oops, I made a mistake in my last entry; the W: drive isn't going to be coming back after the migration. After the final file copy and setting of permissions, the X: drive will be the one to use. Mac users will connect to smb://sundown/wou_website$.



Thursday, February 23, 2006

The W drive and Web migration

Despite how everybody commonly talks about it, the W: drive is not actually the location where the website files are stored. Really it's just a shortcut that leads to the real location. From your end, it looks like any other drive attached to your computer, but it is just a shortcut to a specific network location. That location is currently on the old server, which is why we can't automatically map the W: drive on your somputer now (To "map a drive" means to set up that shortcut so the drive letter or icon points to the proper network location.) This is also why you have to enter your old password when you run that pesky little batch file to map the W: drive (or when Mac users connect to "/maverick_nt/wou_website$".)

Since the W: drive (and any other network drive letter or Mac network drive icon) is really just a shortcut, it can be different for different people. A good example of this is your H: drive; it points to a different place for every person, namely their private network folder. Conversely, some people use different drive letters to point to the same location; for instance, at least one person I know of has a Z: drive on their computer that points to the web server files, so for them it's exactly the same as the W: drive. Mostly we try to keep things standardized here so everybody uses the same letters for the same things, just to keep confusion down. Mac people don't have this extra level of complexity since Mac's don't use drive letters; you just see a named icon, though that's still actually a shortcut.
Why all this explanation, you may ask? Why do we need to care that the W: drive isn't actually the location that holds the files? Because what I'm about to say won't make sense without the concept that drive letters and icons are actually just shortcuts that can be mapped to different locations.
Here's the process: First, we copied the web data from the old server to the new server. All of your W: drives still map to the old location, as does the web address www.wou.edu. (If it helps, you can think of a web address as just another kind of drive letter that happens to be visible in web browsers instead of in your "My Computer" folder; it's a shortcut that points someplace, and the place it points to can be changed.) If you have edits to make, you should continue to make them through the W: drive; the copy we made is just a temporary one anyway.
Once we get the editing permissions figured out, we'll apply them to the temporary copy of the files. We'll create an X: drive for everybody that points to that temporary copy, so you can test that your editing permissions still work. You can view those test changes at www3.wou.edu, which is a temporary web address. You still want to make real updates to the W: drive, though, because the web address www.wou.edu still points there, and so that's what people see on the live website. With me so far?
After everyone has had a chance to test their permissions on the temporary files, and we fix any problems we found in the process, we'll delete the temporary copy of the files, and remove the X: drive. Then we'll do the actual web migration. At this point you need to hold off on making any web edits until informed that the migration is complete. We will copy the files from the old server again, including any changes you made up until that moment. That took about fifteen hours when we did the test copy, so you can count on it taking about that long with the real thing. When that's done, we'll run the permissions script to reset everybody's editing rights, and change the www.wou.edu address so it points to the new server, and set up an automatic mapping of the W: drive to the new server. All this should take less than a day, including the file copying.
Once this is done, you can throw out those drive-mapping batch files; they won't work anymore because the W: drive will be mapped automatically at the time of login, if you have any web rights. From your point of view, things will look pretty much the same as they did before; you will still go to www.wou.edu to get to the website, and use the W: drive to edit your files. It's just that both of these shortcuts will be pointing to the new server instead of the old one.

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

It's been a while.

Hmmm, I've left this blog alone way longer than I intended. That needs to change.

The automatic user creation process is finished, except for the very last step; the automatic part. For some reason it gets errors when we schedule it as an automatic job, even though it works fine when we run the command manually. So all I have to do is remember to type in a command once a day, even on weekends, until this last little issue gets figured out.

I've been busy lately with the new web design project. Sometimes it seems that progress is slow, but at least there is progress.

Other projects I've put time into are the Calendar of Events (fixing bugs and making minor function upgrades) and an export filter for the Business office to get loan data exported by one of their programs into the proper format for the Treasury department's new system.

Oh, and my office has moved as well. I'm still in 009, but now instead of my little office by the front door, I'm now in the room behind the helpdesk where the hardware repair area was. Joe and his team are moving into ITC007. I'm sharing the new space with Dale Goodell, so my new area is actually smaller than the old one; however, I wasn't using a lot of the space in my old office, so I'm not suffering from the change. Getting a new machine sweetened the deal a lot; my old one was over four years old.

And as always, my job has lots of little tasks; updating webpages, fixing little problems on the website, creating URL shortcuts, and setting up editing permissions on new and existing folders.

And that, of course, brings me to the webserver migration, but tonight I'm busy enough working on it that I don't have any more time to talk. Hopefully tomorrow I'll get an entry up explaining more about that. With luck, I'll have time to get an FAQ written this week, believe it or not!

Which reminds me, if anyone has a topic they want to see explained in an FAQ, please let me know!

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Busy again

I got back from my vacation in the middle of last week and found myself busy again, needless to say.

Current projects, in no particular order:

  • Finalizing daily automatic user creation: This is really close to done. The user creation script itself works just fine; all I need to do is go through the code and make sure I can turn off all output to the screen, because when you run something as a scheduled task (AKA crontab or "cron" job in the unix world) any output that would normally go to the screen instead gets emailed to the user under whose security privileges the job runs as. I can't just redirect all output to null, because if there's ever an error message, we need that email to notify us, so instead I need to make sure that all non-critical output is suppressed inside the script.

  • Website master database: This is a big one, and I'll be talking about it more in the next weeks. We've been planning for almost a year to redo our entire website, primarily to make it easier to maintain. It will be written in PHP and we'll hide a lot of the common template features in external files. Anyone who views the source code of a WOU web page can see how complex our current template source is; this will be replaced by a few lines at the top and bottom of the file, with only the actual page content in between (still written in HTML so people don't have to learn a whole new language.) These external files will query our Oracle database for some page-specific information, and right now I'm working on the administration utilities for that information.

  • Detail work on the Calendar of Events: There are still a few things that need to be cleaned up; the event display needs a few tweaks, and I need to make the error messages friendlier.