We are meeting with the Vice-Chancellor and one of the CIO’s from around the state on monday to discuss Data Warehousing, and it’s future at WOU.
Our team has been working recently to provide some data to Eric as we just crossed over year-end.
I’m very confident in the abilities of our team, and hope that our meeting on Monday is a positive event. I’ve been spending time this week getting myself up-to-speed on the reports that exist and building new reports for Monday’s meeting and beyond.
I’m not sure if re-emergence is a word, but the spellcheckers don’t seem to mind.
Today was SOAR #1. We spent a great deal of the time this week prepping, organizing and re-learning some of the things that are done for SOAR. Overall, things seem to have worked well and the vast majority of the work is now done 🙂
This week we finalized the Banner migration and upgrade timelines.
OUS requested that we bump our week back to September, and we graciously agreed.
We’ll have an upgrade, followed by the migration, followed by an upgrade.
It’s going to be quite a ride.
Mike Soukup is doing a great job on the technical team to make preparations.
In July, he’ll be bringing Nathan and Christina up-to-speed and will include them in much more of the preparation for the Banner changes this year.
Now I just have to get the REST of the projects slated, and send that information out to campus…
Wednesday afternoon, I joined the IT open-source security summit for the Portland Area. The roundtable included the City of Portland, Military, OSU, Google, some government observers and some private contractors.
In the end, we all struggle with the salience of Open-source software, it’s supportability and our staffing of it’s R&D, maintenance and support for Security areas.
It was actually reassuring that much larger institutions are struggling with very similar things to us.
Monday I spent the whole day in Cisco UCS training … the instructor was obsessed with IT super-villains.
I missed the 2nd day of training, but was later informed that their server crashed anyway and the only thing I really missed was lunch 🙂
In June, we’ll have a full crew again for the first time in a LONG time.
We hired a new Desktop Support staff member, and an OS/phone staff member.
Both start in June, and we’re super excited to have them here!
Not having a “face” for our department for the Service Request Desk (SRD) has been particularly problematic. I have a great hope that our new employee will come in with some real energy and revolutionize the way we serve the campus! With our powers combined, we’ll get the list to a manageable number, and blow the sox off of campus members as we provide the highest level of service ever.
So yeah, we still have to train/acclimate them to WOU, but I don’t think that’s gonna take long.
A faculty member asked me about the default spacing in Word 2007, how it puts some empty space between each line. That’s irritating, but can be fixed with a few clicks. But that’s EVERY time …
Solution? You bet.
Launch Word 2007/2010.
Click the “Change Styles” button next to the listed styles in the Header.
Hover over “Style Set”.
Click “Word 2003”.
Then go back into “Change Styles”, back into “Style Set” and click “Set as Default”.
Boom.
Ah, the power of VDI. Phenomenal, cosmic power! Itty-bitty living space.
But profiles, and group policy and comp testing – oh my!
This has been a doosey of a week, trying to prep for Comp Tests yesterday. The lockdown profile didn’t work in VDI, and Richard found the solution at like midnight the night before.
Next year I think we’ll start testing like a month beforehand 🙂
In the end, the Grad office got a working system and we learned stuff about profiles, VDI, GP and Win7. Quite a ride …
Yup, it’s everyone FAVorite process – interviews!
And with 3 open positions (one is for a student position), that’s about all we’ve done for 2+ weeks. And we have another solid week of interviews.
I wish I could code while we do them. Think of how much more efficient I could be 😉
We’ve found some good candidates, so I’m anxious to do the 2nd interviews, and hiring. Everyone is feeling the strain of pulling 2 empty chairs.
I have completed my desk relocation from ITC 007 to ITC 008.
I’ll be closer to the staff I supervise, and have more room to spread out.
It will also put future teams closer together for increased interaction.
And beyond needing to clean up pretty bad, I’m pretty happy with the move, the desk, the location and my new office-mates.
I really need to trade-in some of this Cisco gear 🙂 That alone will get rid of half my stuff.
But I’m not getting rid of the minis. Ever 🙂
