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Lyle Wiedeman

Three Common Questions

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I have been assigned a phone number that was used by my predecessor, but I can’t get into Infomail (voice mail).  How do I get the password reset?

Please fill out a Service Request Form (SRF) http://www.nacs.uci.edu/service-request/ and specify in the comments section that you need an Infomail password reset. There is a $10 charge to reset the Infomail password. It is reset to the default password (the phone’s 5-digit extension).  This will normally happen the same business day.

What email programs can I use with my NACS email account and how do I configure them?

NACS offers a web-based email program at http://webmail.uci.edu and supports many common desktop email programs. A list of desktop email programs, including Thunderbird, Mac Mail, Outlook, and Eudora, with configuration instructions is available from http://www.nacs.uci.edu/email/settings.html.

What is a ‘Corporate Time’ or ‘Oracle Calendar’ account?  Why do I need one?  What is my password?  How much does it cost?

‘Corporate Time’ is the former name of the campus-wide calendaring service NACS supports.  Since being purchased by Oracle, it has been renamed ‘Oracle Calendar’.

Oracle Calendar allows its users to keep track of tasks, reminders, and meetings (like a planner/organizer), but adds the functionality of viewing and interacting with other users’ accounts, which allows joint planning and collaboration, even between members of different departments.

Many units on campus use Oracle Calendar as their scheduling tool. You can obtain your password by contacting the NACS response center at (949) 824-2222 (extension 42222 on campus).

The cost is $7.00 annually per account, payable by recharge.

For more information, please see our Oracle Calendar web page at http://www.nacs.uci.edu/calendar/

Academic Personnel Training

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NACS Academic Web Technologies combined forces with Academic Personnel and the Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, to deliver a series of nine workshops, which concluded recently.

NACS is developing an online tool under the guidance of Academic Personnel to aid in the Senate Faculty search process. Informally referred to as “Recruit,” this tool was originally written for internal use by ICS, and NACS is extending it for use campus-wide.

84 staff attended Recruit training over the past two weeks, representing the School of the Arts, Social Sciences, Social Ecology, the Paul Merage School of Business, Biological Sciences, the Henry Samueli School of Engineering, Humanities, the Bren School, and Physical Sciences. Workshop attendees were personnel managers, department managers, administrative analysts, and admin assistants, all of whom were invited to learn to use Recruit to manage a Senate Faculty search.

Pat Price (Academic Personnel) and Peggy Munhall (ICS Dean’s Office) led the training. NACS staff were on hand to provide additional support.

Data Center Upgrade

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Recent announcements by earthquake scientists and the US Geological Survey indicate that Southern California is due for a major earthquake in the next 30 years. That along with other data suggests that there’s as much as a 30-50% chance of major shaking affecting the UCI campus in the next 10 years.

NACS has studied the likely effect of such a quake on central computing systems and data stores in our Engineering Gateway Academic Data Center (ADC). Aside from the obvious scenarios, like computer racks falling over or the raised floor collapsing under the strain of holding two very large UPSes, we discovered that disk drives housing critical campus data (e.g., our campus e-mail services) are susceptible to damage in such an event and possibly in a milder quake.

To mitigate the risk of serious data loss, NACS has followed the lead of the UCSD ADC and purchased and installed ‘Isobase’ rack isolation equipment. This equipment was installed during the June 24th scheduled service outage. Similar to base isolation technology used on modern high rise and freeway overpasses, ‘Isobase’ places computer racks on essentially a shock-absorber surface. Six racks which house NACS’s e-mail, calendaring, EEE, and other critical campus services were installed on this base. We plan to purchase bases for our remaining systems in the ADC as funds become available.

If you have any interest in this equipment or what steps you can take to protect computers and disks from seismic events please contact NACS. NACS also has a service for hosting your equipment in our ADC.

NACS Shares at ACUTA

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Bruce Cotsonas, NACS Project Coordinator, and Todd Strand, NACS Infrastructure Engineer, co-presented at the 35th annual ACUTA conference and exhibition in San Diego on July 27th. (ACUTA is an association for communications technology professionals in Higher Education.)

In their presentation, “Visual Documentation and the Installation of Communications Infrastructure”, Bruce and Todd demonstrated the use of “visual documentation” (also known as “visual scope of work”) to portray telecommunications infrastructure before and after installation projects on the UCI campus.

Google Earth (TM) satellite photography of UCI building sites and digital photographs of construction details as well as text and other graphics were imported into Power Point presentations. The resulting “visual documentation” helps to reduce ambiguity and clarify the reasons for infrastructure work, solutions to problems, conduit location and excavation, cable pulling/splicing/termination, and the transferring of services.

Bruce Cotsonas coordinates NACS cabling projects with clients, vendors and staff. He is a member of ACUTA, BICSI, CSI and DBIA, and he has over twenty-one years of experience in project management.

Todd Strand designs, plans, and provides cost estimates during communications infrastructure projects. He holds the Registered Communications Distribution Designer, Network Transport Systems Specialist, and Outside Plant Specialist certifications from BICSI.

Bruce and Todd work for Diane Dunn, Manager of NACS’s Communications Planning Group, which plans and manages all campus-wide network and telecommunications infrastructure projects.

EEE Develops New Online Survey Tool

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The newest instrument in the ever-expanding EEE toolbox is the online Survey Tool. The tool allows any instructor, TA, or staff member to create and compose a quick and easy survey and then target a specific audience for responses. Results can be analyzed online and in real time.

“By the time we returned from lunch, we already had 14 responses. We were very excited. We never had this fast of a turn-around time when we were mailing out bulky, paper surveys,” said Adam, who has just finished overseeing the school’s 4th major survey.

Any faculty or staff member with a UCInetID can create and publish a survey. Instructors who want to survey their class will find a link to the tool in their MyEEE / MyInstructorClasses module. Other UCI staff can access the Survey Tool from the ToolBox in EEE’s main page navigation bar or go directly tohttp://eee.uci.edu/toolbox/survey/

A fill-in-the-form wizard guides you through each step of the way when you build a survey. Surveys can be reused or shared with a colleague. To make the survey address easy to remember, you can designate an alias, called a “Friendly URL”.

Surveys can be deployed to students in specified classes, research groups, or even to the general public, depending on the settings you choose. The tool generates e-mail and sends it to your target audience, containing a link to the survey.

Data results can be viewed, even as responses are coming in. You can review the results in a graphical display or download them as a spreadsheet.

The Henry Samueli School of Engineering began using the EEE Survey Tool immediately after it was launched to solicit feedback from industries in and around the community regarding eight engineering programs. Iris Adam, Senior Analyst for HSSoE, reported that one survey was sent to two hundred people, and results came in very quickly. “By the time we returned from lunch, we already had 14 responses. We were very excited. We never had this fast of a turn-around time when we were mailing out bulky, paper surveys,” said Adam, who has just finished overseeing the school’s 4th major survey.

NACS has created an example survey to illustrate the tool. You are invited to check it out at http://eee.uci.edu/survey/article-sample