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Vendor Technical Briefings at UCI

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NACS has recently sponsored several technical briefings by vendors who offer products and services intended for the educational community. NACS consulted campus support staff to narrow down which vendors and products were of interest, and then invited vendors to make campus presentations. The vendors were:

Nokia Display Products, who provided an overview and demonstration of Nokia monitors. Nokia is making a deliberate effort to increase its presence in the educational market by offering quality products at educational discounts.

Intel, who presented Video Conferencing products and outlined the “Intel CPU Roadmap,” Intel’s strategy for its family of processors.

Microsoft, who presented a technical overview of the new version of Windows NT about to be released (version 5.0 Beta 2) and described the strategic direction of Microsoft NT.

For detailed information about these presentations, please see NACS’ Computer Support Coordinator page:

http://www.nacs.uci.edu/support/csc

Suggestions about future vendor briefings are welcome, please contact Jan Vescera of NACS’ Indirect Support Team,JVescera@UCI.EDU.

Academic Computing Support Review Report Available

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The report of the UCI Academic Computing Support Review Committee (ACSRC) is now available in the Web for general review:

http://www.nacs.uci.edu/support/review/report

The ACSRC met between January and April of this year; it’s charge was to review the current state of computing and network support to faculty, students and staff in academic units. The committee took into account all sources of support, including central and local support organizations. The committee’s report summarizes the current state of support, and makes initial recommendations about improving it.

Committee membership spanned many academic units and represented the perspectives of faculty end-users, academic senior managers, computing support managers, the Vice Chancellor for Research, and the Academic Senate Computer Policy Committee.

Comments on the report are invited and should be sent to Dana Roode (e-mail DRoode@UCI.EDU, telephone x5173). The committee’s recommendations will also be discussed the appropriate campus forums later in the year.

NACS Staffing News

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In April, Jim Surlow was named manager of NACS’ Distributed Computing Support (DCS) group, taking over for Lyle Wiedeman who has assumed the role of managing NACS’ participation in the Electronic Education Environment (EEE). Lyle continues to manage NACS Departmental Support efforts.

Domingos Begalli left DCS in February to become Physical Sciences‘ School Computing Coordinator. Joining DCS are Colleen Melzer, a new hire from the commercial sector, and Evans Curtis, long time day-shift NACS computer operator. Tri Tran, who has been a part of NACS for several years, but assigned to School of Engineering lab support, will become a DCS Unix SysAdmin after his Engineering position is replaced later this summer.

Reviewing Academic Computing Support

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The UCI Academic Computing Support Review Committee has been formed to collect information andperspectives concerning support of academic computing at UCI. The committee will look at both local(departmental and school) and central support of faculty, student, and academic department computingactivities. It will also make initial recommendations on improving UCI’s support situation.

The creation of the committee represents a first step in reviewing the critical issue of technical support atUCI. The information gathered, as well as the initial recommendations made, will be available for campus comment and follow-up study.

“Computing support” includes end-user (faculty, student, staff) assistance, as well as behind-the-scenes network, server and application maintenance and development. Examples of end-user assistance are: system and software installation/setup, hardware/ software problem resolution, “how-to” advice on common software, instructional computing assistance, and consulting on a variety of topics.

The committee membership is a mix of faculty, assistant deans, and computer support managers. Members are: Peter Breen (College of Medicine), Candy Garretson (Humanities), Gregg Goldman (Graduate School of Management), Craig Martens (Physical Sciences), Jim Murry (College of Medicine), Leslie Pearlman (Biological Sciences), Thomas Saine (Humanities), Alan Terricciano (School of the Arts), Jan Vescera (NACS), and Ted Wright (Research and Graduate Studies/ Social Sciences). Input to the committee may be provided to any of its members, or to Committee Chair Dana Roode (DRoode@UCI.EDU, 824-5173).

NACS After-Hours Policy

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Although many NACS services and facilities are available 24 hours a day, NACS technical assistance and consulting support is only available during the standard UCI business hours of 8 AM to 5 PM, Monday through Friday, excluding holidays. Only the on-duty NACS computer operator is available outside those hours.

During evening and weekend/holiday “waking” hours, technical staff in a few key areas are on-call to handle urgent problems such as central service failures and other major outages. Technical resources available after-hours are minimal — problems will take longer to resolve and some may ultimately have to wait until the next business day. All urgent off-hour problems should be reported via the on-duty computer operator at (949)824-6065; e-mail reporting addresses and staff phones are not covered during this time. (The NACS network trouble reporting line, (949) 824-2222, is also answered by the computer operator after hours).

In most cases, problems occurring during “non-waking” hours that the operator cannot resolve will be reported to on-call staff early the next morning. Exceptions to this include widespread outages, and threats to University resources.

We appreciate client feedback to our after-hours policy. We believe the policy strikes a reasonable balance between timely handling of problems that impact University business and the substantial cost of after-hours support.