Enterprise Services

Recruit Team Earns 2010 Sautter ‘Gold’ Award

January 5, 2011 by Max Garrick

Sautter Award

The annual Larry L. Sautter Awards for IT innovation were presented at the 2010 University of California Computing Support Conference at UCLA. Ten UC teams received awards, and among three receiving top honors was the team that developed AP Recruit for multi-campus use.

AP Recruit is a web-based system for managing the recruitment of academic personnel. Recruit was originally launched at UCI in 2006 after 3 years of development. (See prior articles). In October 2009, UC Irvine and UC San Diego jointly launched the AP Recruit web application for use at the San Diego campus. The collaboration transformed UC Irvine’s campus-tailored AP Recruit system into a multi-campus software service in 6 months. Going forward, other campuses will benefit from the new Recruit enhancements.

The multi-campus AP Recruit product uses current software technologies yielding efficiencies within established business processes in academic personnel recruiting, particularly needed in this era of budgetary challenges.

More details on the collaboration can be found in the Sautter Award application. More information on Recruit can be found at the Recruit web site.

Teach a Process? Do it with a Screencast

June 7, 2010 by Gerrard

Academic Personnel has a new way of rapidly training staff to use “Recruit,” UCI’s Web-based faculty hiring system. As the cornerstone for their e-learning solution, the Recruit support team, with the help of Camtasia Studio recording software, has produced a number of screencasts.

A screencast is a video that is produced by capturing motion visuals, text, and audio from a computer screen. Learners are instructed to watch the demonstration screencasts and then follow the exercises in an accompanying training workbook that they download from the site. Both the videos and the workbook reside within the Recruit system, and are reachable via the online Help after the user logs in. This self-paced training is a flexible and efficient way to help new users, or even seasoned users who have been away from the system for a while and are looking for a refresher course.

If you want to teach a computer process, consider screencasting. Your learners will be able to play, pause, and rewind whenever the need arises.

Advanced Oracle Calendar Tips

June 7, 2010 by Andrew Laurence

Oracle Calendar

OIT has been supporting the collaborative appointment management tool “Oracle Calendar” for many years. Users quickly learn how to create appointments, invite colleagues to meetings, and indicate their availability to others. However, Oracle Calendar has a rich set of useful features you might not be aware of. Here are some of them.

Group Agenda

If you need to find a time when a group of people can all meet, the most straightforward way is to choose a time that suits you and use the “Check Conflicts” feature on the event creation dialog to see if everyone else is available. If your colleagues already have a lot of meetings, this kind of hunt for an open spot can be frustrating. You can also select “Suggest Date/Time” from the Tools menu of the dialog, but Oracle Calendar will exclude times held by tentative or low-priority meetings and include hours that may not be part of your colleagues’ work schedules.

Alternatively, you can open “Group Agenda” from the File/Open menu. This allows you to browse the calendars of your colleagues in parallel, one day at a time, and use your own judgment as to priorities in selecting a meeting time.

Color Coding

By default, Oracle will color meetings you plan to attend in green, meetings you have declined in red, and meetings that are undecided in blue. In addition, paler versions of these three colors are used for meetings with a tentative status. Alternatively, you can elect to have your calendar colored according to meeting priority (red for highest and blue for lowest) or even according to whether you created the meeting and control it (in yellow), or have been invited by another user and don’t control it (in blue.) Finally, you can set the colors for any of these views in a way that is intuitive to you. You can access this feature under “Tools/Options…” then under “Agenda/Colors”.

Search

There are three search features available to you in Oracle Calendar. One allows you to search your own calendar for events matching diverse criteria. Another allows you to search the directory (the database of Oracle Calendar users and resources.) A third allows you to quickly look up where a colleague is (say, at a staff meeting.) All of these options can be found under the “Tools” menu. Searching your own agenda can also be accessed with ctrl+F or by clicking on the binoculars icon.

Include Non-Subscribers

To a limited extent, you can invite and communicate via email with people who do not use Oracle Calendar. Simply put an email address in the place of an Oracle Calendar user name, then agree to send email upon creation or change of a meeting’s status. Oracle Calendar will coordinate with the non-subscriber using the email address you supply.

If you would like more information about Oracle Calendar, consider attending one of OIT’s quarterly classes, accessible through TED.

Departmental Servers Go Virtual

December 15, 2009 by John Mangrich

With OIT’s new Virtual Server Hosting service, units which need a server for a departmental web site or application hosting can provide those services to their faculty, staff, and students with all the advantages of a professionally managed Data Center but at a much lower cost.

A virtual server or virtual machine (VM) is the software emulation of a physical server’s hardware and services, and can be configured to meet the needs of a particular group of users. A single high-end physical server or cluster can simulate a large number of servers, and make more efficient use of physical resources such as disk, memory, and network bandwidth than stand-alone servers can.

With OIT’s VM service, customers may install, configure, and manage the operating system and applications of their choosing, to meet local needs. Administrators can quickly configure and deploy VMs without concern for the purchase, maintenance or replacement of the underlying hardware. As the service is hosted on OIT’s enterprise infrastructure in the Academic Data Center, customers enjoy the benefits of redundant, highly available systems which are often beyond the means of smaller departments.

This service helps increase server reliability, as well as achieve campus goals of efficiency in power and cooling. Old, unreliable equipment can be retired, while the server’s software and function is retained.

The VM service is hosted on an HP blade server chassis. Each blade has four gigabit Ethernet network controllers, and the maximum possible memory. Storage is provided by OIT’s enterprise disk storage from NetApp. In addition to the high-availability features in the hardware components, the VMWare virtual environment allows for dynamic movement of servers across physical hosts, as well as automatic restarts for the VMs.

OIT’s VM service uses the same infrastructure as OIT’s other enterprise services: earthquake protection tables, redundant power sources, large-scale UPS, data center chilled-water cooling, on-site emergency cooling, and generator-backup power.

More information on configuration options and pricing can be found on the Virtual Server Hosting web site.

Advanced Webfiles Collaboration and Sharing Techniques

December 15, 2009 by Gerrard

UCI has long provided faculty, staff, and graduate students a flexible, online, file sharing service in Webfiles. An introductory article on Webfiles can be found in the IT News Archives.

The simple Webfiles operations – uploading documents, setting permissions, creating directories – are easily mastered. However, Webfiles has features very useful in file sharing which are not as obvious but that you should be aware of.

Tickets

Tickets are a method for defining permissions to a document or directory in your Webfiles account, which you can then email to other people so they can access the material. They act as web links which take your colleague directly to the document. You can specify such things as a window of time in which access is granted, whether it grants read-only permission or read-write, or even that a document may only be accessed a fixed number of times. You can specify a password and share that separately, in the event the URL gets publicized to people you didn’t mean to give access.

Bookmarks

Bookmarks are shortcuts to files and directories in your account – or that of someone else to which you’ve been granted access. They are presented in their own small area on the left hand side of the Webfiles display. Like bookmarks in a web browser, you can add, delete, and rename your bookmarks.

Groups

Ordinarily, Webfiles allows you to grant read, read-write, or other permissions to individuals, to all Webfiles users, or to the world at large. If you wish only a certain group of Webfiles users to access one of your documents, you can define a group that includes just them, and then grant that group the desired privileges.

Quotas

You may specify a disk quota for any directory in your Webfiles account, placing a ceiling on the amount of data that may be stored in that directory. This can be useful if you create a directory for others to deposit documents, and you want to limit the amount of your 2Gb Webfiles storage capacity you wish consumed. You can also paritition your account, assigning a fraction of your storage to each one. This allows you to use one directory principally, but if you run out of space you can count on having some spare for short-term emergency use until you have a chance to delete some files.

Web sites

You can publish simple web sites using your Webfiles account by creating an index.html file, uploading it into one of your directories, and granting access permissions to others. The webfiles directory path (e.g., https://webfiles.uci.edu/UCInetID/directory/) becomes the URL for your new web site.

WebDAV

WebDAV is a technology that allows you to access your Webfiles account as if it were a local directory, allowing you to view the files, open, edit, and save documents in place, browse sub-directories, drag-and-drop, etc.

If you would like more information about Webfiles, consider attending one of OIT’s quarterly classes, accessbile through TED.