Information Technology News Archive

1996 - 2017

IT Consolidation Update

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Consolidation

Consolidation

UCI’s IT Consolidation initiative continues to move along.

On April 20th, about 120 staff from units affected by consolidation attended a “Town Hall” meeting to hear a status report and ask questions.  Presenters included Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Michael Gottfredson, Dean Sharon Salinger, and several staff from the Office of Information Technology.  Materials from the meeting, including the presentation slides accompanied by speaker audio, and a summary of the questions and answers discussed, are available online.

In summer, 2009, Academic Affairs Computing Services, Administrative Computing Services, Graduate Division IT, Network and Academic Computing Services, and Office of Research IT joined forces as the Office of Information Technology.  The desktop support, help desk, data center, and security teams in these units have been consolidated and work on integrating services is ongoing.

In the spring of this year, IT staff from Distribution and Document Management, University Advancement, Design and Construction Services, Parking and Transportation Services, and Athletics were moved organizationally into OIT.  In addition, the reporting relationships of IT staff in Student Affairs outside of Enrollment Services, were changed to report into OIT, through full or affiliate relationships.  Enrollment Services IT will move organizationally into OIT sometime this summer after the recruitment for an Enrollment Services IT Director completes.

OIT Director Allen Schiano has been conducting a series of meetings with the academic unit computing directors to review OIT services that the schools require.  CIO Dana Roode has been asked to coordinate a campus-wide discussion starting this fall regarding how academic units might benefit from IT integration efforts.

The IT Oversight Committee continues to meet monthly to receive updates on consolidation activities and to review longer term IT priorities.  The Committee has developed a set of IT Principles to help guide IT decision making at UCI.

Questions or feedback on the consolidation initiative may be sent through email to IT-Consolidation@uci.edu.

New Voicemail System Rolls Out

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Voice Mail

Voice Mail

Early this year, following much planning and several announcements, UCI faculty and staff were migrated to the new OIT Voice Mail service, replacing the previous service known as “Infomail.”

Three years ago, NACS (now part of OIT) began an intensive process of exploring alternatives, as Infomail was no longer supported by its vendor, and spare parts to keep the system running were already scarce.  At the same time, voice mail technology was evolving, and NACS wanted to keep open the possibility of providing new functionality made available through modern technology.  Other criteria included the ability to emulate Infomail to minimize the impact on users, and security features to counter the rise in phone-mediated identity theft and other forms of fraud.

Once the Voice Mail system was selected as the best match to our diverse needs, NACS began a long process of working with the vendor to develop and test special purpose software so that the Voice Mail system could emulate Infomail. This project was quite successful, and only a few differences between Infomail and Voice Mail remain.

OIT plans to enrich the Voice Mail service over time with new features.  Already users are able to do some things not possible with Infomail, such as using a simple menu to configure your Voice Mail greeting to indicate why you are not in the office (e.g. vacation) and when you expect to return, rather than dictating a custom message for each absence.

More information on the new Voice Mail service is on line: a FAQ, and PDF documents offering a basic Users Guide, a navigation map, and a hierarchical description of Voice Mail features.

New on EEE: Podcasts

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In October, OIT launched ‘Replay,’ a service for recording and distributing audio and/or video of lecture classes. Now, EEE has added a new tool, ‘Podcasts,’ to make it easier than ever for instructors and TAs to provide recordings to their students.

EEE Podcasts allows instructors and TAs who have used UCI Replay to link their Replay recordings directly to their classes on EEE. Students will have a convenient ‘Podcasts’ link on their MyEEE pages to help them find their class content.

Learn more | Use Podcasts

Teach a Process? Do it with a Screencast

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Screencasting

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

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Oracle Calendar

Oracle Calendar tool bar

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.