After the dormancy of winter comes the vibrancy of spring. The same can be said for all sorts of efforts that have a less visible, but very necessary, phase that precedes the blooming. In this issue we will talk about a bounty of efforts in ITS that are springing forth.
Blossoms covered in this Newsletter
The one that has been germinating the longest is the goal of being able to authenticate to cloud services, like Gmail, Slate and the Catalyst catalog, even if there’s a network problem on-campus. Richard Goerwitz talks us through that change in his article about efforts to keep key systems online during a significant network disruption.
Austin Robinson-Coolidge describes the final step in our move of storage to the cloud, namely the need to delete documents after students graduate and faculty/staff depart the college. His article talks about how to transfer documents and how to set up shared folders to avoid the need to transfer later.
Other efforts that are blooming
In addition, several grants that Carly Born and Andrew Wilson have been working on have reached fruition. Read more about their collaborations with faculty in enhancing the teaching of language pronunciation and in visualizing proteins.
After investigating options with St. Olaf for over a year, I’m pleased to announce that ITS will be moving to a new ticketing system called TeamDynamix. With the new system, you will be able to follow your technology requests more easily and it will enable us to do our work more effectively as well. This effort has been made possible with support of the Broadening the Bridge Mellon grant.
Another strategy we’ve been developing this year is a series of one-minute videos that provide technology nuggets to help you be more productive. We are calling them “Minute-to-Learn-It” videos. I did one on creating a Google Group with project team members and then emailing that group list, adding it to calendar appointments and sharing documents with the group. (It’s easier to watch it than to read about it!)
Spring is indeed in the air – and with it a lot of new growth and new opportunities. It’s an exciting time for all of us.