Over the past two weeks, I’ve gotten to reacquaint myself with the incredible individuals that we have working in IT Support. And taking a cue from AD&S, I’m going to try to lift the veil and provide a bi-weekly look at some of the issues and projects being undertaken by the team. This is by no means an exhaustive list (the technology gremlins are always causing mischief), but I would like to highlight some of the ongoing work of the unit.
LTC Computer Shuffle
Karla Strieb and Morag Boyd have been leading Content and Access through a really thoughtful redesign of how their group thinks about their work. And as these changes have started to come to fruition, it has required a large number of staff to move to different locations in the building. This process has been a team effort between LTC staff, facilities, and IT Support, and as of today, the moves have nearly been completed. I’ve appreciated everyone in IT Support and their all hands-on deck attitude as most everyone has contributed to the move; though Gary deserves some special recognition for coordinating most of the work on the IT side.
Chasing the Printer daemons (there’s a joke in there)
Printing has been a little bit of a bug-a-boo lately, and Gaymon has been spending a good deal of his time working out why this is happening. Problems like these can be complicated as they hardly ever are just one thing…and this has been the case here. As someone that has just come back into the team, it’s gratifying to see our infrastructure team working together and sharing information as we try and sort out the problems. More importantly, I feel like we are getting close to resolving the underlying issues that have been causing the problems.
Adobe Scanner issues
Earlier this week, we started to see a number of reports related to an inability to use adobe to scan content. It was a bit of a vexing issue and a disruptive one. To help customers who’s work was disrupted, Rico created a very nice “workaround”, but the underlying cause was elusive. It wasn’t until this week, and after some impressive detective work, that we identified the culprit – the malware software (Malwarebytes) – was incorrectly identifying the method Adobe uses to communicate with the scanners as a security risk. Gaymon has been in contact with the vendor and will work with them to test any patches that they make available till a permanent solution is found. This kind of partnering with vendors is indicative of the kind of work that goes on in IT Support and helps not only OSUL, but all users of a particular piece of software or hardware.
Skype and Office 365 issues
As you might guess, with the University migrating services, IT Support has received a number of tickets related to these services. We’ve been working closely with OCIO to resolve reported issues.
Proxy Updates
The start of a term always brings an increase in the number of questions related to accessing content and this year is no different. However, one kink has been some proxy changes aimed at improving the user experience while on campus and to bring resource access for content on our regional campuses into better compliance. These two changes have surfaced some unexpected problems – and I’ve appreciated the time Eric spends with each user to sort these problems out.
In my first two weeks working as the co-Interim Head of IT Support, it’s been gratifying seeing how hard this group works for the Libraries. It’s something that we “the big WE”, don’t get to see very often unless you have an occasion to ask for help — but it’s certainly there.
–tr
