For your information

Students have given McGill’s campus technology the highest grade of any university in Canada. McGill University received an A — a campus technology grade unmatched by 15 other large Canadian universities. The results were published in The Globe and Mail’s Canadian University Report 2010.

These results mark the second consecutive year that McGill’s campus technology has received top honours from students. For an illustration of the important ways in which current technologies are serving McGill students, please see the Student IT experience at McGill in 2010, a web page devoted to key facts and figures on the delivery of IT services today on campus.
Continue reading ‘Student IT experience at McGill is top of its class’

New IT Knowledge Base articles and usage statistics

Graph: There is always a drop after start of term, which is a known peak for traffic on the IT Knowledge Base. 2008 recorded an even more pronounced ebb, with a drop in traffic from September to October that was slightly over 50 per cent. IT Frontline Services – Communications/ICS

Below you will find a listing of new Knowledge Base articles created during the month of October and a tally of article hits (the number of times each article was accessed) for the 30 most visited articles. Please visit the IT Services web page for a more expansive look at solutions to your IT needs: www.mcgill.ca/it.

Total article hits for the top 30 articles in October
20779 Minerva for Faculty and Staff
8275 Configure Wireless for Mac OS X (10.4)
7424 Virtual Private Network (VPN) – for Remote Access
3823 Email for Students Service
3719 Configure Wireless for Windows Vista
Continue reading ‘Data crunch: The Knowledge Base in October’

Thanks to solutions from central IT, nine university calendars will no longer be edited using a manual process.

And, for the students who refer to them, they will be easier to use with improved legibility and a handy new search tool — two needed enhancements for students that emerged from the Principal’s Task Force on Student Life and Learning.

At the heart of this improvement effort was making the calendar-production process entirely electronic. Out of this, the eCalendar project was born — managed out of the Project Management Office, and relying on a strong collaboration with Enrolment Services and the Faculty of Law.
Continue reading ‘Students, faculty and staff welcome eCalendar’

New IT Knowledge Base articles and usage statistics

Graph: Monthly Visitors to the IT Knowledge Base (The hits for configuring Wireless for Mac OS X increased again this month. IT Frontline Services will be looking to identify more useful topics to support the Mac user-base in the coming months: Suggestions are welcome.) IT Frontline Services – Communications/ICS

Below you will find a listing of new Knowledge Base articles created during the month of September and a tally of article hits (the number of times each article was accessed) for the 30 most visited articles. Please visit the IT Services web page for a more expansive look at solutions to your IT needs: www.mcgill.ca/it.

Total article hits for the top 30 articles in September
26849 Minerva for Faculty and Staff
17794 Minerva for Students and Guests
16365 Configure Wireless for Mac OS X (10.4)
10596 Virtual Private Network (VPN) – for Remote Access
7432 Configure Wireless for Windows Vista
Continue reading ‘Data crunch: The Knowledge Base in September’

On September 8, CIO Sylvia Franke reviewed selected IT topics tied to teaching and learning with members of the Senate Subcommittee on Teaching and Learning (SCTL) at the first committee meeting of the current 2009-2010 academic year.

The CIO’s presentation is summarized in this Interim Activity Report [pdf] that includes updates on software evaluations, pandemic preparedness, classroom support and many other current developments undertaken by Information Technology Services at McGill.

Visit the Chief Information Officer website to access related IT documents, reports and presentations.

New IT Knowledge Base articles and usage statistics

Graph: Monthly Visitors to the IT Knowledge Base (Rise in hits for configuring Wireless for Mac OS X, in comparison to configuring Wireless for Windows, could suggest that the number of new students and faculty with Macs is rising too.) IT Frontline Services - Communications/ICS

Below you will find a listing of new Knowledge Base articles created during the month of August and a tally of article hits (the number of times each article was accessed) for the 30 most visited articles. Please visit the IT Services web page for a more expansive look at solutions to your IT needs: www.mcgill.ca/it.

Total article hits for the top 30 articles in August
71950 Minerva for Students and Guests
20560 Minerva for Faculty and Staff
9054 Configure Wireless for Mac OS X (10.4)
4529 Virtual Private Network (VPN) – for Remote Access
3807 Configure Wireless for Windows Vista
Continue reading ‘Data crunch: The Knowledge Base in August’

As Manager of Research Computing, Roland is never lost in the passages of the NCS datacentre in the Burnside Hall basement. Photo: Claudio Calligaris

The name Roland Gombe is an important one to many McGill researchers. Roland provides assistance to researchers who need to prepare grant applications. He works with them to define and review their IT needs related to funding granted by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI). But there’s more to it than that.

In the last six years that Roland has been the Manager of Research Computing at McGill, his IT specifications have frequently developed into on-campus contracts for robust and customized support services for researchers.
Continue reading ‘Computing support gives McGill research a boost’

There is a new category for customer support called IT Services for Research. It answers questions that McGill researchers often have and can be accessed at www.mcgill.ca/it. On the web page, you will find the new research category just below the existing categories for Teaching and Learning and myMcGill, as shown here.

Continue reading ‘Drill down on campus “IT Services for Research”’

The IT Knowledge Base at McGill is constantly being tailored to the needs of the campus community, as revealed in this recent look at IT services for researchers. As part of a new regularly appearing piece on the “For your information” blog, IT Frontline Services provides this glance at data extracted from the Knowledge Base.

New IT Knowledge Base articles and usage statistics

Graph: Monthly Visitors to the IT Knowledge Base (Increase in visits as of May is due to the removal of the Minerva for Students and Minerva for Faculty and Staff web pages and subsequent redirects to the Knowledge Base) IT Frontline Services - Communications/ICS

Below you will find a listing of new Knowledge Base articles created during the month of July and a tally of article hits (the number of times each article was accessed) for the 30 most visited articles. Please visit the IT Services web page for a more expansive look at solutions to your IT needs: www.mcgill.ca/it.

Continue reading ‘Data crunch: The Knowledge Base in July’

Addendum

This addendum to the previously posted People on the move is an important update. It has come to the attention of For your information that many IT employees were recently omitted from mention in this recurring feature. In fact, several staff members should have appeared in an update that was left unpublished during the Winter term. FYI apologizes for these omissions.

Here is a listing that complements June’s People on the move and offers a more complete view of the first half of 2009.

Continue reading ‘People on the move’