For your information

The For your information blog about McGill Information Technology Services has been replaced by other outlets of information for news on current campus IT initiatives.

For instance:

• The IT Services page: www.mcgill.ca/it
• New feeds related to IT announcements: www.mcgill.ca/channels/announcements/?group=group_it
• Important events feeds, including important service advisories: www.mcgill.ca/channels/events/?group=group_it

In addition, members of the community are encouraged to continue to interact with IT Services and with the Chief Information Officer — the head of IT Services — Ghilaine Roquet. Instead of using this blog, you can submit a comment or suggestion or ask a question on the following web page:

• Ask the CIO: www.mcgill.ca/it/it-mcgill/who-we-are/office-cio

Meanwhile, For your information blog posts remain archived on this site.

On January 28, IT Services celebrated staff members who have reached major milestones in their ongoing support. Thirty employees, who by the end of 2010 had marked 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, or 40 years of employment, were recognized for their dedication and hard work.

Standing in foreground (from left): Ivy Burry, Danielle Roby, Joanne De Rose, Carlette Walker, Erwin Rollauer, Jane Amro, Ross Greenberg, Julia Dewar, Steph Lengacher, Johanne Casella, Brian McCullogh, Earl Lindberg, Judy Musil. Standing in background (from left): Leonard Wharwood, Michael Walsh, Margarete Eiteman, Michel Rainville, Gilles Thiffault, Lorne Wald, Trevor Garland, Spiro Mitsialis, Bill Friend, Irvin Griffith, André Cantin. Sending regrets to the event were: Rosemary Campbell, Susan Kojima, Josette Muyal, Johanne St-Hilaire, Shirley Whyte. Photo: Owen Egan

The event, which is part of the Service Awards Program created in 2006, began with a few words from the Vice-Principal (Administration & Finance) Michael Di Grappa, Network and Communications Services Director (and former Interim Chief Information Officer) Gary Bernstein, and newly appointed Chief Information Officer Ghilaine Roquet.

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Whenever any part of 36,531 McGill students or 5,084 McGill staff members have a problem related to IT, they can contact ICS Service Desk to resolve their problem in an efficient and timely manner. That’s no small feat.

But speak to Kim Huynh, Manager of IT Frontline Services, and head of the ICS Service Desk team, and she will tell you that getting the job done is not a numbers game. She says that it’s about her resources — her own staff. Her team is made up of talented individuals who are really good at dealing with people — all kinds of people.

In fact, ICS Service Desk doesn’t only serve students and faculty and staff. Huynh points out they also serve McGill’s retired employees, guests on campus (such as parents of students or visiting professors), as well as affiliates from the University’s teaching hospitals. And this is without mentioning the large group of people served by Service Desk that grows by giant leaps and bounds each and every year: McGill alumni.

That is a lot of people.

So to be a member of the ICS Service Desk, for starters, you’ve got to be versatile, patient but quick, and able to talk to all kinds of different IT users from across McGill’s campuses. Service Desk staff also have to readily absorb the IT tools being used at the University, of which many are newly introduced tools. To see some of them at a glance, visit www.mcgill.ca/it.

Maybe Huynh will explain more about her team when she accepts this year’s Principal’s Award for Administrative and Support Staff (Team Project), a prize attributed to her and her colleagues for their exceptional work.

ICS SERVICE DESK First row (from left): Diana Collie, Donna Wong, Kim Huynh (Senior Manager), Mary Ann St. James, Riyad Zienni (Team Leader). Second row: Wade Colborne, Francina Sibanda, Nellie Boyadjieva, Norma Haddad, Golam Chowdhary, Diane Huot, Karim Kazak. Third row: Xolani Ngwenya (Team Leader), Alexandre Galant, Alex Bechalani, Terrie Quilatan, Michael Lalonde, Hiio Kirby, Michael Sampson. At the centre back of the group, ICS Director Ryan Ortiz smiles on the team. Team members not appearing in the photo are: Quang Nguyen, Sharon Sebright, Tovonirina Razakaria, Anastasia Vasilopanagos, Rodney Jean-Paul, James Johnson and Lise Menard. Photo: Owen Egan

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McGill’s website is changing with the times. A new publishing platform for www.mcgill.ca is being introduced – in fact you may have already noticed a new look on some McGill web pages.

Admissions Office of the Faculty of Medicine. Human Resources. And IT Services, for instance.

The new Web Management System, which provides the framework for centrally supported websites under the www.mcgill.ca domain, has been built using Drupal, an open-source software.

The benefits of the new Web Management System include several important abilities for the University community:

• Web pages can customize their look and feel while remaining consistent with the overall theme of the McGill website
• Increased flexibility for adding multimedia elements, and other elements, to web pages
• A platform for web publishing that is capable of staying current and adapting to technological developments
• Easy editing tools that feature a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface to assist editors who don’t know HTML coding
• Greater user-friendliness, such as web page hierarchies that can be rearranged at the click of a button and an Images & Documents Tool that will be easier to handle than ever before

As well, McGill’s practice of complying with web accessibility standards will continue, though at the same time site managers will be allowed more flexibility when it comes to laying out their web pages.

If you manage or edit a page on a McGill website, you can begin reading up on the new resources becoming available to you. Please visit the Web Management System site (note the new look on this page too – it’s also built on the new platform) and click through to find documentation and training materials in the IT Knowledge Base.

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A glance at the student IT experience at McGill

McGill IT Services offers a multitude of ways for students to connect to their daily life on campus this fall. At a glance, here are some of the tools and services that students will want to make a part of their day-to-day activities. This overview highlights just some of the tools that are in-demand with students, and is presented with recently collected facts and figures on usage and availability.

Access class material with your iPod

Students who have iPods can automatically sync to course-related material that their instructors have uploaded to McGill’s Lecture Recording System. The Lecture Recording System is a facility that records lectures and makes reviewing course material easier.

• 39 of the largest classrooms at the university are equipped with the Lecture Recording System
• 180 of the largest McGill classes are recorded every term

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McGill IT Services is undertaking a major initiative to upgrade Banner — the University’s administrative system for student records, financial information and human resources data — and the project will be making several important leaps forward this summer.

The big Banner move, from version 7 to version 8, is scheduled to be completed in late November 2010.

But in preparation for the Banner upgrade, McGill’s Data Warehouse (BANREP) must first be made compatible with the new Banner version 8. The conversion for compatibility will happen during the month of August. At this moment, a test instance has been set up for Data Warehouse users to test and ensure that their applications will work correctly with the converted data. Please see Banner 8 Upgrade Information in the IT Knowledge Base for the latest information and key dates in this upgrade process.

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The Student Advisory Council on IT met four times over the course of the 2009-2010 academic year to informally exchange advice and opinion, as well as to receive formal presentations by guests on specific topics of current interest affecting the student IT experience at McGill.

The student members of council in 2009-10 were:

• Ashley Burgoyne, Council Commissioner of the Post-Graduate Students’ Society (PGSS)
• Conor Cleary, Delegate of Macdonald Campus Students’ Society (MCSS)
• Rebecca Dooley, Vice-President – University Affairs of Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU)
• David Marshall, Delegate of Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU)

During the initial meeting, a list of items for a proposed work plan was generated by the council. Most of the items did receive attention during the year.

1 Educational Technologies
2 Responsible Use of Information Technology Resources
3 Registration/calendar issues and improvements
4 Content Management System – digital assets and workspaces for students, pilot projects
5 Classroom technologies – physical and infrastructure concerns
6 Student feedback mechanisms
7 Integration of IT tools – usability regarding myMcGill
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Instructors and students from across McGill are coming together as panelists to talk about social networking, active learning classrooms and lecture recordings. The discussions will take place at the Teaching and Technology Fair on May 6 from 10 am to 3 pm at the Faculty Club.

The new format promises to be dynamic and encourage audience participation since speakers will incorporate the use of teaching technologies as part of the discussion.

Now in its seventh year, the Fair annually examines innovative practices and emerging technologies. The event is coordinated by Content and Collaboration Solutions in association with Teaching and Learning Services, the McGill Library and IT Customer Services. It is co-sponsored by the Office of the CIO and the Deputy Provost (Student Life & Learning).

“This is a valuable opportunity for colleagues to share progress they have made in teaching technology and to learn from other instructors who are motivated to advance teaching and learning at McGill,” said Deputy Provost Morton J. Mendelson.

To attend, members of the McGill community are asked to register. Please consult the Fair website for all details, including this year’s program (in PDF) and these bios of some of the event’s participants (also in PDF).

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When the Facilities and Space Management Project officially began, the University was looking for a solution that would integrate its existing enterprise systems. As of this month, new software is in place and for the first time users are logging on to the single unified solution — McGill FAMIS software.

FAMIS is a broad tool for facilities and space management that will reach a wider group of people at McGill to deal space issues in a timely matter.

The project to set up FAMIS at McGill is an essential one. The data McGill gathers on university room usage and floor plans is crucial; it drives the annual capital and building operating grants received from MELS, Quebec’s Ministry of Education, Leisure and Sport.
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New IT Knowledge Base articles and usage statistics

Graph: Total visits to the Knowledge Base did not exceed last month’s, however it is worth noting important activity related to the Configure VPN for Windows 7 article, which had a total of 810 hits and was only added as recently as the first week of January. This illustrates how timely IT documentation meets campus’ demand for support. IT Frontline Services – Communications/ICS

Below you will find a newly clickable listing (thanks to the feedback given by a recent commenter) of new Knowledge Base articles created during the month of January, and a tally showing the total hits of the most popular articles during the last several weeks (tallies show the number of times the 30 most-visited articles in the Knowledge Base were accessed in January). Please visit the IT Services web page for a more expansive look at solutions to your IT needs: www.mcgill.ca/it.

IT Knowledge Base articles created in January

• Configure VPN for Windows 7
• Windows 7 Implementation at McGill
• How to record your lectures using Camtasia
• Secure Exams
• * Index of documentation for instructors using myCourses

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