Minutes for Admin Computer Support Meeting - October 17, 2007

Wednesday October 17, 2007, 10 am - 11:15 am, NH 3001.

Agenda was:

Status of Office 2007 Deployment (Bob Hicks)

Office 2007 has been deployed to over 700 computers in academic support departments. There are two large non-ancilliary departments still to do, and all of the ancilliary departments still need to be done. Deployment continues every Tuesday night. Departments wishing to deploy Office 2007 should contact Bob Hicks. Over 40 training Office 2007 training sessions have been given, and there will be more to come.

It is important for departments to upgrade to Office 2007 to be compatible with the rest of campus, and also our training sessions are now using Office 2007.

Converting from Eudora (Bob Hicks)

This is still work in progress. There are two Outlooks tutorials scheduled in the November - December SEW brochure. Departments are slowly converting from Eudora, and IST will help as requested with both the conversion and the training. To schedule this, please talk to Bob Hicks.

Making Email Quicker (Paul Snyder)

Paul reviewed the Outlook configuration changes to make email quicker. The steps are included below:

If you are using Outlook 2007 with IMAP, please review the following Outlook configuration settings. Also, Outlook Express and Vista/Mail (as well as many other IMAP clients including earlier versions of Outlook) have similar problems and the same advice applies

By default, Outlook 2007 scans all IMAP folders for incoming and outgoing mail. This will cause you long delays and is placing a severe load on the admmail server

Please complete the following steps to correct this problem and improve email performance:

• From the Tools menu, select “Send/Receive” then select “Send/Receive Settings”, and then select “Define Send/Receive Groups”.

• Uncheck “Schedule an automatic send/receive”. This is not required for imap.

• Press the Edit button to display the following panel.

• Click “Use the custom behaviour defined below”. As illustrated in the above panel, this will direct Outlook to only look in your Inbox for send/receive mail resulting in much faster performance for you and reduced load on the admmail server.

Web Advisory Committee (Paul Snyder)

A few people attending this meeting are on the Web Advisory Committee. The committee's web page provides information about the work the committee is doing, including minutes from their meetings.

New employee/co-op student information in RT ( Peggy Day)

Please use the web form found at https://rt.uwaterloo.ca/~wwwrt/cgi-bin/rtuser.pl to request new accounts. To create a new userid we need a birthdate – if you are uncomfortable in asking for one, we will have to wait until the person signs up with HR to get this information.

Type of information required – Full Name includng middle initial, birthdate, office location and extension if known. If the person needs access to special security group please provide if not sure check another person that has the same security groups.

For a co-op student you can provide an expire date, we will include this which will expire the userid on that date.

Old versions of applications (Trevor Bain)

We continue to use the popup at login within IST - only for Firefox however. No other products are being tested. Trevor has not moved ahead with deployment in the rest of Academic support because based on feedback at the last meeting, Trevor needs to investigate some mechanism for the Academic Support Computing reps to identify systems in advance of the popup so that they can take proactive measures instead of fielding a flood of requests for assistance on the morning the popups appear. Trevor doesn't yet have a solution for providing those reports.

Vista, Rollover (Bob Hicks)

The Vista project in IST is underway. Plan is to install Vista in MC 1078, one of the two IST training labs. Testing applications in Vista will be done for the remainder of the Fall term. IST will have spare machines to loan to departments for testing their special purpose applications in Vista. If you are interested in participating in this testing, please contact Bob Hicks. Vista deployment will be much different than Windows XP deployment in that only new machines being purchased will be running Vista, and this will happen sometime in the Winter 2008, once Vista SP1 is released.

Training Sessions

The November - December SEW brochure has been mailed. Many of the Level 1 Office courses from September and October are being repeated as there were waiting lists. The Level 2 Offices are being offered for Office 2007 applications. There are some new web courses as well.

There was a request to offer the training again for new computing support reps. There were 3 or 4 new computer support reps in attendance at this meeting, and we would like a few more interested in the training before we offered it. Please let Bob Hicks know if you were not at the meeting, but would attend this training if offered.

Last updated by Bob Hicks (bjhicks at uwaterloo.ca) on June 6, 2008

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