Team sites help members of Lee groups share

29th January | No Comments | posted by vegger | in For Students, Faculty and Staff

Organizations at Lee looking for a better way to communicate, collaborate and share information need look no further: IT Systems provides members of groups at Lee with access to team sites through Portico.

 

Just what are team sites?

“They’re awesome is what they are,” said IT Systems Business Analyst LeAnn McElrath, the essential brain trust of the team sites project.

Team sites, McElrath elaborated, are sharepoint sites. This means that they can be used to upload a wide variety of content to the site that can be shared with all members of a designated group, or “team.”

Team sites make it possible for group members to share anything from announcements and calendars to files and pictures.

“The sky is kind of the limit with this technology,” McElrath said.

Organizations such as Greek, academic, and service-oriented clubs can even use the team sites to keep track of their membership.

IT Systems crafts and maintains team sites for all campus departments and organizations as it becomes aware of a group’s existence and its need to use the site. It is currently working to make sure the benefits of team sites are available to all clubs and their members.

To grant team site access to clubs, IT Systems gathers information about the clubs from the academic and student life sides of the university, and puts it into Colleague.  This gives the appropriate capabilities to the organization participants that are on file. Once these people have access, they will have it for as long as they are in Lee’s Datatel system.

To access the team sites, one need only log in to Portico, scroll to the bottom and click on the tab that reads “My Team Sites.” From there the link to the desired team page can be selected, and access to all the things the team shares is granted.

Lee users should keep their eyes peeled for what technological advances will come next.

 

 

Facilities scheduling will improve room reservation process

23rd January | No Comments | posted by vegger | in For Students, Faculty and Staff

The days of back-and-forth emails and phone calls trying to reserve a room at Lee are soon to be over, thanks to the new Facilities Scheduling application being made available to students and staff by IT Systems.

IT Systems is currently perfecting the technology that will allow members of the Lee community wishing to reserve an on-campus facility to do so online, rather than by less efficient means.

“The new software is more centralized and user oriented,” Business Analyst LeAnn McElrath said. “Students can now see what rooms are available at what time, and there’s a filter for specific criteria.”

In the past, students had to call or email Director of Special Events Kim Brooks or her secretary Abby Black to ask if a certain room was available at a certain time.

Brooks or Black would then review reports from different departments on room availability, before replying to the student and contacting the person in charge of the room to reserve it.

The new tool eliminates a step on each side of the process. Instead of asking if a facility is available, students, faculty and staff can see for themselves when the place they desire is already booked.

In addition, those who do not have a certain room in mind but do need a room with certain criteria (such as specific seating capacity) can use the filter function to find rooms that meet their needs.

On the user side, Facilities Scheduling removes an element of stress from event planning. Not only can planners use it to find rooms that have everything they need, but they can also look at the schedule in advance before setting the date or general time frame for their event.

The new software has advantages on the administrative side as well.

In fact, McElrath said Kim Brooks was the one who found the software and suggested that they try it. With the advent of Facilities Scheduling, the person in charge of the room simply receives an email to approve a pending reservation request.

“All the [administrative] staff who will be using it have been trained, too,” McElrath said.

As for user training, McElrath has created a How To Guide  through Portico that goes through all the steps of reserving a room, from logging in to Portico to hitting the “Submit” button. These submissions will hopefully make scheduling easier for everyone.

 

IT enables communication for Lee Festival Choir

17th January | No Comments | posted by vegger | in For Students, Faculty and Staff

Major news organizations won’t be the only ones posting firsthand coverage of the 2013 Presidential Inauguration on January 21^st – the IT department at Lee University will be, too.

 

This year, 200 choir members from Lee are scheduled to sing at the U.S. Capitol as part of the ceremony that will ring in Barack Obama for his second and final term as President of the United States.

IT plans to be right behind the students in terms of letting everyone interested in the Lee community see and hear what the performers are experiencing up-close.

As students snap candid pictures, they will have the opportunity to send their shots to IT’s private Flickr account.

 

Flickr is a photo-sharing website that allows the user to upload pictures to the site itself, and also to share the photos on other sites.

According to Nate Tucker, Director of IT Systems, IT will stream some of the photos from the Flickr account that students upload to the university’s website, where there will be a scroll feature to view them.

“When our Flickr gets populated with pictures, I’ll see them and choose which ones will go on our official inauguration page,” Tucker said.

IT Systems notified the students of this technology by printing out enough business cards for each student to have one.

The cards display the email address to which they can send the photos, as well as the official inauguration tags and hashtags for Facebook and Twitter designated by the White House.

In addition to facilitating communication between the Lee Festival Choir and the Lee community about what’s going on at the inauguration, IT is also using Regroup to allow leaders on the D.C. trip to transmit important information to a large number of students, without pulling their hair out.

 

Regroup, according to its website, is an emergency notification and efficient group messaging tool.

IT already uses Regroup to send mass emails from the university to students on a near-daily basis, and it adapted its use of Regroup for this trip.

Leaders can use Regroup to send a mass text message to which no one can reply.

The no-reply function results from Regroup’s use of a different random, unused phone number every time it sends a mass message.

“This way, leaders can send reminder messages to tell students they’re loading the bus, or that they need to be in a certain place by a certain time, without overloading everyone’s phones,” said Morgan Adams, IT Systems Project Manager.

As with many projects in the IT department, staff organized several periods of testing to ensure that the program was working properly before they granted access to the Music Department.

As of now, all systems are a go for this weekend and Inauguration Day.

IT Systems and Operations streamlines Spring Registration

10th January | No Comments | posted by vegger | in For Students, Faculty and Staff

The staff of Information Technology at Lee knows that no one likes to stand in long lines, especially when they don’t need to. That is why, for Spring 2013 registration, IT pulled out all the stops to make registration relatively painless, streamlined, and automated.

“We’re here for the students,” said IT Business Analyst LeAnn McElrath.

In the past few years, IT has made vast improvements regarding its role in the process that have made the procedure easier for everyone.

One of these improvements is the creation of a kiosk at the registration site where a student can scan his or her ID card to access a data sheet, which gives the student all necessary information about his or her registration status.

The kiosk, which is in its fourth semester of operation, thus eliminates the need for students to wait in multiple lines trying to figure out where they stand in the process.

“We used to have students stand in line for a long time, going through all of the registration checkpoints, only to find out that they had already been cleared and didn’t need to be there,” said Sr. Programmer Analyst Robert VanHook. “The kiosk automates a lot of those processes.”

It also saves trees, according to VanHook. In the past, IT would print approximately 3500 data sheets for students the night before on-campus registration began.

Many of these sheets were left unused because a great number of students confirmed enrollment online beforehand and were not in attendance, so the paper was wasted.

McElrath said that more students are now opting to confirm enrollment online instead of coming to campus on the registration days, and VanHook said that that is where all of this work in automation is headed.

“Ideally, we’d like it if students didn’t have to come at all,” VanHook said.

However, since that day has not yet arrived, IT still works very hard to help on-campus registration to run smoothly and efficiently. IT starts amalgamating and setting up the approximately 100 computers it needs for the two-day event weeks in advance.

During the actual event, the IT staff is present to deal with, according to McElrath, “totally random technology-related things,” such as network connection problems.

When registration is over, IT spends the rest of the evening doing teardown – no matter how long it takes. In the past, staff has worked until midnight reprogramming computers and putting them back where they belong.

However, this practice has more recently been simplified by the acquisition of multiple virtual computers called thin clients. Instead of having to bring a monitor and the actual computer, staff members just grab the mouse, the keyboard, and the network cable and go.

IT plans to continue to improve the registration-day process for students until it reaches the eventual goal of majority online registration.

“Just about every year we’ve streamlined more and done something different,” McElrath said.

 

 

Photo credit:

Line: freedigitalphotos.net

Tree: blmiers2 / Foter / CC BY-NC-SA