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

IT verifying department assets

29th November | No Comments | posted by Caleb Bell | in For Students, Faculty and Staff

The IT department is currently involved in the process of verifying all of Lee University’s technological assets.

IT has a list of all the assets – computers, laptops, printers, tablets, etc. – that each department uses.
This list includes serial numbers, the name of the product, the department where they’re located and the heads of those departments.

IT is asking the heads of each department to go through the verification process with the employees and faculty in their sector and report to IT. Though it is a tedious task, it helps IT to be prepared when leases expire and helps to expedite the process of finding and replacing different assets.

The reason IT is verifying all of these is to make sure that they can keep track of where each asset is, so when it comes time to end the lease, they won’t have to go on a wild goose chase looking for it. IT hopes to do this twice a year to make sure everything is where it should be.

New WebAdvisor options make employees’ lives easier

8th November | No Comments | posted by Caleb Bell | in About IT Staff and Student Workers, For Students, Faculty and Staff

WebAdvisor saw some new additions and changes this fall, making a few aspects of business here at Lee just a little bit easier.

Web procurement and benefits enrollment online are two changes that went live September and October 2012 after being under development since spring.

Kathy Jackson, business analyst for IT Systems, explained that these two system improvements make life all-around easier for those who have to deal with them.

Web procurement refers to the new way for staff and faculty to enter accounts payable invoices and purchase orders (sometimes known as vouchers).

These used to be filled out and approved in Colleague, which meant having to go through page after page to get where you needed to go. Now those approving vouchers and those entering them can go in to a single page on WebAdvisor and approve them.

“It’s a win/win for both the people who enter the vouchers and the people who have to approve them. Much more time efficient,” Jackson said.

Benefits enrollment online is also designed to make things easier for faculty and staff. Before, when an employee at Lee wanted to enroll in health insurance options they had to fill out a big pink form and someone had to manually enter all of that information to send to the insurance company.

Now all an employee has to do is go on to WebAdvisor, choose the options for coverage they want, and submit it.

These changes are designed to make the regular tasks of employees at Lee easier, and just a couple of the many projects IT has going in order to improve the technological environment at Lee University.