Fall 2015 Weinberg IT Update
Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to the new academic year! I would like to take this opportunity to update you on Weinberg IT's operations and highlight some of the services available to you as part of Weinberg College and Northwestern.
IT support in September and October
As you know, the period from Labor Day to mid-October is very busy for everyone in the College. To help ensure a successful start of the year, Weinberg IT will provide more focused support between Tuesday, September 8, and Friday, October 9. Support will include computer setups for new faculty and staff, break/fix support for all faculty and staff, and assistance with using the new Box file synchronization and sharing service. We expect to resume full support operations, including new computer setups for continuing faculty/staff, as of Monday, October 12.
Opening a support request with Weinberg IT is as easy as emailing us at weinberg-it@northwestern.edu. Your email automatically goes to our support request system, where we can assign it to an available staff member and track our work.
If your computer has been turned off during the summer, we recommend you turn it on at least a few days before the start of the quarter. The computer will receive available security updates from the summer, which will require a restart. Doing so a few days in advance will help avoid disruptions to your work at an inopportune time.
Similarly, we recommend you connect the computer you use for teaching to the equipment in the classroom(s) you will use before the start of the quarter to ensure everything works as expected. Please be aware that Registrar classrooms and some Weinberg seminar rooms are supported by NUIT; these rooms will have information about contacting 7-ROOM for help. All other Weinberg seminar rooms are supported by Weinberg IT.
IT services for faculty and staff
Over the past few years, we’ve focused our efforts on ensuring the technology services available to you better meet your needs as more people use them at any time or any place. We also seek to reduce the amount of time spent by you or us on administering these services, so we can devote more time to assisting you when needed. In particular, I would like to bring to your attention several key offerings that we think significantly benefit the College.
- Northwestern Box is a cloud-based file sharing service that combines the ease of use and collaboration of tools like Dropbox with the institutional coverage and security you expect from Northwestern’s IT services. You can access your Box account from any device at any location without VPN, and share files and folders to any email address. Many universities have begun using Box, which makes it even easier to share with inter-institutional colleagues.
- CrashPlan PRO backs up the data on our desktop and laptop computers to reliable storage at NUIT’s datacenter. You can review your backups and restore files without IT intervention. We’re currently backing up over 183 million files and almost 100 terabytes.
- Research Data Storage Service is a brand-new offering from NUIT to provide high-capacity storage at a reasonable price to researchers. The storage is interactive at a Windows, Mac, or Linux desktop, and saved data is replicated from Evanston to Chicago on a nightly basis.
- NUsites is a cloud-based service that enables faculty, students, and staff to easily create and manage websites and blogs for academic and research purposes. Built on WordPress, NUsites offers a broad range of click-to-pick design themes, a generous selection of plugins for added site functionality, and 24/7 email support.
- NUworkspace gives faculty and students access to research software using a virtual Windows desktop. It replaces and improves on the Sheridan cluster by allowing us to provide more concurrent desktops, each of which has more resources and performs faster than the previous cluster.
- Qualtrics Research Suite provides a comprehensive suite of tools to create web surveys and analyze collected data. Qualtrics has been licensed by the College and unlimited access is available at no cost to all Weinberg faculty, staff, graduate students, and undergraduate students. Faculty using Qualtrics in the classroom may also grant access to non-Weinberg students.
- Weinberg Online Forms enables the creation of web-based forms that trigger multi-step workflows. This application was built by Weinberg IT in 2013, and continues to be improved to support administrative forms in multiple schools and units.
I’ve received feedback from many of you on Weinberg IT over the five years I’ve been part of Weinberg College, and I very much appreciate your taking the time to offer thoughts, pose questions, and provide comments on our efforts. We review your feedback regularly, and aim to provide services and assistance, including those highlighted above, that respond to your needs and enable your teaching, research, and administrative work. I look forward to working with you in the coming year and learning more about how we can help you.
Best regards,
chris
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Chris Comerford
Senior Director of Information Technology and Administrative Initiatives
Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences
Northwestern University
(o) 847-491-2746
(c) 773-968-8488
http://www.weinberg.northwestern.edu