Home » Information Technology Services » Blog » ITS Weekly » This Week in LIS - 18 April 2008
Home » Information Technology Services » Blog » ITS Weekly » This Week in LIS - 18 April 2008

This Week in LIS - 18 April 2008

Weekly news and updates from Luther College Information Technology Services. To receive email updates, please sign up here.

By bartch02

Upcoming Dates

  • April 23 (Wednesday): Demonstation: Moving to the Mac Platform
  • April 24 (Thursday): Training: Word 2007 & Office 2007
  • April 30, May 1 (Wednesday, Thursday): Training: Excel 2007 & Office 2007
  • May 7 (Wednesday): LIS General
  • More information on upcoming training opportunities: http://lis.luther.edu/learn

Headline of the Week: Norse Apps Update and Revised Deployment Plans

With more than 2600 accounts now active in our Norse Apps suite and having been converted in the last several weeks, we are now substantially along the road of implementation. Generally, the process has gone very smoothly for those who have converted. Perhaps one of the biggest speed bumps has been the simultaneous expiration of passwords, which depending on the timing of users who both change their Norse Keys and migrate to Norse Apps, can create some migration issues for old mail. Now that the expiration date has come and gone, we are now pushing a little harder to have the remaining students who have not yet migrated do so. We have set a new deadline for students to move of May 31st. With well over 80% of students already moved, this should be a very attainable goal.

After the work to migrate students is complete, we will be turning our attention to alumni, providing them an avenue to create an account if they wish. We will also be ramping up work to implement more faculty and staff migrations for the summer and into the fall. At this point, we would like to see employees migrated by the end of the calendar year. We now have a new self-service tool to migrate Thunderbird contacts, and are working to implement a new solution to manage email lists for employees who have regular need to contact large lists of people (Google enforces sending limits on accounts as a spam prevention mechanism). We will also be working to plan for a campus move to Norse Cal for calendaring which will require some coordination across campus to implement.

This overall timeline is revised to be a little quicker than we had originally planned based upon the good experience we have had in migrating students. We continue to receive positive feedback on the services in Norse Apps and look forward to greater integration into campus workflow as we continue to expand our implementation. For updates and more information about Norse Apps, visit http://helpdesk.luther.edu/go/norseapps

LIS Blog Highlights from the Week

The following articles are sampled from those available on the LIS Blog:

LIS Website Changes

  • We’ve implemented a project tracking tool for internal use by LIS (available at http://lis.luther.edu/projects). Currently, access is limited to LIS staff.
  • Progress is being made in implementing some Drupal-based resource guides for library research.
  • Several minor site upgrades occurred this week.

Notes from LIS Council

Items discussed this week included:

  • 2008-09 Budget – We’ll be meeting next week to make some determinations for project funding for the 2008-09 budget year.
  • Faculty Roll – Finance plans are being discussed with Financial Services and data is being collected from faculty on preferences.
  • Performance Evaluations – Chris is seeking some comment on performance evaluation processes and will be convening a lunch discussion.
  • Library Furniture – Andi has volunteered to participate on this group. Still looking for additional volunteers. Work will begin in May.
  • Annual Reports – The time is quickly approaching for annual reports. We’ll be following up individually with folks regarding data and metrics.

NITLE Opportunities

As a member of NITLE (National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education), Luther has the opportunity to participate in a wide variety of developmental and training programs intended for faculty, librarians, and information technologists. Events listed at the link below are currently open for registration by Luther participants. LIS Staff who are interested in participating in an event should speak with Christopher Barth. Faculty who are interested in participating should speak with Lori Stanley. Participation is contingent upon available funding and program acceptance.

Complete List of NITLE Opportunities

Cool Resource of the Week: W-i-d-e-U-R-L.com

This week’s site is “cool” in that it has a sense of humor, though the usefulness of it’s service is somewhat in doubt. The web is full of services like TinyURL" that convert long, gangly-looking URLs into something easily pasteable into an email. The long tail of url-web services has now also brought us W-i-d-e-U-R-L.com" for those URLs that seem a little too short. This service phonetically stretches out a URL to make it much longer than it originally was. For some truly geekly, mind-bending fun, you can easily create a TinyURL from your WideURL as well. Some folks have a lot of time on their hands I think. On the web at http://wideurl.com/.

Around the Web

Here are a few links to interesting developments over the past week:

  • Google
    • None

{ Return to ITS Weekly for more posts. }

Add a comment

Please login to comment.

Return to ITS Weekly