IUSM Educational Technology

Watson and I talked about migrating cfserve, and it’s sites. I’ve already loaded the Coldfusion 8.0 software onto the main webserver, and the server admin interface appears to be working well. Now that CF is on spidey, I can begin to move the Geneinfo website database out of MS Access and into Sql server. Once the database move is complete, I’ll start the process of re-doing the design/development of the Geneinfo front-end.  Keeping in mind, that I’ll need to develop a web interface for the library staff to be able to login and add, update and delete records in the database. Need to consider a way for library staff to also perform any updates to the web front-end, without needing to know html. Will consider using Contribute.

mat

On July 21st there was a UITS infoshare on the new Footprints service desk application which has taken the place of the old Falcon service desk, or ticket tracking, system.  In June, UITS completed the migration from Falcon to Footprints, so today was a brief demo of the product.

Owned by a company called Numara, the software appears very flexible and configurable and is very customizable due in part to the fact that when clients purchase the software, they get the source code included.  IU has already purchased 100 concurrent seats and has the ability to purchase more on an as needed basis.  There’s no charge to IU departments for one of the concurrent seats, but if a department wanted their own “fixed seat”, there would be a cost involved.  Several departments are already using Footprints including LSP services, and the Department of Medicine and Nursing.

For departments to try Footprints out, they need to request a test project via a upcoming web form via https://footprints.iu.edu/projreq. UITS will create an instance for the project and it will be in a “testing phase” until such time as the department has prepared the application and it’s admins. have attended a 1 day training session. Once the departments project has been fully tested and UITS admins have been given ample notice, then the project will move from a testing environment to a production environment.
One important note on the role of the Project Admins., the UITS presenter did stress that when in testing phase, the project admins have full power over their project instance, but once it goes to the production environment, their powers are diminished dramatically (to the production instance of the project, not the testing instance.)

The applications organizational scheme consists of individual “projects” which would be various departments or teams instance of the Footprints application .
Project administrators–all rights and control over that departments instance (IU would like each group to have at least 1 admin and an alternate/backup.)
Agents —other support team members with specific rights
Issues— are request tickets in the system

All in all the Footprints application looks promising and it looks like it’s worth it plunge in and get a testing project. We really do need to address our lack of an efficient support tracking system for Educational Technology, and the Angel system.
for more on this topic check the UITS KB on Footprints…

This was an Apple sponsored all day seminar that focused on the tools that can be used to create images of  Macs. There was also discussion and  live demos of  tools to deploy images. Both InstaDMG and DeployStudio were covered in detail (along with other solutions).

Plan on implementing some of the tools described in the workshop, to help ET with the management of our Public Mac stations.

The Angel team was contacted by Dr. Thurston about setting up the gradebook in Angel to upload and store test results for the Medical Genetics course.  I spent a little while finding out the format that the gradebook uses to import grades, and uploaded a  .csv format from the spreadsheet that Dr. Thurston provided, and was able to give her a template and brief instructions on how to setup the Angel gradebook for a course.  During our consultation time, she mentioned that she was at a meeting with all of the course directors and that most if not all of them wanted to have the feature of posting exam grades on Angel, for each student to view privately under their own log in.  It was discussed that there would be a high request very soon for this from a lot of course directors.

Also, it was mentioned that the current online video tutorial about how to setup the Angel gradebook is not very helpful and intuitive.  This is the tutorial that links from Angel learning.

These are the steps to adding a Mac 0SX 10.5 Leopard Server to ADS

Prepare DNS

• Get a Static IP and have IUB DNS-Admin dns-admin@indiana.edu do only the reverse DNS entry for it. This is the same thing you should do for any Windows server before you add it to ADS. They don’t need to know it’s a Mac that may just confuse things. The DNS entry must have ads.iu.edu as the suffix then use campus-department-servername naming convention for the name of your machine. So that your FQDN might look like bl-dept-server.ads.iu.edu. We haven’t tried any other naming conventions with 10.5 but this is what is needed for 10.4 systems and it works with 10.5 systems. In other words don’t try to use indiana.edu in the FQDN of your server.
• Create a machine account in ADS for your server and put it in an OU that you control.
• Contact ADS ADMINISTRATOR <ads-admin@iu.edu> and Cc LSP Services <lsps@indiana.edu> and let us know you need to add a Mac Server (only needed for servers) to ADS. Give them the IP address and the DNS name you will be using. (May not need to do this step with 10.5 but It can’t hurt if you do.)
• In the Terminal run these commands to check DNS BEFORE installing your 10.5 server. If DNS isn’t working properly don’t building your server you WILL HAVE PROBLEMS.

dig bl-server-dept.ads.iu.edu

dig -x IpAddress

hostname

Update a few user accounts in Angel and enrolled a few users into Class of 2012.

Kent Redman, wanted us to create a course for Fort Wayne Medical Genetics 682 course with himself as the instructor.

Contact: Michael Taylor

ET is in the process of learning how to manage Mac computers in a public environment and we have been increasing our knowledge on how to match the policies enforced on our Windows stations. Carol Thorne and myself have attend a couple of Mac classes and have learned a great deal so far. There are a few different management options we currently know about. We’ve also, installed and configured a Mac 0S X Leopard Server with Watson, and have already begun the process of implementing several of the following server abilities:
• Remote installation and configuration of the server OS.
• Troubleshooting DHCP DNS and network configurations.
• Firewall setup.
• Account creation and administration
• Open Directory (LDAP) and Kerberos configuration for single sign-on.
• Integration into Active Directory enviroments.
• Configuring and troubleshooting AFP, SMB and other file-sharing services.
• Managing user, group and computer accounts using Workgroup Manager.
• Managing web services including wiki/blog and calendar server.
• Implementing NetBoot and NetInstall services.

Image creation for Macs info:

Here is the definitive info on building a Mac system for general distribution to your other Macs. It’s not a simple process but Mac support users should be able to learn it and there’s lots of online help.

First go to macenterprise.org and watch the webcast on InstaDMG .

AFP548.com has all the tools to learn how to do it.

Contact: Michael Taylor

Jim would like us to again work with the Bi-annual Scientific Sessions project:

Comments below:

What we did in 06 is in the Iusm infoshares group under “Public Resources”. It’s essentially a drop box with instructions to leave their contact info if they don’t sign into ANGEL (because a number wouldn’t have ANGEL accounts).
We need some way to provide a name and email prompt that they’d have to answer before submitting their abstract. Maybe also change it to peer review under access so they could see other submissions. And then suggest to the dean’s office they create a folder of accepted submissions, so those submitting could see when their submission was accepted.

Sometime around July 16th, someone or something altered the A-Z branding on the libraries A-Z site. ET was asked to correct the icon/logo look on the website so that it reflects the proper look. I did a little editing work and put together what I thought should be a decent and accurate? branding for the site. Upon further review, Jim Morgan mentioned that since Clarian set up their own A-Z a year or two ago, that we could have taken out their logo at that time. It should still be IUSM libraries however. I will now just remove the Clarian logo and have it to only reflect IUSM Medical Libraries.

This raises the issue that since we’ve made a transition from our old RLML website to the new IUSM sitemaker uniform library website, we really no longer have a defined “RLML logo”. It doesn’t matter to me one way or the other, just noting it for future reference to the powers that be.