IUSM Educational Technology

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…