SOAR - the re-emergence

I'm not sure if re-emergence is a word, but the spellcheckers don't seem to mind.

Today was SOAR #1.  We spent a great deal of the time this week prepping, organizing and re-learning some of the things that are done for SOAR.  Overall, things seem to have worked well and the vast majority of the work is now done :)

Schedule - coming together

This week we finalized the Banner migration and upgrade timelines.

OUS requested that we bump our week back to September, and we graciously agreed.
We'll have an upgrade, followed by the migration, followed by an upgrade.
It's going to be quite a ride.

Mike Soukup is doing a great job on the technical team to make preparations.
In July, he'll be bringing Nathan and Christina up-to-speed and will include them in much more of the preparation for the Banner changes this year.

Now I just have to get the REST of the projects slated, and send that information out to campus...

Security Summit

Wednesday afternoon, I joined the IT open-source security summit for the Portland Area.  The roundtable included the City of Portland, Military, OSU, Google, some government observers and some private contractors.

In the end, we all struggle with the salience of Open-source software, it's supportability and our staffing of it's R&D, maintenance and support for Security areas.
It was actually reassuring that much larger institutions are struggling with very similar things to us.

Training

Monday I spent the whole day in Cisco UCS training ... the instructor was obsessed with IT super-villains. 
I missed the 2nd day of training, but was later informed that their server crashed anyway and the only thing I really missed was lunch :)

June - A new beginning

In June, we'll have a full crew again for the first time in a LONG time.

We hired a new Desktop Support staff member, and an OS/phone staff member.
Both start in June, and we're super excited to have them here!

Not having a "face" for our department for the Service Request Desk (SRD) has been particularly problematic.  I have a great hope that our new employee will come in with some real energy and revolutionize the way we serve the campus!  With our powers combined, we'll get the list to a manageable number, and blow the sox off of campus members as we provide the highest level of service ever.

So yeah, we still have to train/acclimate them to WOU, but I don't think that's gonna take long.

Word 2007/2010 - Default Spacing

So, I did done learned me sumethin' this week ...

A faculty member asked me about the default spacing in Word 2007, how it puts some empty space between each line.  That's irritating, but can be fixed with a few clicks.  But that's EVERY time ...

Solution?  You bet.

Launch Word 2007/2010.

Click the "Change Styles" button next to the listed styles in the Header.
Hover over "Style Set".
Click "Word 2003".

Then go back into "Change Styles", back into "Style Set" and click "Set as Default".

Boom.