SnipITs - Issue 1 2008

Welcome to SnipITs

In response to the Your Voice Survey conducted in 2007, IT Services will provide SnipITs of information about our services, developments and initiatives to interested users.

SnipITs is not designed to be a fully developed IT newsletter, but a brief update of key SnipITs of relevant information initially delivered on a fortnightly basis to raise the awareness of key Services, Developments and Initiatives IT Services is involved in.

The intended audience for SnipITs is senior University staff, IT Services staff and any other interested members of the University community who wish to subscribe to the mailing list.

Peter Nikoletatos
CIO

Profile

The 17triplezero IT Service Desk

The primary function of 17triplezero (IT Service Desk) is to provide a single point of contact for all IT related issues.

17triplezero undertakes this by:

- providing first point of contact, aiming to resolve 60% of calls at first point of contact (Level 1 Support).

or

- by escalating your issue to the appropriate 'resolver group' (Level 2 Support).

and

- by providing up to date information on current and planned system or service outages via the 17triplezero Service Portal.

When you contact 17triplezero you are dealing with a group of IT professionals who carry out a range of tasks as part of our Service Level Agreements. The same people you see setting up desktop computers, or visiting you to resolve an issue on-site, are the same people that answer phone calls to 17000, and deal with issues submitted on the Service Desk Portal or via email. You can be confident that your issue is treated professionally and in a timely manner.

The Service Desk staff are assisted by a group of Student Rovers, all of whom are undertaking IT related studies at The University of Newcastle (promotong our Student Engagement Model). The IT Rovers provide after hours support and have a particular empathy with problems encountered by students.

SnipITs Stats

- Monthly average of phone calls to 17000:

- 2006 was 1879

- 2007 was 2203

- so far in 2008 a total of 2404. An increase of 78%.

- Most calls recorded in a month:

- 3402 in February 2008.

Jobs logged on the Service Portal and via email are not included in these figures.

Practical SnipITs

Responsible Data Storage

If your computer has ever crashed and you have lost your data, then you should appreciate the benefits of storing your work files responsibly and ensuring they are backed up regularly. When considering which files should be backed up, ask yourself "What is the impact to me and the University if these files are lost?"

IT Services recommends the following methods of data storage and backup.

- Save all work related files in the My Documents (Windows) or Documents (Macintosh) folder. All University computers administered under the Managed Operating Environment (MOE) have this setting as the default. Copies of this data should be backed up to CD or DVD and stored in a safe place.

- Copy important work related files to your U:\ drive.
What is a U:\ drive? It is 1Gb of central server storage allocated to each member of staff in a designated home on ‘staff’ U: drive, which is automatically mapped and visible under My Computer as a Network Drive. Only you can access the files on your U:\ drive.

- Store files which need to be accessed by other staff in your business group on the shared drive in your area, usually the S:\ drive.

Both the U: and S: drives are regularly backed up by IT Services.
In the event that your computer needs to be rebuilt, or data recovered, the potential data loss is minimised if your work related files are stored using these options.

Further advice on data storage and backup is available from 17triplezero (IT Service Desk).

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