by Seth Novogrodsky, LSCR Faculty Team Project Manager
October 1, 2007—The Letters & Science Computing Resources (LSCR) Faculty Support Team provides support to the majority of College departments, and our service has evolved along with the computing needs of those departments. We are continuing to make changes to better serve our L&S faculty. This article is the first in a series that will provide information on updates in our computing support programs. We hope they will enable readers to take better advantage of our range of services.
If you are not currently using LSCR's faculty support services and are interested in more information, please feel free to contact us, and we will be happy to answer any questions you might have.
Michael Quan is our operational team leader, and he does the bulk of faculty computing support for the College. Mikael Hansen is also a regular on the Faculty Support Team, and we have two student workers, Aric Huang and Daniel Henderson. Seth Novogrodsky also helps out on faculty support, as do members of LSCR's Ohlone and Tilden teams, which provide support for L&S staff.
Michael and Seth have been meeting with department managers and chairs to discuss issues related to faculty support. We will be contacting more departments over the next few months. If you would like to schedule a meeting to discuss any issues related to faculty computing support, please contact us.
Eudora, the email software widely used on campus, is no longer being developed and is in technical violation of the campus minimum security standards because security updates are no longer being released. LSCR's goal is to have the bulk of our users migrated from Eudora to Thunderbird, a free email program that LSCR and the campus are recommending, by the end of the this calendar year. Please see Director's Blog: Migration from Eudora to Thunderbird for our general plans.
We plan to coordinate the migrations with the Ohlone and Tilden teams so that when practical we will migrate faculty at roughly the same time as departmental staff are migrated. However, faculty can contact us to schedule migrations at any time that is convenient for them.
Recommendations for new computer purchases for departments in the College of Letters & Science are now available on The Scholar's Workstation website. To access the recommendations, go to The Scholar's Workstation website and click on Enter Store under Shop for your Department on the right of the screen. Then click on Department Recommendations under BROWSE CATEGORIES in the navigation bar on the left of the screen. On the next screen, click on TECHNOLOGY RECOMMENDATIONS under Letters and Science. Currently, only Apple computers are listed, but we plan to have recommendations for Dell models in the near future.
Before buying any new computer or printer, we strongly urge you to contact us. We can evaluate your needs and provide you with recommendations tailored to your specific requirements.
The best way to reach us is to send email to fac_support@LS.Berkeley.EDU. We also have a message line at 642-1355; the message line is best when email is unavailable. When making a request, the following information is helpful for us:
Also, because we use an automated ticket tracking system, if you wish to provide additional information regarding a request that you sent in, please reply either to the automated response or to a message sent by an LSCR consultant regarding that request so that "[LSCR Request System #xxxx]" (with the appropriate tracking number) will appear in the subject line. New requests should be sent without a tracking number; the tracking number will be assigned automatically.
LSCR Faculty Support business cards are now available, and we encourage department managers to distribute them to faculty for the convenience for those needing assistance. The business cards include our email address, our phone number, and the link for the LSCR website. If you would like to distribute these cards to your faculty, please contact us with information on how many you would like and where you would like them sent.
