SHSU Information Resources Update

Happy New Year!

Welcome to academic year 2008-2009. We would like to encourage each of you to take just one step which can increase your happiness, good health, and productivity, while reducing your stress.

#1 Resolution for 2008-2009:When you absolutely, positively have to have your syllabus, presentation, exam, grant or research paper overnight----Make a Copy.

Be prepared. If the air conditioning goes on the fritz or the power goes out or the ethernet wiring to your workstation gets cut or a server goes down, you can open up a battery-powered laptop with your memory stick and keep working. Recently we moved all the S: drives to a new clustered file system. Permissions were altered and a number of you could not immediately find your files before crucial deadlines. Please never rely on only one copy of anything into which you have poured your heart and soul.

Memory sticks (USB flash drives) are the fast and easy backup solution to ensure you can take your presentation or documents with you and pull them up anywhere. This month, we are giving away ten memory sticks to help encourage you to remember to MAKE A BACKUP! Send us an e-mail by September 4th at 4 pm promising to back up your work, and we'll enter you in the drawing for your department to win a memory stick.

We wish each of you a happy, healthy, stress-free, productive year.

Tweak Your SHSU E-mail & Voice Mail

Need help with the transition from the old mail system to the new? If you're in do-it-yourself mode, follow the tips below. If you'd like to spend some up close and personal time with a trainer, we are offering Outlook training sessions for faculty and staff this month to make it easier.

If you are new to Exchange/Outlook, you can move all your old e-mail from unxmail to a personal folder on your S:/ drive, not your C:/ drive. Here's how. After doing that, you can then get rid of your old imap account. That account can cause you to receive the "can't locate *.pst file" error.

Want to filter out the spam? We can show you how.

Sending to more than one recipient? Put a semi-colon between the addresses.

Feel like you're missing voice mail? Perhaps it's landed in your Personal Folder. You can make it go to your regular Outlook mailbox by clicking Tools, Options, Mail Setup, E-mail Accounts, Data Files.

Forgot your VM pin? Reset it yourself within Outlook or Outlook Web Access. Click Tools, Options, Voice Mail, Reset PIN.

Even more confused but you can't fit a training session in? Write us a note and ask for the Outlook Guide.

Training

Students will be moved to Exchange this month. We'll be offering large sessions in the LSC Theatre to help in their transition to the new system. If you correspond frequently with your students via e-mail, encourage them to attend to make sure their transition is pain-free.

Training for faculty and staff includes Outlook, Dreamweaver, and Contribute. Check the Calendar for class times and sign up now to reserve your seat. You may also request one-on-one training or training for your department. Just e-mail the Helpdesk.

Blackboard: Location, Location, Location

Blackboard 8's Grade Center gives you many tools and options that enhance assessment. That being said, a few bugs need fixing!

The bug that seems to cause the most frustration for faculty members is the limit on how many students show up in the Grade Center without scrolling. Blackboard has been inundated with complaints from us as well as numerous other universities. Until they fix it, here are three ways you can increase the amount of real estate in your grade center.

Cut Down on Toolbars:
You may have noticed that you have acquired a few extra friends on your Internet browser window. Places like Yahoo and Google love for you to have their toolbars on your browser so that you will use their product when searching the web. This may be convenient for you in terms of at-your-fingertips searching, but it reduces the amount of viewing real estate you have available. Learn how to hide the toolbars.

Go to Full-Screen View
One of the least used tricks-of-the-trade in online browsing is the Full-Screen View. The full-screen view lets the user interact with the web page without seeing any of the browser buttons, pull-down menus, or toolbars. One tap on a function key (F11), and you can turn it on or off. Learn how to go to full-screen view.

Increasing your Monitor's Resolution
The last way you can increase the real estate in your grade center is by changing your monitor's resolution. This may be unfamiliar to some, but it is a 3-step process. Changing your monitor's resolution can shrink or grow your desktop (icons, fonts and buttons will change) depending on which way you push the slider. For instance your monitor might be set to 1024 X 768. By pushing your slider to the right you would then hit 1280 X 1024. You can then see more information since each item displays smaller. Learn how to increase your monitor's resolution.

A Black Hole

Has your S: drive turned into an attic filled with old relics? Take the time in this next month to look carefully at your departmental T: drive, your S: drive, and your profile. Perhaps you have forgotten you saved something there, and it's no longer needed. If so, delete it. If you may someday, somehow need it, but think it unlikely, move it off to a CD or DVD.

As a reminder, university drives are specifically for university-work-related files. Please do not store your personal files here. Remember: any files saved on university servers are subject to the Open Records Act.

Storage space is much cheaper now---but it's still not free. The sheer time it takes to process everything slows you down and others too. In the next few weeks, we will be enforcing quotas to ensure we can maintain adequate space for everyone to work efficiently. We will be contacting our highest-use users soon to discuss better storage solutions.

Please do some housekeeping and let us know about it. It'll make all of us feel better to recognize your organizational efforts!

Warning, Warning, Warning!

Another reminder that it is up to each of us to keep SHSU's information safe. Do not respond to phishing expeditions with people trying to steal your information.

Look at your own department's official e-mails and proofread them with the idea of whether they ask for anything unnecessarily confidential. Go with the "need to know" concept. Unless you legally must have a social security number, ask for the SamID. Use the SHSU username as a easy unique identifier also.

Do not write down credit card numbers and file them away. Think carefully about how you can protect yourself and the campus and its constituents.

New Year; New Staff

The UCS Department of Administrative Applications is pleased to welcome Rigel Anthis as its newest staff member. Rigel has been a student worker at SHSU for the past five years and therefore joins the fulltime staff with a wealth of direct experience!

What's Good, What's Not, and What's Happening When?

The Helpdesk provides support for university equipment and software on the local area network. Each month's update will include the versions of software and minimum requirements for hardware with the new or changed information highlighted and bolded.

Memory Sticks: Purchase (and encourage your students to buy) flash drives that are USB Mass Storage Compliant.

Operating Systems: The supported version of Macintosh machines will be OS X, version 5 after the Leopard conversion which is underway. The supported version of Microsoft's operating system is Windows XP.

Software Packages: The supported versions of office suites are Microsoft's Office 2007. The new version of an office suite for Macintoshes is Microsoft Office 2008 and is being packaged for installation on campus machines.

Hardware Configurations: The minimum requirements for SHSU local area network support for a PC are a 1Ghz processor, 512MB RAM, and a 40GB disk. Our recommended configuration is a 2.53 GHz Dual Core
2 GB 800 MHz memory, and a 160 GB hard drive. The recommended configuration for a Macintosh on the LAN is a 1.6GHz PowerPC Single-core/Single processor, 1GB RAM, and a 40GB hard drive.

Computer Services may schedule significant periods of downtime for major system upgrades and maintenance. For your planning purposes, the weekend following each graduation will be set aside for scheduled outages. Additionally, certain systems may be unavailable on Friday nights after 6 p.m. and on holidays.

All offers, training, and software above pertain to faculty and staff at SHSU only. If you have any questions, compliments, comments, or concerns, please let us know.