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D.During short weeks where sections may be closed and students and staff are on vacation like the week between Christmas and New Years, support blocks will be suspended as we go to an on call model. All requests for support during this time can be emailed directly to us.
III) IT Liaisons
It will be the job of the section LIAISON to track requests for IT assistance in their sections and prioritize them for us when we get onsite. You know your people better than we do, so if there's a support issue that's more important, please let us know so we can assist those users first. So far we’ve been able to address, forward to IS&T, and/or resolve ALL tech issues that the liaisons have brought to our attention.
a) In order to maintain quality of service and fast response times, all REQUESTS FOR APPOINTMENTS must go to the section's IT liaison for processing. The Liaison will then send an email to the shass-tech-remote to request an appointment and we will get back to them to schedule.
b) Faculty members CAN email us directly if it’s a simple question. (eg. Is this spam, what do you recommend for X, is this service legitimate, have you had any experience with this program, etc)
c) As a best practice, complicated questions and issues (like email or calendaring not working all the time) should be handled in appointments anyway and should be directed to the Section Liaisons for scheduling.
d) The LIMITS of our support coverage are with MIT owned machines on campus. This is a practical limit. There are 2 of us and we support 7 sections in the school as well as the Dean's Office. We simply don’t have the resources to support all home networks, peripherals, and/or personal machines and devices. HOWEVER, time permitting, we are happy to TRY to answer any questions users may experience at home with MIT work machines. BUT for more complicated issues we have to see the machine. This is best accomplished by bringing in the machine to MIT. On a very special limited case by case basis if the users can work with us and users can’t bring in a machine, we can attempt to work with a relative off campus while the user is on campus with us so we can convey instructions to them and they to us to try to troubleshoot the issue.
e) With few exceptions we will NOT troubleshoot complicated issues over email. Due to differences in vernacular and terminology we have found that 90% of the time it leads to a frustrating experience for everyone involved.
If you are in this SHASS Section, your Liaison is
Section Liaison Liaison
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Anthro Carolyn Carolyn
GL Jo Jo
History Kathleen Kathleen
LIT ZachZach
MTA Michelle John
STS Adanna/ Paree
WGS SophiaStacey
GCWS Stacey Melanie
IV) Onsite Appointments
There are 3 situations where out-of-cycle onsite appointments can be scheduled: (please carefully note the specifics)
A) EXCHANGE EMAIL transition onsite setup requests should continue to be sent to shass-tech-tech@mitremote@mit.edu. Exchange migrations are a special project that we schedule outside of each section's normal support time. We will schedule the Exchange onsites as necessary. If you have any questions about moving to Exchange from the failing IMAP servers, please don't hesitate to email us. Remember that the old IMAP email servers are scheduled to be removed from service at the end of 2013. These IMAP email servers are failing and have been losing emails, in some cases entire accounts, so the sooner you get off of this legacy email system, the better for everyone.
B) ALL EMERGENCY REQUESTS should continue to be sent by the IT Liaison to shass-tech-tech@mitremote@mit.edu. We definitely don't want to make anyone wait a full week before getting help for an emergency. Keep in mind that we may not be available right away but we will respond as quickly as possible. How soon we can assist will depend on our availability. Generally, we were able to assist users with their emergencies on the same day 80% of the time. This may change during busier times of the academic year but worse comes to worse each section will never have to wait more than 7 days for support.
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