On Thursday afternoon, Dec 8, the redesigned Insider, BRCC’s faculty and staff intranet web presence, was released. Over time the navigation menu for the various pages across the Insider became too large and disjointed across the Insider site. Additionally, landing pages for forms and publications simply contained too much information to process and easily navigate as more and more information was uploaded to the Insider. Planning for a redesign of the Insider began last spring. The redesign was meant to accomplish several elements:

• Provide richer content on the Insider landing page and reduce the amount of white space on that page,
• Standardize and reduce the navigation menu for the Insider pages,
• Organize content into smaller, manageable groups of information,
• Implement Active Directory authentication for the Insider, and
• Clean up directory structures and their content.

All of these goals were accomplished with the release of the redesigned Insider.

Important Elements of the Redesign

There are a number of important elements about the redesign that all employees should note:

1. Content for the redesigned Insider has been arranged to break content into more manageable groupings instead of the long scrolling lists of links that were becoming quite difficult to use because of the lack of organization. A brief synopsis of the new locations of information is as follows:

Your IT department will deploy over 264 computers to classrooms and labs and employees by the start of the spring 2012 semester. In addition, we will continue deploying new computers to employees through the month of January. Our priority is to ensure that all classroom deployments are completed by the start of the spring 2012 semester. Our goal is to complete all of the FY2011-2012 PC refresh deployments by the end of January.

Overview of Deployment Process

Classroom computers

1. (November 14 - December 19 In progress) Install and configure software
2. (December 19 – January 4) Deploy computers to classrooms

Employee computers(December 5 – 16, January 12 – 31)

1. (IT staff) Open ticket and notify employee 3 – 5 days prior to scheduled deployment
2. (IT staff) backup documents, bookmarks, etc from local computer to network drive
3. (IT staff) Deploy new computer
4. (Employee/IT staff) Close ticket once deployment is complete

Prioritized Help Desk Service

In order to accommodate the deployment process, Help Desk staff will need to temporarily reprioritize their workload according to the following schedule...

BRCC completed the purchase of the Entrinsik Informer Web Reporting system last month. Informer is web based reporting system that allows trained users to create reports from data available in our Colleague database. BRCC has been using Colleague’s“Query Builder”software for this purpose however Datatel is discontinuing support for Query Builder in 2012 and Informer will replace it.

Although, there is no stated date when Query Builder will stop functioning, our goal is to transition all critical reports to Informer by February 1, 2012.

Informer Transition Plan Overview

Milestone	Targeted Completion Date
Configure Informer, build data mappings	Completed
Generate Inventory of Query Builder Reports	Completed
Convert Query Builder reports to Informer	2/1/2012 - In Progress
Creating and using Informer Reports Training	(Multiple 1 hour sessions) in December, January, February
Decommission Query Builder / UI 2.3	February 2012

We are pleased to announce that our new IT ticketing system, Help Desk Authority, is now online!

This new tool will help us "close the loop" by keeping you updated on the status of your ticket(s) and helping IT staff better track and organize the large volume of requests we receive daily.

Currently, we support approximately 1,000 computers, 500 staff and 80+ varieties of software. Over time, this system will provide valuable data that will help the IT Department evaluate and better understand the support needs of the College.

The new, web based Colleague User Interface, UI 4.3, is now accessible to all BRCC employees. The new user interface offers a variety of improvements that should make it easier to use than the current user interface (UI 2.3).

Instruction to access the new user interface are below.

A few of these improvements are highlighted below:

• Search for mnemonics (screens) based on either the mnemonic name or words in the title
  • Searching for the word "address" will show you applicable mnemonics such as "NAE")
• Comprehensive on screen help
• Export on-screen data and lists to Excel
  • Note: this functionality is not available for all mnemonics
• The current context can be saved for easy access when accessing a new mnemonic

Printing is not fully functional in UI 4.3. We are in the process of generating updated versions of a few critical forms. We anticipate that printing in UI 4.3 will be fully functional by late November.

• Print forms and reports as you have been using the old and familiar UI 2.3
• Print reports to hold then either save text file to local computer or export to pdf and print
• Print screens using the print button in the interface
• Where appropriate, you can use the "Export to Excel" button and print the resulting Excel document

Microsoft Internet Explorer is the only web browser that we will support for UI 4.3.

What:

BRCC is transitioning to using a new shared network file storage system (“G:” and “H:” drives) through the month of September. This transition process actual started in in June and will end with the retirement of our current Novell file server at the end of September 2011.

How this affects you:

The new storage system will be more reliable, faster and triple our available storage capacity. Users at our Transylvania campus will likely experience the biggest boost in performance. All of your files and folders on the “G:” and “H:” drives should appear to remain in the same location. You will be able to access files on your “H:” and “G:” drives on the new system exactly as you currently do. For example, if you currently have a Microsoft Word document at “G:\My Folder\MyWordDoc.doc”, it will be in that same location on the new file server.

Today marks an exciting change!

As part of our email system migration, we are officially opening up Google Apps for Education for you to begin using. We have created several "How To" documents that will take you through the entire process of getting logged into your new account and to start getting familiar with the new interface. While Google Apps has many cool, new features that we will be using in coming months, for now we will be focusing solely on e-mail, calendar and contacts functionality. Support and training on several other Google applications will soon follow.

The NC Community College System has used GroupWise for the past 12 years. Beginning Thursday, June 2, each Community College will be free to use any e-mail system it deems best for their school. Because of this change, you need to follow the directions below:

1. Copy and then empty your “Frequent Contacts” address book
   1. Go to Address Book in GroupWise
   2. Right-click Frequent Contacts
   3. Left-click ‘Save As Book’
   4. Type book name “Old Frequent Contacts”
   5. Click ‘OK’
   6. Delete contents of ‘Frequent Contacts’
2. Be aware that this change on June 2nd only affects e-mail between colleges. It will not affect internal e-mail or e-mail to Internet addresses (Ex: bill.gates@microsoft.com).
   1. To see the e-mail address being used, you can click and hover your mouse cursor over the recipient’s name.
   2. If the recipient address is NOT in a standard Internet format (Ex: user@school.edu), that may result in an undelivered e-mail!