Notes from CCEI Customer Service sub-committee

May 10 Meeting

10:00 – 11:30, Room 216 Scott Hall

Attending:

Louis HuntRegistration and Records

Angie BallardNCSU Libraries

Mike CrossCALS

Alan SchuelerCALS

Melissa WillifordDELTA

Tim LowmanITD (Coordinating team)

Harry NicholosITD (Coordinating team)

Cheri RenningerETSS (Coordinating team)

Joshua GiraCNR

Rick ListonGraduateSchool

Sarah NoellITD (Coordinating team)

Don PattyTalleyStudentCenter

Adrian StrockNCSU Student Rep

Carole SaravitzPhytotron (CALS)

Hanya RedwanOIS

Second meeting of the Customer Service sub-committee. Meeting began with introductions of all members and three new members were introduced: Carole Saravitz from the Phytotron, Adrian Strock, student representative, and Angie Ballard from the NCSU Libraries – replaced Andrew Pace.

5/13/05: Gil Zuckerman from the College of Management has joined our committee as the faculty representative.

Started meeting by reviewing briefly meeting that Sarah Noell and Leslie Dare had with Nancy Whelchel in UPA (University Planning and Analysis). Nancy has suggested that we move forward with Open Forums (similar to focus groups) this summer. Nancy has offered to help train facilitators and give guidance with the open forums. She suggested we hold off on survey since time is so tight and see what type of information we get back from the open forums. Leslie Dare has offered to help coordinate these forums, so Sarah and Leslie will work with Nancy to come up with a plan and present back to this group.

Demonstrations

The main agenda item for this meeting was to showcase the calendar and email clients in use by the administrative and academic sides of campus. For the academic side, this was the Oracle (Brickyard) calendar and for email, two clients were demonstrated: Thunderbird and SquirrelMail (a web-based email client). On the administrative side, Groupwise was demonstrated for both calendar and email. Tim Lowman did the demonstrations of the academic applications and Cheri Renninger for the administrative side. Features that were demoed included:

Calendar

  • Show a typical day or week view for an individual user, including different views (day vs. week vs. month)
  • Show how to schedule a meeting with one other person
  • Show how to accept an invitation to a meeting
  • Show how to send email in Oracle re: a meeting vs. sending a direct email message from Groupwise.
  • Show how to delete / reschedule a meeting
  • Show how to schedule a group meeting
  • Show how to search for busy times and/or open times
  • Show how to set meeting reminders (pop-ups vs. email)
  • Show default access rights and how to change them
  • Ability for others to schedule calendar (proxy or designee rights)
  • Show how to schedule a resource
  • Show how to do a repeating event
  • Task lists and to do lists
  • Discuss syncing possibilities (PDAs and cell phones)
  • Discuss printing

Email:

  • Composition of email similar in both clients; ability to do simple customizations like font and size changes.
  • Show email compositions; ability to save as draft and returned to later.
  • Show how to add an attachment(s); multiple attachments are possible
  • Show folder layout and how to move messages to/from folders
  • Show status of sent email
  • Show address look-ups (LDAP and address books)
  • Personal address books
  • Show nickname files
  • Sorting mail: by sender, date, subject
  • Quotas on academic side vs. auto-expiration on admin side
  • Purchase more quota
  • Archive email messages
  • Notification of over-quota
  • Archiving messages
  • Accidental deletion of mail messages: how they can be retrieved.
  • User can proxy to another mailbox and/or “identity”
  • Attachment size

Viruses, Spam and Filtering options:

General overview of how the two sides handle viruses and spam.

Administrative side:

  • Discuss how messages are quarantined and how users can access files that shouldn’t have been quarantined.

Academic side:

  • Discuss PureMessage and how mail messages are tagged as spam and/or having a virus
  • Show how users can set filters to tag spam: marked for deletion, deleted, other options

Some excellent questions were asked by the meeting attendees; overall both sides now have a good overview of what products are in use and the main features and functions.

If you were unable to attend the meeting and would like to see a demonstration of a particular client or product, please let us know and we’ll arrange one for you.

Spreadsheet of email and calendar features and functions

A spreadsheet was distributed prior to the meeting with listed features and functions. Committee members were asked to review these features and functions and let us know if we were missing any and/or they had any questions about what we meant by a particular feature or function. Unfortunately, the demonstrations took most of the time, so we were unable to talk much about the spreadsheet. However, we have asked the group to send any comments back out to the list and we will address them. We have not heard from anyone, so we will move forward with those features on the spreadsheet.

Action item: sometime this week, we will place the spreadsheet on the web as a form so that input can be provided by you. The first part of the sheet will list features that are considered essential and will be in any client recommendations that move forward. Following the essential features will be those features that we would like the committee’s input on – we will setup the form so that you can easily mark features you use frequently and must have, features you use occasionally and features that are not applicable and/or with which you are not familiar.

Next meeting has not been scheduled; will look to schedule in early June. At that meeting we will review plan for open forums. We will also report on any activity from the Technical sub-committee.

Meeting adjourned.

- Sarah Noell