The faculty hiring process at many universities is arduous for both the candidates and the search committee members. At Rice University, the decentralized nature of faculty recruitment processes, the relatively small number of faculty hires each year, and constantly changing committee membership has historically left each department to design their own search committee process.

Dr. George Phillips, the Ralph and Dorothy Looney Professor in BioSciences, has served on many search committees during his tenure at Rice and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Last year, when I was the chair of the committee, we manually organized and reviewed 400 applications that arrived by mail and email. We used OWL-Space to organize the files manually, led by staff members Monica Roberts and Susan Merz, and helped by  a cadre of undergraduate student workers to shuffle all those files around and manage the ranked lists.  I knew it was [a waste of time and resources], but we couldn’t change anything at the time. This year, I started searching for solutions early.” After talking with various groups around the campus, Phillips heard about the OnBase workflows.

“I met Eddie Heard and Brian Cole and we talked about what their system could do and our requirements; it seemed like a good fit. But our search committee was encouraged to wait for the university’s new faculty hiring system instead of jumping into an interim solution. It is a good thing we didn’t wait, because the new system was not ready for us to use in the fall.”

Phillips said the committee was pleased with the OnBase team’s responsive and helpful attitudes as the committee “kicked the tires” in the new process before sending the link out with job opening announcements. The BioSciences search committee processed 450 applications this year in much less time than the 400 applications they reviewed in 2013. OnBase auto-assembled all the application documents and references into a single PDF packet for each candidate. “The system worked really well for us, and we estimate the time the department spent on handling the CV’s and data organization administrative time went from 1750 hours last year –when we did it using OWL-Space and organizing things manually– to about 80 hours managing the docs and handling exceptions this year. This was a huge savings of department staff time and hassle.”

VPAA Liaison for Rice Faculty Search Committees Seeking Paperless Solution

As more Rice faculty search committees move away from paper-based processes, a need has arisen for paperless systems.  Assistant Vice Provost  Celeste Boudreaux said the Office of the Vice Provost for Academic Affairs became aware of committee members’ need for a central liaison.  “Our office is evolving to meet the needs of the faculty,” said Boudreaux. “The relatively small number of Tenure/Tenure Track (TTT) and Non-Tenure Track (NTT) faculty hires makes it relatively easy for us to help departments determine how they want to conduct their search, how to find a system that can do what they want, and even how to make a specific system do what they want – as far as it possibly can.”

Unlike staff hires, faculty applicants often submit reference information with their application documents, and references are collected by the committee before the application review begins. In addition, each person on the search committee usually needs access to PDFs, although some departments still use paper. “Instead of a group of people sitting around a conference table for hours as they pore over identical binders of applications, the current committee members can choose to review electronic application documents in different time zones and locations,” explained Boudreaux. “This fall, the search committees for about five faculty positions began the selection process using OnBase as an interim solution for TTT positions. We are working with Human Resources (HR) to finalize the new Rice Faculty Hiring System that will be rolled out in March 2015.”

The Rice Faculty Hiring System will include a comprehensive process for committee members to use, from the job posting through the hiring process, and a feature to auto-populate fields on the candidate’s application using the Vitae dossier service.  It will also serve as the online hiring proposal and approval system. Boudreaux is enthusiastic about the benefits of the new system. “None of these options are currently available in OnBase or collaboration software used by some faculty search committees.” However, the new faculty hiring system will only manage TTT selections at first, so search committees that review applications for postdocs and NTT faculty positions may still find the OnBase workflow to be helpful.

The first two departments turning to OnBase as a solution for the paper-based process were Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) and Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE). These departments were familiar with OnBase as a business solution for document imaging. “They approached us about using OnBase as a place to collect documents,” said Eddie Heard. IT’s Imaging Applications Manager. “We worked with Web Services to create a web page for candidates to apply and submit their documents and reference information. Then selection committee members can login to review the applications. That was Phase One. In Phase Two, we added workflows for Architecture, Bioengineering, Biosciences, and Electrical and Computer Engineering. There is a feature to automatically send notifications to a reference’s email address, including a link for them to upload their letters of recommendation. Some of the departments wanted to see reviewer comments and a ranking, so we built a cover sheet that aggregates the rankings and displays the comments. After the initial reviews are completed, selection committee members can begin filtering applications by their average score and focus only on the applications that are rising to the top of the rankings.”

Will there be a Phase Three? “We are open to suggestions by the departments and the VPAA,” said Heard. “For example, we could also build an auto-create feature for Celeste to use each time a department contacts the VPAA about hiring a new NTT faculty position. Since we already know what works, it is easy to duplicate the features and space as soon as she hits the button.”

Riding on a MegaBus from Houston to Dallas, we had just passed Huntsville when the wireless network slowed to a crawl. The miles rippled by as we traveled down the highway at the maximum legal speed, but web pages and email seemed to amble aimlessly, taking several minutes to load. The Megabus service agreement for accessing their wifi already warned us that all streaming services (Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, etc.) are blocked, that the network is a public, unsecured network, and that it is only available “as is.” But the price of a bus ticket is less than a half-tank of gas, and each passenger has an electrical outlet and wireless access, so it is still a pretty good deal.

The slow loading pages made me remember the “old days” in Allen Center around Y2K (2000). At the beginning of a business day, my Rice co-workers and I would login to our wired network computers that were about the size of today’s rolling suitcases. Then we would go make our first pot of coffee for the day while the operating system and default programs like email and our home web pages loaded. By the time we returned to our desks, our computers were awake and ready to begin work. Web pages still took several minutes to open if they included a picture or a lot of content, and email messages to the boss did not necessarily arrive faster than we could walk down the hallway to his or her office.

Almost 15 years later, I am working on a laptop computer that weighs less than a ream of paper while traveling down the highway on a vehicle that allows me to charge my computer and my iPhone and use both of them on a wireless network that works a little slower than the Tier One research network speeds I’ve become accustomed to at Rice. Looking back on the life-changing network and infrastructure disruptions which were eventually accepted as “improvements” by most of the Rice faculty, staff and students over the last decade and a half makes me wonder what the next 15 years of the digital age will bring to the campus — and whether I will be demanding or rejecting the next upheavals that are sure to be part of the coming changes. Either way, it will be an interesting ride. Listen. Isn’t that the driver calling, “All aboard?”

About the author: Carlyn Chatfield began working in the financial aid office at Rice University in April 1999 and now manages communications for the IT division.

In October 2014, IT issued a recommendation not to upgrade to Mac operating system (OS) Yosemite, OS X v10.10. Faculty and students alike inquired why they should continue using Mavericks, instead of upgrading to the newest operating system.

IT Support Specialist, Bill Klemm, stated, “When a new Mac OS is released, Mac experts in IT volunteer to explore the exact release every Mac user will actually experience if they upgrade.”  The IT systems specialists document their findings as they can, squeezing in time to research the new OS between their more demanding day to day job requirements.

Klemm explained, “Thorough testing of a new OS is time-consuming, so IT typically recommends not upgrading to a new OS until several months after the public release. The reasons for postponing are based on an absence of control over the environment.  If a customer upgrades to a new OS and a web tool like Esther or OWL-Space does not work well in say, Safari, the customer reports a problem with the Rice web application when in fact, the application is working, but is not necessarily compatible with this new OS.”

How can Rice IT resolve this issue? “We can’t.” Klemm replied. “That’s between the software developer and Apple. We have to wait for them to duke it out with patches. Almost all of the potential problems with Yosemite or any other operating system are out of our control.”

“If you want to update your own computer as an early adopter, please do. Feel free to report any oddities, bugs, or incompatibilities on the wiki article comments.”

https://docs.rice.edu/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=46901280

“However, we recommend that Rice faculty and staff not upgrade simply for the sake of upgrading — because the update may break older software, on which they depend to complete their work. The upgrade to Yosemite might be free, but the update for older versions of software, such as Finale 2012 and Mathematica, to make them compatible with the new OS, can be rather expensive.”

IT recommends holding off until a follow-up .1 patch is released. This gives all the developers time to play catch-up.  If you choose to upgrade, we suggest you back up your computer first, and make sure all of your key applications are compatible with Yosemite.

In 1959, Rice’s first computer adhered to no campus-wide standards, but one of the main purposes of the Rice Institute Computer was to “provide a platform on which members of the Rice community could do research that would have been impossibly time-consuming without access to a computer.”

Fifty-five years later, desktops, laptops and mobile devices provide the platforms on which members of the Rice community perform research as well as daily tasks –all impossibly time-consuming without access to a computer. In those five decades, standardization has become common, affecting everything from chips and operating systems to touch screen interfaces and web site designs.

At Rice, the most recent standard applies to the purchase of desktop and laptop computers in offices, labs and classrooms across the campus.  Research-specific computers are exempt from the Campus Laptop/Desktop Standards (PDF), which was distributed by the Office of the President on September, 15, 2014.

A result of two years of study by the Information Technology Advisory Committee and various working groups, the new standards introduce economies of scale for both procurement and support. Economies of scale became critical as IT infrastructure investments increased.  Rice is not alone in grappling with rising IT costs; many of Rice’s peer institutions have already standardized desktop and laptop purchases and support.  In fact, EDUCAUSE surveys of IT leaders showed that “strategically funding IT” was the number one issue facing IT for six of the last 10 years.  Not until 2012 would IT funding concerns drop to the bottom half of the top 10 IT issues faced by higher education institutions.

Links to more details on the new procurement standards, and to start the computer purchasing process:

• Frequently Asked Questions –FAQs– on the Procurement web site: https://procurement.rice.edu/content.aspx?id=2147484169
• Begin the computer purchaing process: http://purchasing.rice.edu/computers/

Note: These links are only available to Rice community members on the Rice University network.

Blogs are popular web site solutions for faculty instructors and researchers, departments and student organizations in need of an intuitive content management system.  Rice University implemented a local version of WordPress called blogs.rice.edu in 2009.  Information Technology began looking for alternative blogging solutions in 2013.  CampusPress is the higher education blogging solution from WordPress.com and is hosted in the cloud by Edublogs. After researching EduBlogs’ CampusPress tools in the fall of 2013, the  Jones School adopted the system in spring 2014 and  IT will launch CampusPress this fall.

After three months of testing, IT announced on April 16 that a new webmail.rice.edu interface would be available on April 22.  The ALLDEPTS announcement described several new features, including access from mobile devices and dragging to move messages to other folders.

“Each year in the IT Annual Report, customers complained about the old webmail system,” explained Ken Marshall, IT Manager for Middleware Development and Integration. “But there were always higher priorities, like getting the Eduroam network up and running. But last fall, we were forced to upgrade the webmail system to keep it running.” That was when Brian Woods, an IT System Administrator II on Marshall’s team, realized the most recent release of the application included a mobile interface. “Brian began working on a test site right away because we realized that the latest upgrade for the customer interface would solve many of the requests we’ve gotten through the years.”

If you prefer the look and feel of the old webmail service, go to https://webmail-legacy.rice.edu.

Scenario:  You sit down to work and need to watch a Lynda.com video to refresh skills before tackling a big project.  You can’t open the video because you get an error message that your web browser needs an upgrade to see the video.  But, you don’t know the administrator password that is required to update the web browser.  Help Desk!

While waiting for the Help Desk to respond to an email about updating Chrome on one of the student iMacs in our office, we turned to other tasks.  All the student and staff members of the team were busy working on individual projects and no one noticed the Help Desk had already responded and fixed the computer.  Everyone had been working in the office.  No one from the Help Desk came by.  When and how did the magic happen?

What may seem like a minor miracle is simply a tool used by IT support staff when customers need quick fixes –like installing the latest release of an existing application. Bill Klemm, one of IT’s most senior divisional representatives (Support Specialist III), describes his behind-the-scenes magic, “We use Apple Remote Desktop or ARD to manage computers.  I can run unix commands or copy files to the computer.”

IT staff who support Windows computers can use a similar tool, Symantec’s desktop Management Agent (sometimes referred to by its working title, Altiris).  “ARD and Altiris make it easy for us to manage labs and student-use computers without having to be present –we can be in two places at once,” said Klemm. What’s more, these tools can be used on multiple computers at once.  “I used the Apple Remote Desktop tool to run [a script] on all the Macs I manage at once — about 100.  BOOM!  Done. Saves me lots of time and shoe leather.  Also helps people get ‘instant gratification’ for their requests.  Cool, eh?”

ARD is a handy tool for Klemm and other Mac support staff.  “I have it on all of the Shepherd School Macs.  I can get hardware reports, run Unix commands, run updates, realign system settings, run repairs, remote control, etc.  So customers get quick help and I can even run preventative maintenance if I see trouble in the reports – solving problems before they happen.  I get so much more done by not having to run all over the place!  Charles Wright, [another senior IT Support Specialist III] uses ARD and similar tools to manage Mac labs in other schools.  Tools like ARD for Macs and Symantec  for Windows help IT staff work smarter, plus the tools close the gap in time between the requests for assistance and delivery of support.”

Marty Merritt, Facilities Manager at the Shepherd School of Music

Marty Merritt, Facilities Manager for the Shepherd School of Music, agrees.”We’ve been very happy with ARD support. The best thing about it is that it allows Bill to respond very quickly and it minimizes distractions and potential noise during lessons and rehearsals. Installations and troubleshooting can be managed without having to have the professor or staff member any more involved than they need to be.”

Music professors’ offices double as their teaching space and private lessons are booked back to back throughout the day.  A music professor can call or email the Help Desk before lessons begin or during a brief break in lessons and Klemm can apply the necessary updates without ever knocking on the office door.  “It’s been tremendously helpful at the Shepherd School and I don’t know of any disadvantages,” concluded Merritt.

To learn more about remote support tools like ARD or Altiris installed on your Rice-owned computer, contact the Help Desk: helpdesk@rice.edu or 713.348.4357.

When is the last time you updated your website content or photos? From your Facebook page to your department website, change is challenging.  So when the Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (GPS) looked at their five-year old website and determined it needed a make-over, they called in the local experts: Public Affairs and IT’s Web Services.  “Public Affairs came up with a really great design,” enthused Kate Cross, Assistant Dean for GPS.  “The responsive design works on mobile devices – just change the size of your web browser to see how it flows to fit the size of the screen.  They had so many great ideas–most of the features you see came from them.”

Michelle Buchanan, the Graduate Studies Coordinator, is the heavy hitter when it comes to content management in GPS.  By pulling existing content from the old website and searching Public Affairs Flickr site for professional images, Michelle was able to easily build out the new web pages.  “I arrived at Rice and Arnaud Chevallier [Associate Vice Provost for Academic Affairs and Graduate Studies] had dreamed up a new website because the old one was not geared at all towards applicants,” recalled Buchanan.  The look was dated, compared to peer graduate school’s websites, and it had big blocks of text on every page.  “The 1-2-3 idea was one of our favorite aspects of the Jones School’s website,” said Buchanan.  “We have a single application process, but every program has a slightly different application aspect and its own juries.  So we took our notes, our peer research and our requirements for the application process to Public Affairs where Sean Rieger, Rachel Foster and Jennifer Ongoco listened to us and looked at the designs we liked, and got to work.”

Michelle Buchanan (right), GPS Coordinator, worked with Michael Harrison (left) of Web Services to update their department’s website.

When the designs were complete, Public Affairs built out the pages in HTML using responsive design elements, and handed off a file for GPS to present to a web developer to build out the full site. “We’ve worked with Web Services on several other projects – including the GradAdmit application system and the Hooding registration site – and have a good relationship with the team,” Cross explained. “We briefly thought about using someone else [to build out the site], but came back to Web Services because at the end of the day, it’s really nice to have someone next door.”

Once a proposal with Web Services was negotiated, Michael Harrison was the liaison between customer and the outsource agency who built out the website.  “When the outsource company was finished, Michael helped me fix the little things they missed,” said Buchanan.

In 2013, the networking team began working on a complex set of requirements necessary to upgrade the nine-year old Rice network.  Demands on the network are two fold: quantity and capacity.  Every Rice faculty, staff, student and visitor now connects multiple personal and Rice-owned devices to the network.  Each device (computer, phone, pad, tablet, and other types of computing equipment)  processes much more data much more quickly than the computers and servers that connected to the Rice network in 2004.

Although the new network will not require re-cabling the campus, it will require changing the equipment and components attached to the network fiber. In order to meet an unexpected deadline for submitting requests for proposals, a physical inventory was required for the 300+ networking closets all across campus and in the outlying facilities.  In just one week, a team of Data Center Operations staff completed this physical inventory, visiting and surveying up to 60 closets per day.  Photographs and manual entries regarding the number of ports and switches each closet could manage were added to a database and linked to other information such as which departments and offices would be served through connections in each closet.  Two of the operations staff, Edwin Martinez and Zach Pruitt, were responsible for the physical inventory. Back in the Data Center Operations Room, Christopher Ramirez transferred the photos and manually collected data into a database each night. Every morning, Sandy Rehm linked the new data to existing information about the connections as Martinez and Pruitt headed out to take inventory of more closets.

The networking and data center operations teams collaborated closely, to ensure that the appropriate data was collected and an accurate request for proposal could be distributed to vendors for quotes.

Rice faculty, staff and students can store electronic files in several solutions inside Rice’s physical footprint or outside Rice, in the cloud. The most frequently over-looked space is individual user space with each person’s NetID, called simply “storage.rice.edu.” Undergraduate students get 2GB and faculty, staff and graduate students get 5GB of storage space that can be mapped to a computer as a separate drive.

Each faculty, staff and student gets 30GB of Google Drive space, also associated with their NetID. Undergraduate students manager their email through Rice Gmail, which consumes part of their 30Gb of storage space. Data and files stored in Rice Google Drive spaces are saved off-campus and possibly out of the United States, so Google Drive is not an appropriate location for sensitive and confidential university data.

For additional storage solutions, see the attached PowerPoint slides.

Contact the IT Help Desk at 713.348.4357 or helpdesk@ to discuss specific storage needs for departments and research groups.