Tier 1 Group, 4/5/06

We had our second Tier 1 Group meeting this past Tuesday at Vector North. Curt G, Cindy W. and Lori O. were in attendance.

We went over the current findings of what is available to make server logins easier. While it was agreed that the solution of having Macs log into the AD domain was probably the best solution, a couple drawbacks were pointed out:

1) Mac users are not accustomed to logging in with personal username and password everytime they use the computer. Changing their logins at this late in the year will be quite disruptive to many users.

2) When they do login to their own personal account, they will no longer have access to their old desktop and documents folder, where alot of their stuff is currently saved. We need some easy way for users to copy their files out of the old staff desktop and documents folders and into their personal space on the file server before we take away access to these old folders.

These are both very important points and caused me to re-consider having people log in through AD at this time. So I revisited some of the techniques described earlier and decided perhaps we could tolerate requiring people to login with their username and password to get connected to the file servers, but it would be nice if they only had to do it once for all volumes, not having to log into each volume seperately.

That definitely sounded like something AppleScript could handle so over the past few days I have put together an AppleScript to do just that. You can download it here.
Go ahead and play with it, it is fairly self-explanatory. Any documentation will have to come later.

Since Cindy and Lori are on the documentation/training part of the project, we also discussed strategies for training. The thought was that probably a simple how-to sheet that can be posted to a web server would be good enough. That will be created once we all agree upon what the final product(s) will be.

It was also pointed out that Amy Kuklock is also in our PLC so we should be sure to share notes with here. She is responsible for posting items in the blackboard system, and will also be helping Lori and Cindy out with documentation and training when we get to that point.

Other items that were discussed included:

– Compared notes on how trackit training is going. Some of use are doing real quick overviews just to get people started. Some of us are waiting for the final bugs to get worked out of trackit before we do any in-depth training.

– Compared notes on installing "Rubric Maker" software. Anyone else out there dealing with this? If so we should get together sometime to share our experiences.

– Raised the concern that one reason some staff may be reluctant to enter trouble tickets is they are not sure how the information is being used. There may be some fear that the information may get used against them in a performance review: "We see that you requested help for Microsoft Word two weeks after we did a staff training — you need to pay better attention during training sessions!" or there may be some fear that reporting problems may result in their favorite tool being taken away: "We see that you submitted 50 trouble tickets for Widget X last year, so we decided that Widget X is too expensive to maintain and we are removing it from our district."

Any sense that there may be negative consequences for submitting trouble tickets will probably result in people submitting fewer trouble tickets, which does not do anyone any good. Perhaps we need some way to clarify for people what trouble ticket data is being used for.