Update to MyIT portal published–please verify department contact and provide active users for your department

May 7, 2015

The MyIT portal has been updated.

 

What and When:

This morning, several changes to the MyIT portal were published.

 

The changes included are:

  • Nebula Departments page – new. You’ll find this under the left-nav bar, under ‘IT Things I Own/Manage’.
  • Department Detail page – new. You’ll find this under the left-nav bar, under ‘IT Things I Own/Manage’, under ‘Nebula Departments’, when you click on a department listed.
  • Group Sync Info page – new. You’ll find this under the left-nav bar
  • ‘Export to csv’ capability sprinkled across more pages.

 

What you need to do:

We have a variety of things we are asking those that consider themselves a contact for a Nebula department to do.

 

  1. Help us get the Nebula contacts in order. Go to https://support.nebula.washington.edu/myIT/myNebulaDepartments.aspx and review what departments are listed. Our contact information is in a sad state of affairs, and we need your help to get it updated. There is more info below which may be useful.
  2. Provide a list of active eligible Nebula users for your department. These are users that your department is willing to pay for the associated costs, and for which you would like their access to Nebula resources to continue. Create a group in the Groups Service (https://groups.uw.edu) which has all of these users as members. Then add it to your department via the myDepartmentDetail page noted above (e.g. https://support.nebula.washington.edu/myIT/myDepartmentDetail.aspx?department=pottery if your department was pottery).

 

We’ll be sending a separate email to anyone currently listed as a contact, to ensure that all who might need to hear about this get the message.

 

More info:

 

General Questions/issues you may have

  • “I don’t know why you think I’m a contact for a Nebula department, please remove me.” We’d ask you to provide a better contact, if you are able. Maybe your manager knows? If not, you can remove yourself or ask us to.
  • “Our department hasn’t had that name for several years, can you rename it?” Absolutely. Just send us a request via help@uw.edu.
  • “We’ve had reorganizations and this Nebula department is now spread across several department you don’t know about.” We can help with that. Just send us a request via help@uw.edu.

 

Department Contact Info

The state of the Nebula department contact information is not good. We worked hard at populating some best-guess contacts for Nebula departments which had none recorded–relying on service team experience and some data analysis, but I am certain that much of our contact information is faulty. Having valid information about the contacts for your department is important so we can provide you the services you need. We really appreciate your time helping us help you. J

 

Here’s a reference for choosing which individual fills the following roles for your Nebula department:

  • Billing contact: this is the person who gets bills for this department. They may need to access MyIT for billing data.
  • Owner contact: this is the person who makes decisions for this department. They may need to access MyIT for a variety of data.
  • Tech contact: this is the person who provides local IT support for this department. They may need to access MyIT for IT management data.
  • Tech contact alternate: this is a backup for the tech contact.

 

Department User Info

Similarly, the state of our information about Nebula department users is not good. But don’t take my word for it—see https://support.nebula.washington.edu/myIT/myNebulaUsers.aspx, which lists all the users we think are “active” for your department. I think you’ll agree that we need some help getting that cleaned up. That’s why we’re asking you to provide and maintain a group of users associated with your Nebula department that are eligible for Nebula services. We’ll use what you provide to clean up, and looking ahead to FY16 only charge your department for the users who you tell us are active and eligible. In the future, you’ll maintain that group to remove Nebula services for that user at the time you choose or to add additional users.

 

We suggest that the group name (the group id) end with _nebula_eligibleusers, e.g. uw_pottery_nebula_eligibleusers might be all the Nebula eligible users from the pottery department. If you need help using the Groups Service, help@uw.edu can assist, or you can read the documentation noted at https://groups.uw.edu.

 

One tip to consider with regard to maintaining that group: if all your eligible users should be employees, you can use a dependency group of “uw_employee”. If you do this, when a member of your group drops out of the uw_employee group, they will automatically be removed from membership in your group. The uw_employee group is automatically maintained based on university data around employment, with members removed at the 2nd pay period after their termination date.