ACCS2016

When discussing IT customer service improvement, focus is often on quantitative metrics like turn time and ticket management. We usually ignore that qualitative factor which will most improve customer satisfaction; rapport with our customers. The soft skills that put others at ease and give them a more positive interaction have traditionally been considered unteachable. The image of hopelessly awkward technorati has become ingrained in our culture and many lean into it, but this is a false paradigm. Soft skills, such as politeness and active listening, not only greatly improve customer interactions, but are also easily learned and mastered with just a bit of practice. Whether you work at a help line or in departmental support, these skills can improve customer experience time and again. In this session we will cover the five teachable soft skill concepts and ways you can immediately implement them in your own department.

Do you provide support and have to deal with upset/angry/frustrated customers? Do you manage employees who are burned out, don’t have a good attitude or need motivation? Do you need motivation to get out of bed and go to work instead of taking a “sick” day? Come learn and share ideas for dealing with the “Eeyores” in the work place.

Big data and cloud adoption have moved from experimental projects to mission-critical, enterprise-wide deployments providing new insights and innovations.  Intel and Dell will provide an overview of the changing landscape of education in this new world, with an overview of the latest technologies in data center, virtualization, server, storage, and security and more.

An overview of Dell's Client Portfolio with a focus on security, manageability, and reliability.

Cisco to provide an update on collaboration solutions for higher education to Cisco Product Strategy for HTML5 / WebRTC, voice, video and cloud.
Update on classroom technologies.

Interactive! Find high-tech grant funding in Higher-Ed:
Top Higher Education Grants for IT – Learn-by-Doing Interactive Workshop (Bring Your Own Device!)
Learning Objectives:
• Learn about the 2016 Trends in Government-Funded Educational IT Grants - Interactivity: visit free sites where can find these grants for yourselves!
• Learn about the top pitfalls to avoid in constructing your Educational IT grant - Interactivity: hear first hand from a Federal Grant Review Panel Chair, and get your questions about federal grant review and scoring answered.
• Hear a summary of the Top Educational Grants in IT – what they fund, when they are due, and who can apply. Interactivity: Visit the links for these sites on your own device, as they are presented to you.
• Learn briefly about the ePlus Grant Sponsorship program, and how to have your IT grant written for free, at no cost or obligation to you. Interactivity: Email the team at Team-Grants@ePlus.com for more information.

After the resounding enthusiasm for last year's Trials & Tribulations, let's do it again this year! This Birds of a Feather is an opportunity for mid-level IT managers to discuss the struggles they face and solutions they utilize. The BoF will discuss two broad topics: intra-team dynamics & leadership - how to achieve goals and maintain morale with limited resources within your team; and inter-team communication - how to achieve consensus with other IT areas, specifically the ubiquitous, "Central IT." All IT Managers (distributed and central) are encouraged to come with ideas, concerns and solutions. For those returning from last year, let's also discuss what we've faced/achieved since we last met.

Many colleges and universities have help desk positions staffed by students. It can be challenging, on several fronts. How do you hire, and retain, the right people? What kind of training is best? Can you prevent the ‘use it or lose it’ phenomenon? How do you evaluate their successes and grow from opportunities for improvement? This presentation will answer these questions in telling the story of Longwood University’s instructional technology “help desk”. Separate and distinct from the University’s information technology Help Desk, the Instructional Technology Collaborators are the student staff members within the Digital Education Collaborative. The ITCs are active participants in providing the support and structure behind the University’s commitment to teaching and learning excellence through the effective application of instructional technology. Members in the campus community routinely praise the ITCs for their professionalism and effectiveness. We’ll share the strategies we employ to earn this praise and answer the questions above.

For years we used a Citrix solution to provide students access to a virtual lab, it worked ok but had its own issues. For one, our students found it difficult to get connected. Second, it was expensive! Along comes Windows Server 2012 R2 and the new Remote Desktop Services (RDS) roles. This is not your father’s terminal server by any means. With RDS Bridgewater College was able to save a significant amount of money per year in licensing fees, provide a virtual lab environment that is much easier and faster for students and provide facilities for faculty and staff to work from home using by connecting to a secure managed environment.

With RDS we can provide just the applications that our students and employees need. With RDS RemoteApp users can use published applications just like the program was installed locally on their own devices. Should the users need a full desktop they can connect to a traditional terminal server environment or should they have specific needs they can connect to a private virtual desktop. These solutions since they are running in our datacenter provide users with local and domain resources from anywhere. All through one easy to use web portal.

The Canvas API allows users virtual “keys to the kingdom,” allowing them to create tools that can streamline workflows, provide additional analytics, and generally make life easier for most support staff. This presentation will discuss some of the custom tools created by Longwood University’s DEC staff that interact with the Canvas API. We will look at the technologies that we used to create these tools as well as the impact they have had on the ways that the DEC provides support and training for students, faculty, and staff. This presentation is appropriate for LMS administrators, faculty development personnel, and developers working in educational environments.

The Virginia Commonwealth University’s helpIT Center Walk-up Front Counter services a population of about 31,000 students and 2,000 full-time faculty. We all know how demanding working at a University’s IT front counter can be and as the technology has evolved over the last decade so have the demands of the Customer changed. VCU has initiated a Consultation Support Program (by appointment only) through which students, faculty, and staff can request a FREE one-on-one consultation with an IT support analyst to seek guidance in computer maintenance best practices, virus & malware remediation, software installation and troubleshooting, operating system download, and WiFi connectivity issues. During this presentation we will share with you our growing pains. Reveal the hurdles we had to overcome and the collaboration efforts between our group, VCU’s technology store (RAMTECH), and the student IT department (RESNET). We will have a short Q&A at the end of the presentation to learn from others who may have successfully executed a similar program on their campus or are in beta.

In preparation for the UCI Bike Race coming through Richmond the last week in September 2015, the helpIT Center management worked with our Telecommunications group to configure an ACD application that would allow our staff to take ACD calls remotely. Our objective was to provide quality service desk support in a seamless manner to the VCU community while working off campus. We will share the steps taken to “gear up” and go live.