Supporting Your Installation

1
Supporting Your Installation

• Kevin Corcoran
• Sr. Director, Technical Services
• Connecticut Distance Learning Consortium
• NERCOMP Workshop WebCT User Group
• December 6th

2
Our Organization

• Hosting 25 institutions 80,000 users
• WebCT CE Vista
• Blackboard
• WebMentor
• Development
• ePortfolio.org 15 institutions 5,500
• eTutoring.org 17 institutions - 6,000
• Power Links Building Blocks for LMS
• Support
• Call Center
• Ticketing System
• Help Desk Portal Website

3
Critical Elements

• Support Team
• Implementation Planning
• Training
• Help Desk
• Testing Change Control
• Community Involvement

4
Build Your Support Team

• Identify your key members
• Application Administrator
• Network Administrator
• Help Desk Manager
• If Vista/CE 6, add
• Project Manager
• Database Administrator
• Java Developer

5
Meet Regularly

• Support Team
• Review performance and trends
• Review support calls
• Plan fixes, enhancements, and patches
• Functional Team
• Meet with faculty, students, academic leaders
• Discuss current issues and policy decisions
• Define expectations communication channels

6
Implement Monitoring

• Long Term vs. Real Time
• Trend analysis
• Web Trends
• Cricket
• Real time monitoring
• Nagios
• Whats Up Gold
• Microsoft Operations Manager
• Health Monitor
• Define escalation path on-call plan
• Thresholds
• Contacts

7
Training

• Make sure staff knows the product
• Send staff to training for o/s, db, etc
• Incorporate the product into every day usage
• Chat
• Document sharing
• Discussion boards

8
Call Center

• Post hours
• Maintain support specific website
• Develop tutorials and training documents
• Use tracking system for requests
• Have email distribution lists for emergency
  notifications
• Have email templates in place for common responses

9
Testing Change Control

• Implement a test environment
• Establish change control review
• Test all patches hot fixes and config changes
  first
• Develop post patch functionality testing

10
Join User Community

• WebCT sponsored User Groups
• http//www.webct.com/vistausergroup
• Source Forge sponsored Admin Group
• https//lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/webct
  -admin
• Regionally created User Groups
• Another location may be experiencing the same
  problem that WebCT has not been notified about.

11
Question Support

• Ask how they resolved a case
• Ask how you can do it next time to expedite
  resolution
• Ask how you can prevent it from happening
• Ask if it is a bug or configuration issue
• Review the suggested resolution for conflicts
  with any modifications or additions to your system

12
Questions

• Contact Information
• Kevin Corcoran
• kcorcoran_at_ctdlc.org
• 860-832-3889
• http//www.ctdlc.org