Nebula TipsOther ResourcesExchange in Nebula (MSCA Initiative) About Nebula |
Nebula Home PageWhat's New in NebulaNebula Brown Bag lunch October 23, 2008About 75 clients attended the Fall Nebula Brown Bag in the UW Tower's Auditorium last month. In addition to Nebula Support staff, there were representatives from the Chief Information Security Officer's office, to answer questions about this fall's virus incident. Slides from the CISO presentation are available . UW Technology Town Hall site October 22, 2008UW Technology has held several Town Hall forums to gather input from the campus. You can find more info on the Sharepoint site. This site includes summaries of the Town Hall sessions and various documents, including the final UW Technology Working Group Report to President Emmert. New class dates for Office, Outlook October 8, 2008There are new dates available for all classes: With regards to the Introductory classes, if you would like to reserve the 12-student classroom for your staff, please let us know which time period(s) work for your staff. The instructors for these Introductory classes can teach either curriculum during the scheduled time period, and the cost is included in your Nebula fees. The Advanced Calendaring class has a $30 per-person class fee; there are also options to have custom classes for your staff. Send email to nebula@u.washington.edu with your class choices or to request more information. New way to install software September 30, 2008Nebula is moving to a new method of delivering software, called Systems Management Server, or SMS. This method allows greater control of package delivery and better reporting. For software delivered via SMS, you will use the SMS method. Please let us know if you have any questions about this instructions page, or using the new method. Update on Virus Infection Incident September 30, 2008The UW Technology Services Response Center is the focal point for information about UW Technology Services incident response efforts. To date, over 1140 systems have been rebuilt. There are copies of messages sent to our clients, a Frequently Asked Questions list, and computer security information for managers. If you have questions, please email us at nebula@u.washington.edu. Email to Fax Gateway Service September 10, 2008The Nebula "fax-from-desktop" service is no longer available. Why end the service? A recent survey of our clients revealed that only a small portion of them use this service. The Nebula fax service was crafted some years ago, when there were few, if any, commercial options. The service currently runs on old hardware and doesn't have any of the newest functions. What will replace it? Many good commercial options for faxing from the desktop are now available, with differing levels of service and cost. Some client departments may need just basic faxing from the desktop; others may wish to also receive faxes, send encrypted faxes, and receive fax notifications via email. Each department will be able to choose the vendor and service plan that is appropriate for its needs. Recent reviews are at:
Both sites also give you lists of questions to consider when choosing a service. Contact any provider to get more information about their service. Top-rated providers include Send2Fax and MyFax. You can find more vendors by using any Internet search engine, such as www.google.com, to look for "internet faxing". Office 2007 deployment August 14, 2008Office 2007 is ready for deployment to all Nebula Gold desktops. We are discussing deployment options with the managers of various Nebula client departments along with what training options will be most appropriate. Our plan is to have it installed on Nebula Gold workstations by the end of the summer. Please see our page, Office 2007 Available Now, for more information. Once your department has a conversion date to move to Office 2007, you may wish to take advantage of our free, 2-hour classes to introduce you to the new features of Office 2007, and Outlook 2007. Once your department has a conversion date to move to Exchange, you may wish to take advantage of 3-hour classes available in advanced calendaring using Outlook 2007. These classes are listed on Classes for Microsoft Office 2007, along with their class outline and links to available dates, location and attendance policies. If you have questions, please contact your department manager or email nebula@u.washington.edu. UW Exchange July 3, 2008UW Exchange provides customers with an integrated email, calendar, task and contact management solution based on Microsoft Exchange 2007. Nebula is working with the Finance and Facilities organization to convert their offices to using UW Exchange. Detailed information about the service is available at: http://www.washington.edu/computing/uwexchange Clients who have been converted to Exchange can use a web client when away from their desktops, called Outlook Web Access. Laptops in Nebula March 18, 2008Nebula is working to improve our laptop computer services. Because these mobile computers are used in a variety of ways and situations, we'd like to hear from you about your use of a laptop computer in Nebula, now or in the past. We've created a laptop service survey at: Nebula Laptop User Survey Feel free to forward this link on to others. Your responses will be most useful if received by March 31. Thank you. Using Music Playing Software in NebulaNebula clients are able to install software on their computers, and save work-related files to the file servers. Software that plays music CD's through a computer's speakers has become very popular. However, this software typically tries to save the music files to the My Music folder. In Nebula, the My Music folder is redirected to H:\My Music on the file servers. This has resulted in many gigabytes of non-work related music files being saved inadvertently to the file servers. Consequently, Nebula restricted access to the My Music folder and, each night, any content in the H:\My Music folder is deleted. Any music player you install should be configured to rip, or save, music to a location on your C: drive. Files saved to the H:\My Music folder will be deleted. A special exception was made for iTunes, which will not install correctly unless it has write-access to the My Music folder. Nebula allows iTunes temporary access to the H:\My Music folder, and then restricts it again. If you choose to install iTunes, do not load any music until iTunes has been configured to save to your C: drive. Instructions for configuring two popular music players are given below. Unless you are required to save music files for work, Nebula cannot provide any support for these products beyond these instructions, and compliance with any legal requirements the client's responsibility.
Please notify Nebula of staffing changesPlease be sure to notify your Nebula Support person of any staffing changes, such as folks leaving the department, whether permanently or via extended leaves of any kind. This can help us more accurately manage user accounts and email lists. Thank you! |
