ms-exchange | Thomas' Work Space

Logging learning center attendance using MS-Exchange Calendars

2014/08/27 plagwitz Leave a comment

Over the years, I had to find a number of solutions for monitoring student attendance in the learning center, by repurposing existing infrastructure (there are dedicated solutions which, however, are often too costly for a departmental center, or not shared well). Here is another idea:
We’ve used the existing campus-wide MS-Exchange infrastructure’s resource mailboxes for room booking and equipment circulation.
We have creatively repurposed this infrastructure for managing the staffing of “offices” (center help desk and tutors). Here we needed to allow conflicts:
1. multiple students staff the help desk.
2. 1 tutor staffs the “office”- 1 additional student can book the tutor.
3. Additionally, we set up a time clock system, based on an Excel Macro, to prevent cheating:
  1. Only the person logging in can sign up to the resource;
  2. while only the help desk can provide the time clock value.
It looks like that a similar setup could be extended to support the common requirement that students, while taking a certain course, spend a certain amount of time per week working in the learning center:
1. which has been traditionally handled using paper-based sign-in-sheets or, at best, spreadsheets.
2. With digital input, the data could be basis for analytics and visualizations, taking advantage of existing tools like MS-Calendaranalytics.
3. Such a system would, however, require creation of resource calendar per course section that need to monitor learning center attendance. However, this needs to be done only once and would be reusable, since data can be filtered by input time, as long as no entirely new courses/sections come online.
But hasn’t mandatory weekly learning center attendance been made obsolete by ubiquitous computing and the web?
1. Definitely in some of its more antiquated forms: I have worked at institutions where the computer-savvy students attended the learning center once at the beginning of the term to copy all the learning materials on the network share onto a thumb drive, and I would not want to force somebody to come to the learning center continuously for such a trivial purpose as accessing files on a not-web-accessible network share.
2. However, there seems to be a lot of unmined pedagogical value in learning center group work and blended instruction (under tutor supervision), like in a homework emporium (provided your program is big enough to have continuous tutor support and sufficient learner overlap).

Categories: audience-is-teachers, e-learning, Metrics Tags: calendaring, emporium, live@edu, ms-calendaranalytics, ms-exchange, office365, outlook-live, resources, student-attendance

Protected: LRC calendars requirements and configuration management

2014/07/15 plagwitz Enter your password to view comments.

Categories: e-infrastructure, service-is-documenting, service-is-project-managing, Spreadsheets Tags: calendaring, configuration-management, live@edu, ms-exchange, office365, outlook, outlook-live, renaming, requirements-management, resources, scheduling

Web browser popup blocker exceptions need configuring

2014/04/09 plagwitz Leave a comment

Which computers
1. This I found on the Reception desk
2. but isn’t that then also wrong on all student pcs which have the same base image?
Which exceptions missing: I noticed immediately:
1. outlook.com
2. www.uncc.edu should read uncc.edu
Which browsers
1. Example is IE9,
2. But are others different?

Categories: Glitches&Errors, Reception-desk, service-is-configuring-learning-tools, service-is-library, service-is-testing-troubleshooting-debugging, Student-Computers, web-browsers Tags: calendaring, ms-exchange, office365, outlook, popup-blocker

Student email in Office365/Outlook.com slow on reception desk computers

2014/04/09 plagwitz Leave a comment

Problem: Since last week (or so; interestingly, only individual users seem to have been affected at first), we seem to experiencing regular (but not consistent) issues with meeting requests mostly
1. slowness
2. browser-specific behavior
  1. internet explorer 9: crashes
  2. chrome: crashes
  3. Firefox: (sometimes just seems to hang, with some coercion can bring up an “unresponsive script” warning dialogue that a script is hanging:
Workaround:
1. Best so far: if you see the Firefox warning dialogue, check “do not warn again” and click on “continue”(?)
2. we will try to look into common browser configuration (like popup blockers).
Root cause: ?

Firefox provides only this help on unresponsive script error;
the slowness could be in the actual script, on the client, in the network, on the server…

Resolution: ?

Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, Glitches&Errors, Reception-desk Tags: calendaring, ms-exchange, office365, outlook

MS-Exchange and Outlook enable managing scheduling of 100+ functional resources

2014/03/31 plagwitz Leave a comment

High-level Reporting:

Also, it is easy to manage calendars by group calendars, e.g.

Creation of calendar groups is also easy via the outlook address book:

It is Outlook (Desktop) currently only (not Exchange 2010 OWA) that allows for High-level Reporting. And even here, there are limitations:

Categories: e-infrastructure, service-is-documenting, service-is-library Tags: calendaring, live@edu, ms-exchange, office365, outlook, outlook-live, renaming, resources, scheduling

Configuring UNCC staff (MS-Exchange 10) email on Android 4.1.2

2014/03/19 plagwitz Leave a comment

May come in useful not only during initial setup… I had trouble sorting out the webpages addressing different versions, and translating the picture-less instructions, an so have others when they come to the LRC for help. May this help some.

Categories: audience-is-teachers, documentation, e-infrastructure, mobile-phones Tags: 2010, 4.3, google-android, Jelly-Bean, ms-exchange

Why meeting organizers should cancel meetings from their calendar and not by email

2014/03/17 plagwitz Leave a comment

Because cancelling from the calendar like in video2 here sends the meeting participants not only a (0)message, which includes a handy “Remove from calendar” button,
but also – in case they fail to see the message – a (1) “Cancelled” indicator on their calendars,
while third parties who want to schedule a meeting with the meeting participants, see those participants (including an Rooms that “participate”) as (2) free/available during the time slot of the cancelled meeting,
as you can see in this example: