[Nottingham] Running Ubuntu at Nottingham Uni

[Martin]

On 24/05/12 17:58, David Aldred wrote:
> 
> On 24 May 2012 17:24, Barry Drake <ubuntu-advertising at gmx.com
> <mailto:ubuntu-advertising at gmx.com>> wrote:
> 
>     On 24/05/12 17:11, David Aldred wrote:
> 
>         It's really not as easy as that, in the real world.
>         Yes, they are all University students and staff.  No, that
>         doesn't mean they necessarily have much of a clue about
> 
> 
>     Actually , I do live in  the real world.  Anyone with half a brain
>     at nottingham.ac <http://nottingham.ac> support should have realised
>     that pointing students towards the Ubuntu
>     https://answers.launchpad.net/__ubuntu
>     <https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu> will get them their answer
>     with no knowledge or expertise require on their part.  Pride says much!.
> 
> 
> Ok, so I went there and typed in 'How do I connect to University email'.
>  No answers.  Then I tried "set a proxy server', and didn't get the
> right answer in the first four hits (or not for my version of Ubuntu).  
> Those are likely to be the biggest questions when all the new students
> arrive in September.   (So yes, they will be covered in welcome guides,
> but we know that well under half of students read much of the welcome
> guide before connecting up a computer).

Set up meaningful error messages to *lead* them to the answer. http
redirection is wonderful for that...

Meanwhile, hopefully some feedback about what you've found (or not
found) on that 'launchpad' can be used to help further... Who to chase
up?...


> Launchpad is great if you have loads of patience and a fair bit of
> technical know-how already.   That's not the helpdesk marketplace.     

Hence IT support staff /directing/ people to the answer. Hence have
helpful error messages/pages to direct people to a solution rather than
just have the error say "doesn't work". A good example is the Firefox
page that is displayed if you can't connect to a web page for example.


>     And, if there are a lot of question like this, there are hundreds of
>     folk like me who would run a seminar for free.
> 
> 
> Seminars are great, but they don't answer the question now.   And by the
> time they've got to the seminar, they've presumably sorted out enough of
> their problems to have been able to connect, find details of useful
> seminars, and get email confirmation that they are registered for them -
> so help desk have already done their work.   

Which is where IT support have to have a good system in place whereby
such basic services such as proxying just simply work...


IT support can then tackle the more interesting rocket science...

Cheers,
Martin

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