Ubaidul Khan, Mary Lulis, and Khoi Nguyen
On the Friday before Memorial Day weekend, the Office of Admissions had a tool (Informatica) go down, which is critical to business functions. Given the unavailability of Admissions’ standard support person being out on vacation and the urgency to resolve the outage, ITS was contacted to step in. Khoi Nguyen, Ubaidul Khan, and Mary Lulis were able to get the tool back up and running ahead of the holiday weekend.
This was not a planned task for the day, but these three folks jumped in and worked as a team to get this critical business process back online. A 3+ day outage over the holiday weekend would have been very challenging to recover from. We are thankful they are on the Mason Team!
-Kathy Zimmerman
Matt Berlejung, Tracy Holt, Lauren Hutt, Richard Jackson
There are far more names than I have included here, as the MESA Migration project has been extensive and involved multiple levels of support across ITS, from the immediate project team to subject matter experts stepping in to team members making the time to chip in where needed. This includes providing standing office hour and additional investigation and one-off support for IT directors and those with unique use-cases.
Thanks to the collective team for your exceptional management of this project, including answering repeat questions with calm and diving in to research those that may not have an immediate answer, and further coming up with creative solutions to meet the exhaustive list of needs. For anyone reading this submission, take a moment to learn more about the project here!
-Whitney Sublett
Judy Fortin and Karen Lalicker
Judy and Karen presented on MicroStrategy during multiple “How to Thrive at Mason” Boot Camp sessions. Their subject matter expertise
and presentation skills were on full display. Their presentations are vital to the Mason community as well as the success of the Boot Camp. I always come away from these sessions learning something new and I appreciate the time and effort they put into this work. Thank you both.
-Brian Gantt
Michael Kramer
Michael Kramer is one of the best IT staff I have ever dealt with. He has helped me change my Mason password in the system— more than once and he makes it so smooth for someone like me who is not great with IT. He is responsive, polite, patient, provides clear explanations, and is always VERY helpful!
-Linda Harber, Retiree
Francesca Brunner-Kennedy, Casey Campbell, Gary Casallas, Judy Fortin, Chris Gay, Ubaidul Khan, Karen Lalicker, Lakshmi Maruwada, Boniface Ntawutarama, Karen Savell, Ben Solorzano, and Lifang Vanderwill
Thank you all for the tireless effort and work over the weekend and evenings to complete the RHEL8 and MicroStrategy upgrade this past week. You not only completed the work with little to no interruption to daily work, but you did it a day and a half quicker than planned. Bringing up the production server and letting users back in on Monday night instead of Wednesday morning was amazing, and a testament to the thorough and diligent work you all do every day.
Your work is noticed and appreciated! THANK YOU!
-Erica McQuiston
Tom Deike and Lee Faber
Last week, a temporary office move had to be executed with little warning. Tom and Lee are both entrenched with the Telecom implementation project, but they worked the problem and found a solution within minutes. We moved staff in less than a day! Home Depot may claim to be ‘How Doers Get More Done,’ but they have nothing on Tom, Lee, and the rest of the team.
-Brian Gantt
Richard Jackson and Mike Rothgeb
I noticed a strange behavior on my laptop that popped up suddenly. The Windows Explorer windows where I had navigated to a MESA drive just randomly disappeared, went away, without me closing them. I was doing a lot of work on MESA at the time, and it was really interfering with my productivity. I filed a support ticket, but really had little expectation that anyone was going to be able to fix this. It could be so many different issues, and I never knew when the behavior was going to happen. I reached out to Richard to see if it was related to his MESA migration work. It wasn’t, but he immediately dug into the problem and figured out that it was an end-point AD network drive related GPO. He reached out to Mike Rothgeb who fixed the problem.
-Francesca Brunner-Kennedy