NEWS

Summer Training

The SSCC has a full training schedule for the summer, including classes in Stata, SAS, SPSS, R, NVivo and Matlab. Visit our training page for details and to register.

The R classes and a second round of Stata classes are scheduled for the last week of August, so even if you're leaving Madison for the summer you may be able to fit in the training you'll need for the coming year before classes start.

SSCC Account Renewal

The SSCC's annual account renewal process is underway. If you got an email asking you to renew your SSCC account but have not yet done so, please take a few minutes to visit https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/renew/renew.cgi and fill out the renewal form.

Members who log in to Winstat using School of Education accounts (SOE-AD) do not need to renew them, nor do those with individual memberships or those from agencies with "lower-tier" memberships. If you're not sure whether you need to renew or not, just ask the Help Desk.

New WiscCal and SSCC Email

As you've probably heard, the current WiscCal is going away, and a temporary replacement is being put in place while the Administrative Excellence Email and Calendar Consolidation Team looks for a long-term solution. The new WiscCal does have some nice new features, especially the ability to access it using standard calendar programs like those available on smart phones and the "Lightning" add-on for Thunderbird.

Unfortunately, the new WiscCal associates your calendar with your WiscMail address (i.e. @wisc.edu rather than @ssc.wisc.edu). It also uses the UW directory to look people up for scheduling meetings. This causes some problems if your UW directory entry does not list your WiscMail address.

If someone wants to set up a meeting with you using the new WiscCal, they will enter your name and the system will find you in the UW directory. If the email address it finds for you is your WiscMail address, it will both send you email about the proposed meeting and place it in the calendar associated with your WiscMail address. However, if it finds a non-WiscMail address (such as an SSCC address) it will still send you email but cannot place the meeting in your calendar since it won't know which calendar belongs to you.

If you currently use an SSCC email address, you have two main options:

1. If you don't change anything you'll still get emails about proposed meetings, but you'll need to place them in your calendar yourself.
2. If you change your entry in the UW directory to list your WiscMail address, then WiscCal will be able to place meetings in your calendar automatically. However, anyone who looks you up in the UW directory to send you email will find your WiscMail address. You can still have your WiscMail account forwarded to your SSCC account, though this might cause some minor confusion (e.g. "I sent mail to dimond@wisc.edu but got a reply back from rdimond@ssc.wisc.edu"). WiscMail forwards can be set at the bottom of the NetID Account Modification page.

Keep in mind that the new WiscCal is a temporary solution. We do not recommend anyone make major changes in how they use email just to accommodate the new WiscCal.

Support for the new WiscCal is being provided by DoIT rather than the SSCC, so if you have questions or concerns about it we may need to refer you to the DoIT Help Desk. If you'd like to attend a class on the new WiscCal, contact Caitlin Tefft and if there's sufficient interest we'll arrange for DoIT staff to to do training in the Sewell Social Sciences Building.