NEWS

Fall Training

Our fall round of training gets underway on 9/15 with Stata for Researchers, which we highly recommend for incoming graduate students and new researchers. We then have a variety of topical workshops scheduled, including Stata Programming, Publication-Quality Tables, Grammar of Graphics, and Structural Equation Modeling in both Stata and Mplus. (Please note that the SEM classes focus on implementation, not theory, and you should only sign up for them if you already have some understanding of SEM.) We anticipate scheduling R workshops for later in the semester.

Visit our training page for details and to register. Registration is free for anyone with an SSCC account (i.e. anyone who gets SSCC News).

Office 365 Update

Now that we're through the beginning-of-the-semester rush, if you haven't migrated to Office 365 yet we encourage you to do so. We still have about 150 people to go.

Between 10/20 and 11/10 the Office 365 migration team will move all remaining SSCC members to Office 365. When your account is migrated, any email programs you have set up to read SSCC email or WiscMail will stop working until you reconfigure them to read Office 365 email instead. If you still need to migrate we strongly recommend you do so before 10/20 so you can migrate at a time that's convenient for you.

Office 365 Migration instructions can be found here.

New Policy on Support for Cloud Services

SSCC members have access to more and more "cloud services" all the time, notably Office 365. We recognize that SSCC members depend on these services to carry out University business as well as in their personal lives. On the other hand, the number of services available and their scope makes it impossible for SSCC staff to become experts on everything our members use, and support for cloud services must be balanced against supporting, maintaining, and improving the services SSCC provides.

We've therefore created a new policy on Support for Cloud Services. Perhaps the most important part of this policy is that we will provide full support for Office 365 email, but only limited support for calendaring, OneDrive, and other Office 365 features. Other cloud services, like Google Docs or Calendar, will receive minimal support, meaning we will answer any questions we can but will not research solutions or troubleshoot problems. With any cloud service, some problems can only be solved by the service provider (missing email in Office 365, for example) and we may need to refer you to them. DoIT's Help Desk supports cloud services licensed by the University, such as Office 365, Box, and some Google Apps, and may be able to answer questions SSCC staff cannot.

The SSCC's core mission is research computing, and this policy will help ensure it remains our primary focus.

Tip: Searching for Messages in Outlook 2013

The search function in Outlook 2013 often gives you more results than you're looking for. Last month we discussed how to have it search just the current folder rather than your entire mailbox. Another reason it gives a lot of results is that by default it looks for your search terms anywhere in the message.

For example, if you know the message you want is from SSCC Director Andy Arnold, you could type arnold in the search box. But that will give you all messages where "arnold" appears in the To, From, or CC fields, the Subject line, or the message itself. If you search for from:(arnold) then the results will only include messages where "arnold" appears in the From field.

Similarly, subject:(office 365 migration) limits the results to messages that contain the words "office", "365", and "migration" in the Subject line. Searching for subject:("office 365 migration") will further require that the words appear together.

When you click in the search box, Outlook will automatically switch to the Search tab. Clicking on the From or Subject buttons will insert from:() or subject:() into the search box so all you have to do is type in what you want to search for.