Call Centre

No Call Waiting for this upgrade

Combined efforts on the part of Advancement, a vendor and three units within Information Technology Services (ITS), compressed four months of work into three, fast tracked the project timeline by starting eight months sooner than anticipated, and enabled the University’s Call Centre to launch its alumni calling campaign on time.

The Call Centre’s software required an upgrade at a time when hiring a manager was underway, and when the software required a critical upgrade. To add further challenges to the project, Advancement’s Call Centre, which operates out of the Penny Building, already had to cancel its fall donor campaign due to construction within the facility. Missing out on the winter semester’s donor campaign as well would have significantly hurt the University’s fund raising efforts.

“We were advised that the former vendor of the software had been bought out by a new company. Consequently the old product needed to be migrated over to a new software, called CampusCall,” says Wim Chalmet, ITS Application Support Analyst. “Advancement approached us in October to ask if we could fast-track the project in order to run the next campaign in mid-January. That meant our usual timeline of May to September would be pushed up by eight months, and shortened our work schedule into three months instead of four. After consultation with all stakeholders, we felt it could be done.”

Staff from Advancement, Desktop Support, Applications, Systems, Telecom, and Finance were all involved in the effort, along with great support from the new application vendor, RuffaloCODY.

“The IT team was very supportive during the transition to a new software program in the Call Centre” says Kathy MacFarlane, Manager of Development Programs. “Wim Chalmet led us through the process smoothly and was always accessible. Most importantly, we finished on time for the next calling session.”

For more information, please contact Wim Chalmet at 403-380-1837, or at wim.chalmet@uleth.ca.

IT Services update for week of April 22, 2013

 

CRITICAL SERVICES (Banner, Moodle, Wireless, Internet, Telephony):

  • All critical services functioning normally.

KPI SPOTLIGHT:

Test Centre new peak usage

The University Test Centre successfully hosted students completing 726 exams on Thursday, April 25th.  This new peak level of usage was delivered while meeting service quality standards set for student experience.

University Internet outage greatly minimized

All Internet services experienced a five-minute outage April 25th at 8:51 am.  Off-campus connectivity, including the uleth.ca website, was impacted.  The recently implemented redundant Telus connectivity was automatically activated, mitigating service interruptions caused by a Cybera Telus 14.5 hour outage.  No client complaints related to the internet service outage were received as a result of the outage.

The graphs below illustrate service traffic.  The first graph provides a view of the end-user experience, showing only a slight interruption at 8:51 am.  Graphs 2 and 3 show the Cybera connectivity and the outage.  Graph 4 indicates our alternate Telus connection activating and carrying the load.

Service traffic graphs

SERVICE IMPROVEMENTS:

Penny Building network 20 times faster!

On April 26th, Information Technology along with the City of Lethbridge completed commissioning of the fiber network to the Penny Building.  The old network consisted of a 50 Mbps wireless connection with antennas on UHall and the Penny building roofs.  The new connection is all fiber and gives the network users a 1000 Mbps connection or 1 Gbps back to the U of L.

This will remove the barrier of limited network bandwidth at the Penny Building and allow the U of L to program the space just as if it was on the U of L property.  Life safety, wireless, Alumni Relations staff and Advancement’s call centre will all benefit from increased capacity and reliability.

The following graphic is a representation of  the differences:

Penny fiber upgrade