Agriculture Information Technology

Advisory Group (AITAG)

Date:   May 18, 2007

To:       Dr. D.C. Coston and Dr. Jeffery Gerst

Re:       Agriculture Information Technology Advisory Group (AITAG) Report

Fr:        Randy Mehlhoff, AITAG Chair

Greetings, colleagues! This report is for the January 2007 through March 2007 time period. AITAG continues to meet to assess the needs of North Dakota State University (NDSU) ag constituents and monitor the effort to streamline service between Ag Communication and Information Technology Services (ITS).

As you know, AITAG initiated a second customer satisfaction survey designed to evaluate the on-going Ag Communication and ITS merger. It’s difficult to interpret feedback since the first survey was sent when Ag Communication and ITS were separate.  The survey late in 2006 was sent when the merger had taken place.  It appears there have been overall improvements but that some NDSU ag constituents still call NDSU ag funded staff directly, especially from the field offices.  In addition, there does seem to be some frustration with the help desk not understanding the off-campus offices and the delay of service responses. AITAG will continue to monitor colleagues satisfaction with IT support.   

In our last correspondence you had approved of AITAG’s recommendation to move NDSU ag web pages into the TYPO3 content management system (CMS). Since then, NDSU University Relations approved using the www.ndsu.edu/ag for CMS. Currently, some Ag Communication staff are being trained to begin piloting some ag web pages to CMS.  

E-mail addresses are being converted from @ndsuext.nodak.edu to the @ndsu.edu. Personal e-mail conversions are 100 percent completed. County Extension offices and Research Extension Center “generic” addresses are converted, so now the Ag Communication staff will contact other miscellaneous
address holders to see if their address needs to be converted. E-mail group lists will be converted next, again cleaning up the lists as the change is made.
 
Finally, AITAG continues to monitor IT changes in software and hardware to keep the baselines up to date. In the near future, AITAG will also begin looking at creating baselines for video-conferencing equipment.

The next AITAG report will be at the end of July 2007.  

pc: Ken Grafton, Duane Hauck

Return to Ag IT Advisory Group Home
Go to NDSU Agriculture Policy Statements