Barbara
Horner-Miller,
chair of the
former User
Services SIG
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by Barbara Horner-Miller
At the Stuttgart CUG, the User Services Special Interest Group (SIG) sponsored six papers that spanned three sessions.
Two papers were on training, one on documentation, and three on general user
support issues. These papers, outlined briefly below, are available on the
CUG Proceedings CD.
- Leslie Southern presented a paper on using the WWW to recycle classroom
training, so that the training becomes available to local and remote users
on an "on-demand" basis. Leslie described the courses, the methods used to
put the material on the web and the various modes of viewing the material.
- Bill Mannel, Acting Director of Global Training and Director of American
Training for SGI, gave a brief update on SGI training for traditional Cray
products and opened the floor to questions. He discussed the closing of
the Eagan Training Center for customer training. UNICOS training is now
being handled in Dallas TX and Silver Springs MD and can still be carried
to a site if requested.
- Lynda Lester, NCAR, talked about the Do's and Don'ts of Web documentation.
Lynda has won several awards for her on-line documents and gave an
example-loaded talk on how she puts her material together. Both good and
bad examples were provided to illustrate the points she made.
- Jay Boisseau, SDSC, reported on the NPACI user support structure. After
providing background information on NPACI, Jay talked about integration
of support within the NPACI sites, attempts to standardize services and
software, and problems that arose as they did.
- Guy Robinson, ARSC, presented a paper on how you get users to modify their
behavior and their codes to provide better overall use of the system. On
MPP systems, this might consist of getting them away from "powers of two"
processor utilization.
- Barbara Horner-Miller provided preliminary results of a questionaire send to CUG sites to
survey their User Services practices. Final results, incorporating a few
late responses, will be included in the CUG Proceedings CD-ROM.
Changing and rearranging
At a general session on Monday, the CUG membership discussed the proposed new SIG structure. (For details on the new structure, see "CUG SIGs get a facelift" and A guide to the new CUG SIGs.")
Afterwards
the User Services SIG held an open meeting that included round-the-room introductions and a discussion of the proposed new structure and other User Services issues. We also elected Leslie Southern to be new SIG chair in case
the old SIG structure prevailed, a decision that would not be known until
later in the week.
On Thursday of the conference, the CUG Board of Directors approved and implemented the new SIG structure.
The User Services SIG has now been subsumed into the new Computer Services "super" SIG, chaired by Mike Brown. This new SIG includes two groups: the Operations Focus Group, chaired by Brian Kucic, and the Consulting, Training, and
Documentation Focus Group, chaired by Leslie Southern.
Because the subject matter for the two areas is different, we have recommended that SGI appoint
two liaisons.
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