Food for thought

Wise words: "Far and away, the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing." -- Theodore Roosevelt

Internal customer service resources

Last week, the Internal Customer Service Phase II team (Philip Hunter, Jennifer Love, and Ingrid Nuttall) presented a toolkit of internal customer service resources to ASR supervisors. The toolkit includes an onboarding customer service training video which highlights the customer service attributes, customer service resources for supervisors, and potential IDP goals for customer service.

Feedback shared at that meeting has been incorporated into the toolkit and the video, which are all available on the ASR Intranet. Additional feedback that was out of scope for this team's work will be incorporated into the charge for the next Internal Customer Service team.

Philip Hunter, Elyse Paxton, and Sarah Hollerich have worked diligently to create the video highlighted in the toolkit. The video will be available and tracked via ULearn, and will support the orientation of new employees in ASR. Click here to view the ASR customer service training video.

ESUP Student: eliminating modifications

As of June 20, the student workstream has 65.3% of IDP topics either complete or in progress and has recommended that 64.7% of current modifications to PeopleSoft for the associated business processes be retired. This reflects the hard work the ESUP Student work stream has done in examining the differences in functionality between 8.9 and 9.0. Whenever possible and practicable, modifications to the system are being retired. In many instances, this has not been easy as the modifications were made for good reasons.

Helpful numbers and websites

Whether you're new to ASR or been here for years, the ASR intranet includes a list of useful phone numbers and websites. You can quickly look up the web address or campus phone number for a variety of services and departments, such as Employee Benefits, Employee Self-Service, Human Resources, Payroll, and the Regents Scholarship Program, among others. Take a peek; it's all just a click away.

Who vs. whom

Ah, this is a tricky one! Let's take a stab at it. "Who" is the subject of a verb while "whom" is an object in the sentence. Or another way to look at it: Who is the subject, and whom is the object. You can substitute a personal pronoun (he/him or she/her) for who/whom. If he or she would be the correct form, the correct choice is who. If him or her would be correct, use whom.

Here are a few examples:

• Who is that person on the sidewalk? (Who is the subject.)


• The four women, three of whom were brunette, walked into the store. (Whom is the object.)


• Mrs. Anderson dined with a doctor whom she had met in Chicago. (She met him in Chicago.)


• Sally is the woman whom I married last year. (I married her.)

Way to go, OCM!

In 2011, the Office of Classroom Management (OCM) and the Office of Information Technology (OIT) announced a partnership that added video conferencing capabilities to the classroom technology system in Humphrey Center 25. The partnership was such a success that OIT is transferring three additional video conferencing rooms into OCM's inventory. The new video conferencing classrooms will be used for courses and events beginning fall semester 2013.

The new classrooms include:

• Magrath 4 (St. Paul)


• Peters 145 (St. Paul)


• Peik Hall 165 (East Bank)

A fourth classroom, Peters 155 (St. Paul), will be converted into a general purpose classroom during fall semester and will be ready for spring 2014 courses and events. Nice job, OCM!

Sign out a portable data projector

As mentioned in a previous issue of News & Notes, you can sign out a laptop or netbook through Google calendar. Now, you can also check out a portable data projector. As a reminder, you'll need to "invite" the projector to a meeting, as you would a regular conference room. You'll find the two projectors and VGA cable under equipment (EQ). Here's the info:

(EQ) ASR-Epson Projector I
(EQ) ASR-Epson Projector II
(EQ) ASR-VGA 25ft Cable

When it's time to pick up a projector, please contact Debbie Henderson, and she'll have it ready for you!