Help desk employees taking calls wearing headsets
Wednesday, September 25, 2019 - 3:47pm

Connecting to eduroam and using Two-Step Login were among the “hot topics” for the ITS Help Desk during this year’s fall rush—the week before the semester began and the first week of classes.

An eduroam certificate upgrade in June generated many contacts from returning students who couldn’t connect their laptops. The timing and process for eduroam certificates will be reviewed in the future. 

With increased enrollment in Two-Step Login, there were more questions from users having trouble making changes to their account, international users not realizing they need to set up push notifications before they leave because they can’t use the call and text features, and confusion about the second password requirement for using VPN.

Also on the list of common start-of-semester inquiries were ICON issues like getting access to courses, using UICapture after the upgrade to the cloud, how to use ICON features, or combining courses.

Rounding out the list of hot topics were questions on how to connect gaming devices or smart TVs to the DeviceNet wireless network in the dorms and questions about parents resetting HawkID passwords to access MyUI. 

The top five topics during the fall rush period by number of contacts were ICON (463), Two-Step Login (460), password resets (394), eduroam (234), and Office 365 (219). Phone calls were the most common method of contacting the Help Desk, followed by email, walk-in, and online live chat.

The first day of classes was the busiest since 2016, with 994 contacts. A brief Office 365 outage resulted in about 100 inquiries. 

Overall the fall rush was less than past years. The 4,145 total contacts were down 21 percent from 2018, a trend IT professionals attribute to more do-it-yourself tools and better how-to information online. 

Web analytics showed significant traffic increases to several ITS website pages. Connecting to UI DeviceNet and setting up Two-Step Login pages saw over a 400 percent increase in traffic over last year. Views of a page about connecting to wireless were 200 percent higher. Pages about printing in ITCs, sharing your Office 365 calendar, and the online textbook platform ICON Direct also saw spikes in traffic.