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A brave new frontier

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We’re going to try something new for IT support requests in the School, by migrating most support communication to Office 365 and Microsoft Teams. I’ve added everyone currently using Macs or iOS devices which are Jamf enrolled to the new MPSupport team – the rest of the School will follow in due course. You can access the team at:

https://go.qub.ac.uk/mpsupport

Staff and PGRs will be enrolled by us, or can self-enrol by visiting the site. Undergrads are welcome to join, or access the site as guests.

You can use Teams via web app, or native packages for Windows and macOS, as well as iOS and Android. On Macs and PCs which are enrolled in our management systems the Teams app should be automatically installed for you.

The advantages of Teams are that it’s a more interactive format, allowing everyone to take part if they so desire – and I hope you will. Also, with four support staff in MP now, email is increasingly inefficient; with Teams we can all see help requests and respond more quickly. The options are to try Teams, or switch to the Site Help Desk software which central IT uses. You likely don’t want to deal with that!

Teams is going to be more important in the University going forward. It’s great for impromptu file sharing and group notebooks & wikis, and in the medium term things like the phone system will link into it. I’m only starting to scratch the surface of its possibilities.
If you want to learn more about Teams you can do so from Microsoft.

We’ll still be accepting emails to the usual email addresses for the moment, but please do try Teams if at all possible.

2019 new-start Mac users

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If you are joining the School as a PGR or PDRA in the 2019-20 academic year and are being issued a MacBook then the information below will be of use. Please review it before making an appointment to come see the School IT staff to collect the Mac.

All new machines are registered with the Apple Device Enrolment Program (DEP) which means that they will mostly set themselves up when turned on and connected to the network. You should review this video which gives you an overview of what to expect. Please note that the video features a Thunderbolt 3 docking solution which we are not giving out this year – instead we are issuing a USB-C hub for most users. In addition, when the registration wizard is running, do not use accented characters when entering your name – at best they will be ignored, more likely the wizard will hang.

Once the basic setup has completed, you will find yourself at the Mac desktop. If you’re not familiar with macOS then you should review the information available from macOS Help option under Help. You may also find this link useful.

If you are familiar with macOS, you’ll need to know about the way we run our systems.

VMWare Academic Program

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The School is a member of the VMWare Academic Program – VMAP – which provides Maths & Physics staff and students with access to a range of VMWare software at no cost.

If you would like access to the VMAP storefront, email mp.support@qub.ac.uk with your details, and an account will be set up for you. You will get an email from e5.onthehub.net with a login link; your username will be your QUB email address, and you can use the ‘forgot password’ option to set a password. The account is valid for a year – it will need to be revalidated after that.

Once logged on to the VMAP storefront you can ‘buy’ a zero cost copy of the relevant VMWare product – VMWare Fusion for macOS, VMWare Workstation for Windows/Linux. You will be provided with a download link for the installer, and a serial number to activate the package. You can always access the serial number from your account history if you lose it.

Once you have installed VMWare you will need to create a virtual machine. This must use a properly licensed operating system. For Linux VMs this is simple – just download the relevant ISO for your preferred distro and use the new VM setup wizard. For Windows VMs we can provide you with a pre-configured VM image which uses the University licensed Windows 10 Enterprise.

You should be aware that VM images are large and use a lot of disk space – the Windows 10 image starts around 20GB and only gets larger. You will probably want to exclude the directory the image is stored in from your regular backup solution (eg. Time Machine) or OneDrive as they simply don’t deal well with large files which are constantly changing.

App Store shennanigans

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At present we use Munki/Managed Software Centre to distribute some Apple programs which are typically installed using the Mac App Store – Pages, Numbers, Keynote, and iMovie. We do this for a few reasons, most of which come down to not being sure that everyone using one of our Macs will have an App Store account.

Our work-around, which is tacitly approved by Apple, is to install the programs on one Mac using a managed AppleID and then bundle them up and install on all our other machines. Mostly this works fine, but can lead to a little confusion when the App Store on the client Mac offers to update one of the programs, which then triggers a prompt for the password for the managed AppleID. The solution in this case is to ignore that prompt and allow Munki to push out the updates for Pages, Numbers, Keynote, and iMovie.

Obviously this is not the absolute best user experience. Once all of our systems are enrolled in Device Management we will be able to use the official Apple method for App management, the Volume Purchase Plan (VPP). This will let us push App Store apps to managed devices (macOS and iOS) and this will hopefully stop these moments of confusion.