2CUL Technical Services Remote Desktop Support Committee
Charge
The group is responsible for:
- evaluating technology options and developing best practices
- creating documentation for remote desktop connections
- performing installations and updates for staff
- helping staff to acquire (Cornell) NetIDs or (Columbia) UNIs
Sponsorship:
The group reports to the 2CUL Technical Services Integration Steering Committee. Adam Chandler will serve as liaison.
Membership:
Cornell: Gary Branch (gcb2@cornell.edu) and Amy Blumenthal (ab18@cornell.edu)
Columbia: Gary Bertchume (bertchum@columbia.edu)
Meeting Notes
Reasons we are supporting Windows Remote Desktop for 2CUL TS staff (January 2014)
Amy Blumenthal:
- Columbia and Cornell are running different versions of Voyager, and different sets of tag tables.
- Voyager settings are stored in one place in the registry. If you define where the tag tables are, what your default templates are, etc., those settings will be the same for both Columbia and Cornell.
- Macros need to be aligned to the same set to prevent key combination clashing.
- Users are not always clear regarding which catalog they are in, I know we run into that when we switch between Cornell Test and Production.
Gary (Bertchume):
I agree with Amy's assessments. Running two versions of Voyager software on the same machine is dicey. Until the two institutions are completely aligned (same version of Voyager, same tag tables, same macros, etc.) I would not recommend it. Let me also add that using RDC allows a user to have both local and remote connections open which might be a need for some workflows.
Gary Branch:
As Amy and Gary Bertchume stated we were or are running different versions of Voyager, but I understand Columbia recently upgraded to 8.2. (Whether it's the same 8.2.x, I don't know.) Our tag tables with local configurations for 9xx fields differ and would have to be resolved. In the short term I don't view that as likely as we have very different approaches and local field definitions. Flipping back and forth or running two versions of Voyager simultaneously is asking for mistakes to happen. In fact when I need to compare a record in test to one in production I use remote desktop to the ltstestbox so that I can be sure which I'm looking at rather than flipping back and forth. The remote desktop window allows staff to be sure which Voyager they are in at that moment. We have enough errors due to the tedious nature of some of the work. Visual clues should help to minimize this. We also have different MARC character configuration files which Mark Wilson and I are working on to include all current enhanced characters appearing from OCLC. I feel remote desktop is the more viable approach until we have a single LMS. --Gary (Branch)