Technology Bytes

During one of September’s Faculty Senate meeting, a request was made to purchase a few Vista/Office for Dummies books and make them available through the IT Liaisons – particularly in the College of Arts and Sciences. So we requested a short tutorial and purchased at least one copy of the Vista/Office for Dummies books for each IT Liaison to loan out. We also looked at what our most common Vista and Office questions are.

Below are links to the proposed MS Office and Vista FAQs and to more training materials. Marilyn B. Reisenbichler, Director of Support Services, is also working with Kevin Bailey, Director of Desktop Technologies at the University of Missouri to see if they are willing to let us link to more of their training materials.

Microsoft Office 2007 and Vista FAQs and More Training Materials

As the fall term is starting to draw to a close please keep in mind important dates in regard to Blackboard.

Important Dates, Information, and Directions for Users of Blackboard

Finally, we would like to point out a new tool that is linked to the UMKC homepage. Thanks to Vishal Kurup’s work, we now have the Calendar of Events. The Calendar consists of several sub-calendars that feed into a central calendar using a program powered by Trumba.

Using this tool you can:
· Submit events (and provide a brief description if the title/tag line is not clear)

· Choose what type of events you are interest in (i.e. academic related, arts & culture, lectures, meetings, etc.)
· Click the events you are interested in and add them to your own electronic calendar
· Print out the calendar, subscribe (it can place the calendar in your Microsoft Outlook), or add it as a RSS feed

Individual departments, units/schools, and offices are able to request a sub-calendar for their website.

View the Calendar of Events and Read the FAQs

-Mary Lou Hines Fritts, CIO and Vice Provost for Academic Programs