Speaker
Description
URL for further information:
www.ggus.org
If demonstration is requested please explain what visual or interactive aspects of the contribution necessitate a demonstration rather than a presentation or poster?
To give the audience the possibility to see the user support system in action and to show all its features, a demonstration is the appropriate way of presenting GGUS. A guided tour through the complete life cycle of a support request can be given to users and prospective support staff. The audience can really get to know the look and feel of the portal and become confident of using the system.
3. Impact
A well established and functional user support service permeates the whole EGEE project and it is one of the core non-middleware services and as such one of the key success factors in running a production quality infrastructure. Over the course of the series of EGEE projects the GGUS system and the management of the support process has been professionalised by applying proper change and process management strategies. The GGUS system is being improved through a series of regular new releases, which are well planned and documented including release notes. A coordinating body involving all relevant parties meets regularly to plan the future strategy. Applying these processes, the GGUS system has been constantly improved and its acceptance throughout the project has constantly increased. With this presentation of the GGUS system at the User Forum, we aim at a better understanding of the importance of a proper support infrastructure and show the major achievements of EGEE in this area.
Provide a set of generic keywords that define your contribution (e.g. Data Management, Workflows, High Energy Physics)
User support, operations support, help desk
1. Short overview
Grid user support is a challenging task due to the distributed nature of the grid. The variety of users and Virtual Organisations adds further to the challenge. Support requests come from grid beginners, from users with specific applications, from site administrators, or from grid monitoring operators. With the GGUS infrastructure, EGEE provides a portal where users can find support in their daily use of the grid. The current use of the system shows that the goal has been achieved with success.
4. Conclusions / Future plans
At the end of 2007 a major release of the GGUS portal took place. Included in this release were several new features whose implementation included modifications of the interfaces of the regional help desks. A new search engine which performs semantic searches of the ticket data base and several other data sources will improve the search results will be available by the time of the User Forum. We want to present to the audience the new as well as the established features.
