RSS Feed Available for Service Updates

OIT Help Desk provides information on interruptions to IT services

Friday, December 16, 2005

Durham, N.C. -- Duke's Office of Information Technology (OIT) has developed an RSS feed to help keep the university community informed and updated about interruptions to technology services.

Instructions on how to subscribe to this service are accessible at http://www.oit.duke.edu/helpdesk/rss/ . The RSS feed sends short articles full of information on planned and unplanned maintenance to OIT systems and services like e-mail, websites, printing, and telephones to RSS aggregators, or websites where the articles are housed. The websites can be personalized by the user to house a variety of RSS feeds of differing topics.

“This is an extension of the OIT Service Updates page, where we publish all our various planned and unplanned outages,” said Debbie DeYulia, senior manager of OIT Customer Support.

According to DeYulia, the Service Updates page is updated daily with service maintenances scheduled by OIT, in addition to unplanned outages. The announcements contain the name of the service; whether the interruption is planned or unplanned; start and end times; and an explanation of how the interruption affects users and where to go for more information. The Service Updates page can be found at http://www.oit.duke.edu/helpdesk/service/updates.php .

An electronic mailing list providing similar service maintenance information e-mailed directly to subscribers' inboxes is currently in development, and will be available soon.

The OIT Help Desk supports various RSS readers; students can customize DukePass to receive the OIT feed. Anyone having difficulty setting-up their RSS reader can contact the Help Desk at 684-2200.