How to request technical support

Staff of the Dean's Office, College Centers and Programs, and Industrial & Systems Engineering departments can request technical support for their UW-owned computing equipment and supported software by sending email to:

help@engr.washington.edu

If you are unable to send email, phone (206) 221-4214, or call individual support staff directly.

Email requests will generate a "trouble ticket" and be assigned a request number. You will receive this information in an email response.

Please refer to the email response for instructions on following up on your request and checking its status.

What we support and how to make purchases

We will make best-effort attempts to support personally-owned accessories such as mobile phones, tablets and USB storage drives being used for business purposes.

We do not support personally-owned computers, printers, or other devices. We do not make house calls.

Staff of the Dean's Office should not purchase computing equipment (including components and accessories such as keyboards, mouses, TVs/projectors, etc.) directly. Requests for equipment purchases should come through Computing Services, regardless of the funding source.

We are not responsible for nor will we support equipment not purchased by Computing Services. We must work with a specific list of products in order to ensure that we can maintain them, they are compatible and they meet our security requirements.

All purchases of equipment must be approved by the Director of Computing Services.

Equipment purchasing (responsibilities and procedures)

The College of Engineering Dean’s office is an administrative unit.  All equipment purchased for the office is state funded.  No federally funded equipment by research grants is purchased and used in the work done by the office.

Acquisition

• All equipment purchased must be approved by the Director of Computing Services for the Dean’s office.
• For very large equipment purchases, greater than $50K, additional approval is requested by the Associate Dean for Infrastructure

Receiving

• Equipment is received by Computing staff, then properly tagged by the Assistant to the Director for Computing.
• Placement of equipment, primarily computing equipment, is the responsibility of Senior Computing Specialists.

Records

• Tagged equipment information is entered into the UW equipment inventory system (OASIS) by the Assistant to the Director for Computing.
• The location of desktop computers is tracked using software maintained by Senior Computing Specialist staff.  But, none of this equipment is valued greater than $5K, so OASIS does not need to be updated.  Expensive equipment, greater than $5K, is located in the Wilcox room 60A computer room, and does not leave that location.

Physical Inventory

• The biennial inventory of equipment is handled by the Assistant to the Director for Computing.  Senior Computing Specialist staff help with locating equipment, since they are the ones who installed and work with the equipment as part of their job.
• The Assistant to the Director verifies the equipment has been located and is responsible for updating OASIS if needed.
• The Director for Computing is responsible for reviewing the paper inventory, then signing off and approving.

Maintenance

• Hardware maintenance contracts on all critical equipment is paid for each year to insure the on-going administrative work of the office of the Dean.  Vendors come on-site within 24 hours to replace any failed equipment.

Sub-award

• No federally funded equipment is used in the daily work of the office of the Dean of Engineering.

Utilization

• The Director of Computing is responsible for acquiring equipment and ensuring the equipment is used for the purpose(s) for which it was acquired.

Disposition

• The office maintains the following replacement timelines:
  • Laptops - 4 years
  • Desktops - 5-6 years
  • Monitors and other peripherals - based on wear, functionality and industry trends
• Equipment older than that is identified using a locally maintained database.  Equipment supporting any critical infrastructure is too expensive to maintain a maintenance contract on, so is replaced by new equipment.
• The Assistant to the Director fills out all 1024 forms for surplusing equipment, then the Director reviews and signs off on the forms.
• No federally funded equipment is used in the operations of the Dean’s office.  Any lost or stolen equipment is identified when filling out the biennial inventory.  Equipment such as a laptop computer, if stolen, is reported to the police.  Since we insure all laptops, forms are filled out with the UW equipment insurance office, to recover some of the cost of replacing the equipment.

Assessment

• The Dean of the College of Engineering is ultimately responsible for ensuring the units subject to the above are complying with their responsibilities.
• Annual reports are sent to the Associate Dean of Infrastructure for review to ensure compliance with the above procedures.

Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering

We provide desktop support to the Department of ISE. It is outlined in a separate Service Level Agreement.

• ISE Service Level Agreement (SLA)

All computers that are meant to be supported must be ordered and set up by Computing Services staff. This is so we may install remote management tools so that we may assist more quickly and efficiently.

Engineering Library Instruction Center (ELIC) lab

We provide support to the Engineering Library Instruction Center (ELIC) computer lab as outlined in the Memo Of Understanding.

List of software