CERN Accelerating science

General User Services

The CN-DCI-ACT Section hosts a number of services covering the central Computing facilities provided by CN Division. These include:

• the User Consultancy Office;
• Information Retrieval support (XFIND, XNEWS, XWHO, PHONE, YELLOW, Mosaic...);
• Accounting and Registration on all central services.

User Consultancy Office

The User Consultancy Office runs the Help Desk in building 513 and serves as the users' front-end to the Computing facilities provided by the Computing and Networking Division. The service is fully described in section 1.2 below.

R. Woolnough, CN-DCI-ACT
M. Marquina, CN-DCI-ACT

Information Retrieval

IR technologies cover an essential need of the information requirements of CERN staff, notably in the Research Sector. We have developed the main tools used currently on mainframes to retrieve various data, including online manuals, information in the accounting and user registry databases, etc.

We provide support for online access to documentation, either central or group-based, creation of newsgroups spanning across different platforms, coordination for the elaboration of the ``Yellow Pages'' Services, and assessment on structuring group information. B. Pollermann, CN-DCI-ACT

Accounting and Registration

We provide the management services for registration and budgeting for all centrally-supported services and corresponding follow-ups (space and CPU quota extensions, password resetting, account creation/transfer/deletion, annual reviews, etc).

We provide the production of the weekly accounting summaries and the maintenance of the associated procedures.

M.C.Perler, CN-DCI-ACT
A. Koppanyi, CN-DCI-ACT