Tips and Tricks about Smart Working at Elettra

Due to Government's measures to limit the spread of COVID-19, starting from February 24th, 2020 Elettra employees have been given the opportunity to work from remote using the tools provided by the IT infrastructure.

In this page you can find some useful information about how to Smart Work for Elettra.

Meetings (and the need to make them virtual)

In order to reduce in-person participation to meetings, audio/video-conference software and services such as Skype, Jitsi o Zoom can be used.
We recommend using Skype or Jitsi if the number of participants is limited to 6-8 people and they have a good Internet connection.
Zoom is the preferred tool when a high number of participants is expected or if some of them is using a poor Internet connection. In this case, she/he can join the meeting dialing a phone number reported in the invitation together with the meeting id and the password.

Skype
Skype is a very popular audio/video-conference software. It performs very good even with low computing resources or slow Internet connections.
With the new Meet Now feature, it allows to generate a link that can be shared with the participants even though they don't have a Skype account and avoiding to communicate your private Skype user ID.
Additional, updated information can be found on this web page:
https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA34926/what-is-meet-now-and-how-do-i-use-it-in-skype

Jitsi
A videoconferencing service based on the opensource software Jitsi is accessibile at https://meet.elettra.eu.
You can organize and book virtual meetings just by logging-in with your Elettra UniPass credentials. The system creates a virtual room that corresponds to a web address to be sent to the other participants to join. In case of need, the meeting can be protected by a password.
It's strongly encouraged the use of the latest version of Google Chrome to access the service, as it's the most reliable browser for the technology implemented by Jitsi.
The service is under optimizations but scheduled interventions will be promptly communicated.

Zoom
Elettra owns a few licenses of a videoconferencing service called Zoom that is easy to use, compatible with any device and operating system and performs pretty well even on slow connections.
You should create an account on the Zoom portal registering yourself with your @elettra.eu e-mail address as username and already start using the service with basic features, which limits the duration of a meeting to 40 minutes.
You don't need a registered account to join a meeting organized by others.
Should you organize and schedule a longer meeting, you must use the "Richieste IT" (Elettra IT ticketing system) link on VUO.
You will be asked to specify the title, the starting day and time and the duration of the meeting. You will then receive the information about how to join the meeting included in the message sent as a result of closing the Ticket. This message must be forwarded by the requester to all the people invited to the meeting.
Please open the Ticket a reasonable amount of time before the beginning of the meeting, to allow it to be processes by the dedicated operators.
Short video tutorials on how to use Zoom can be found at https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us

Elettra.chat

Elettra.chat - realtime rich communication is a new service offered to ease and speed up communication among activities and teams.
This tool integrates one or more real time chats (similar to Telegra, Whatsapp etc.) with email notifications, file upload, videoconferencing (through Jitsi).
It is recommended to create private channels (groups) for every activity or project that may benefit from this tool.

A brief note about VPN (Virtual Private Network)

Any device connected to Internet, anywhere in the World can be configured to activate a VPN (Virtual Private Network) to behave as if were plugged to the Elettra LAN (Local Area Network), thus being able to access some services that otherwise won't be available.
All the information about how to request the certificates, install them and activate the VPN in any operating system can be found HERE.

Which services need the VPN (Virtual Private Network) to be accessed?

The Elettra internal services which need an active VPN connection to connect to, are:
  • sincro-share.elettra.eu Public and Private folders;
  • license servers for software with centralized management (Catia, Autocad...);;
  • Windows, Mac or Linux office computers, via remote tool (Remote Desktop, VNC, ssh...);
  • Zucchetti Ad-Hoc server if the appropriate software is installed on the remote computer BUT, wait, this use is absolutely discouraged as the application requires a very fast network to work properly. Should you use is, you're strongly invited to remotely connect to your office PC via "Remote Desktop". The Elettra ICT Team will help you to properly setup the devices to accomplish this task;
  • pwma.elettra.eu to interact with the accelerator control system of FERMI and Elettra;
  • HPC cluster "badger".

Which services can be accessed without the VPN (Virtual Private Network)?

Most of the services recently implemented in the Elettra IT infrastructure are available to any host connected to Internet, without the need of an active VPN connection.
Here is a (not complete) list of such services/hosts:
Last Updated on Tuesday, 21 April 2020 16:49