EGI-InSPIRE:TNA3.3 NGI User Support Teams

Role of NGIs in TNA3.3

The main actors of EGI are the National Grid Initiatives (NGIs) whose work is coordinated by the EGI.eu organisation. NGIs ensure the operation of the grid infrastructures and support services in each country as well as a transparent representation of the requirements of all their scientific communities. The primary responsibility of the NGI User Support Teams (UST) is to provide services for their users which help these users' integration/establishing self-sustainable grid user communities. Support services for users are provided by NGI USTs in TNA3.3. These services include (but are not restricted to):

• identifying new users and new user communities
• consultancy
• training
• porting scientific applications to the infrastructure
• arranging access for users to EGI applications
• supporting new VOs
• developing new software services (portals, toolkits, middleware extensions, etc.)
• collecting feedback (which is then evaluated and prioritised by TNA3.2)
• improving documentation
• providing helpdesk
• fostering the integration of communities (identified by TNA3.2)

Role of EGI.eu in TNA3.3

NGIs are heterogeneous in terms of the size and composition of their user communities, the size and expertise of their USTs. Consequently, NGIs are not equally active and strong in all the above listed user support fields. E.g. while an NGI UST can be very experienced with application porting, it may have less interest and knowledge on the development of grid portals for end users. On top of that the primary goal of EGI is to attract and serve multi-national, large user communities. To meet these demands the User Community Support Team (UCST) of EGI.eu monitors the status of NGI USTs and help NGIs

• serve local users whose requirements exceed the expertise and capacity which is available locally;
• serve international user communities by integrating the user support services and expertise of multiple NGI USTs;
• identify and recommend best practices and tools for NGI USTs.

The monitoring of NGIs is currently done through face to face and telephone interviews, online and email questionnaires. EGI.eu UCST aims to put a more efficient mechanism in place to simplify the monitoring process and to allow NGIs to "broadcast" relevant information about their user support status and services in an intelligent way to EGI.eu and other NGIs.

Related resources

NGI User Support contacts: EGI.eu manages a list of NGI user support contacts for the benefit of the whole community. The contact list currently includes confirmed user support contacts from the following NGIs:

User support contacts can be obtained from Gergely Sipos (gergely.sipos@egi.eu). Related milestone document: MS301-User Support Contacts

NGI User Support Teams session of EGI Technical Forum 2010: [[1]]

Overview presentation of "NGI based User Support in EGI" by Gergely Sipos at EGI Technical Forum 2010: [[2]]

Knowledge base on NGI User Support Teams

Name of the NGI	Services offered by the UST of the NGI for international user communities and for other NGI USTs	Services requested by the UST of the NGI to serve its users
Albania	to be defined	to be defined
Armenia	to be defined	to be defined
...	...	...