EGI-InSPIRE:TNA3.3 NGI User Support Teams

Introduction

The main actors of EGI are the National Grid Initiatives (NGIs) and they are 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 responsibility of NGI User Support Teams (UST) is to provide services for their users. These services include (but are not restricted to):

• identifying new users
• consultancy
• training
• porting scientific applications to the infrastructure
• arrangeing access for users to EGI applications
• supporting new VOs
• developing new software services (portals, toolkits, middleware extensions, etc.)
• collecting feedback
• improving documentation
• providing helpdesk
• fostering the integration of communities

Mission

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 previously described user support fields: while an NGI UST can be very experienced with e.g. application porting, it may have less interest in the development of grid portals for end users for example. Because of this reason the User Community Support Team of EGI.eu monitors the status of NGI USTs, and assist them in case their users' requirements exceed the locally available expertise and capacity. The monitoring of NGIs is currently done through face to face or telephone interviews, online and email questionnaires, but EGI.eu UCST aims to put a more efficient mechanism in place. The goal is to simplifies this 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. Extra assistance that EGI.eu UCST can allocate to NGIs comes primarily from USTs of other NGIs, who are found and asked by EGI.eu to serve foreign communities. Secondly, the UCST of EGI.eu can contact support personnel in external projects with which EGI-InSPIRE collaborates, and inquiry whether they have the expertise and capacity to serve EGI users. Lastly, EGI.eu also has a limited number of persons in its UCST who can be allocated for direct user support.

Related resources

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]]