User Support News 2 October 2007

The items from which I expect feed-back are marked in red and the items which I propose as action items in the JOC meeting are marked in bold red .

For your information, the User Support tasks have been summarized in the CMS User Support internal area in CMSUserSupportTasks.

Tutorials

• Yana has given event display tutorials at CERN and at FNAL in August, and in September at DESY.
• A tutorial was planned during the Physics Week on config file usage by Benedikt based on the experience on skimming config files. Benedikt will not be able to give this tutorial, but has prepared some material, if some else volunteers.

Documentation

A draft of the CMS Software documentation policy written and circulated, see here. Reminder:

• WorkBook: to get started and up to first analysis
• Reference Manual: brief description of content and purpose of each package
• CMS Offline Guide:
  • description of algorithms
  • usage and "how-to" documents which are too detailed for the WorkBook
  • gathers information currently spread in numerous twiki pages to a single structure.

WorkBook

The general CMSSW version in the WorkBook is now 1_6_x (although many tutorials still need to be updated, authors have been contacted).

As suggested in the documentation policy document, the next full WorkBook review (with a amount of printed copies) could take place Dec07-Jan08 so that the new conveners of different groups would be in charge of reviewing the contents corresponding to their area. Your feedback?

CMS Offline Guide

Work in progress:

• as described in the doc. policy document, need contact persons from each computing, offline and physics subgroups
• the data format table: https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/CMS/SWGuideDataFormatTable
  • some areas are not complete - Jose Sanches has started to check them and remind the responsibles

Reference Manual

Reference manual now available appears for all recent versions, see http://cmsdoc.cern.ch/cms/cpt/Software/html/General/gendoxy-doc.php. Need an editor.

Getting help

Savannah

Encouraging its use (tutorials, user support summary), we only gain experience when using it. Negative feedback on wrong assignments, wrong replies or anything else most welcome.

Support for grid analysis at T2

A meeting organized during the June CMS week, see agenda and minutes. A follow-up meeting organized in the September CMS week, see http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=21173#2007-09-18

Online chat room help

Muon POG is proposing an online chat room type service for immediate online help on muons, see https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/CMS/MuonHotline. I find this worth trying if there are people willing to do it, please let me know if you see some problems.

-- KatiLassilaPerini - 02 Oct 2007