Weekly update

A whole week has rushed past. So here's what's been happening in brief. There have been three annual review meetings with respect to e-strategy and IT futures with Academic Schools (Social and International Studies, Informatics and Health). These have resulted in a review of things that were requested before and new things on the agenda. When reflecting back on these meetings, I'd say that apart from one, they have been operational rather than strategic, and slightly adversarial (this may be too strong a word) - I hope to look back in a year's time and find that the culture may have changed in a positive direction. It's our job to help agenda the strategic conversations and on this occasion (as before) these meetings have been for the School to tell us their agenda and issues and for us to listen and respond. In reality we have a good debate on most issues that is fairly well balanced but the language that is sometimes used to describe situations is more negative than positive. Maybe its "spin" and good old plain yorkshire speaking. On Thursday there was a guest lecture from PVC at Coventry about the SMART-Campus@CU initiative. I've been following up the glossy hype with the reality on the ground. It's certainly a story which has provided debate this morning. I've attended a few end of term internal type meetings this week - the Technical User Forum (TUF) and the First Level Support Team meeting. The TUF heard about a range of great and innovative new developments here such as the major email upgrade over xmas including a new web front end, a new unified voice messaging service - voice to email and voice to SMS, the launch of a Secure Global Desktop service on Valentine's Day 2009 using VMWare and Virtual Desktop technologies and the launch in January of a brilliant 100 seat thin client cluster atop the atrium in Richmond Building. The techncial teams are also doing a load of moves and changes over the Christmas at risk period including a major upgrade to the student system infrastructure for test, devel and live environments with 8 new servers. Finally, we have come up with some creative ideas to try and get rid of recharges and be more transparent with the way we deal with "premium or added-cost" services. Need to get some agreements to this but looks possibiity.