Pork Pie Appreciation

Being a vegetarian I don't get to eat pork pies but this weekend was the annual pork pie appreciation society annual competition and guest judge Pete Waterman helped to select a Huddersfield pie maker ! Last week however, I had a very nice rhubarb filled "pork" pie at the school production of Sweeney Todd.

SUN Conference top 3?

This is one of the questions on the feedback form - top 3 things learned?

• SUN's key messages are around communities, open source and there seems to be a particular focus on Sunray and storage technologies
• Preservation and archiving should probably be higher up on the "to do" list
• There are some really interesting Sunray and SGD installations in education around Europe - particularly Netherlands but also closer to home innovative stuff going on at Kings College and York (STEM next door to University).

SUN Conference Day Three - King's College London

Lynne Tucker Chief Technology Officer - what they are doing around Sunray technologies. Vision - to deliver a web-enabled access to all students and professional services staff (in first instance academic staff later). Using a mutli-sourced partnered approach if its "commodity computing". E-mail, sharepoint etc and also global desktop and also because data centre capability is poor looking to get others to run the servers too. Partnered with Getronics fo deliver the global desktop. The infrastructure is connected via JANET which is a first. One of the data centres is in Manchester, and the other is in the Midlands. Two of everything 25 terminal servers in each centre and 10 sgd servers in each (to manage 3500 concurrent desktops ultimately currently only 100). They have 350 applications (but lots of others they won't do for the moment). They don't have sunrays so using the existing PC stock to make this work on the desktop. Lots of cultural challenges - so now you want me to work at home? so you want me to hotdesk? I have some specialist stuff? strategy is to leave old PCs to die gracefully, move everyone to networked printing, access to new and shared filestore. Live demo! Personalised the SGD screen to make it Kings. "for us...it is going to revolutionalise the way we work". Students regard this as real added value service. Really interesting presentation.

SUN Conference Day Three (am session)

Peter Gehl - 3 minute video of colorado state university story on "eco computing". CSU emphasising its eco agenda calling itself a green university and the creation of an "academic village", plus 60 kiosks across the campus - focused on engineering discipline.

Gartner saying that PC Unit decline to be sharpest in history - the only difference is mininotebooks. Very large enterprise environments are refreshing out of PC cycle replacement to thin client devices or serving the desktop to existing devices. Larry Ellison (1998) - the PC is a ridiculous device.

VDI pipeline in last two years grown from $50M to $300M and sunray shipments also linear growth. Oranisations wanting to install multiple thousands. Talking about $300 per desktop is the kind of figure.

Carsten Thalheimer Sr Solutions Architect xVM. Lots of stuff happening in the desktop virtualisation roadmap - SunRay software 5, SunRay 2FS, SUN VDI 3, Sun xVM (virtualbox 2.2). They claim to have sorted out the multimedia quality problem but youtube etc delivered as flash is still a problem until 5 (Summer 2009) already available to evaluate. If you want to synch to outlook etc then USB redirection will also be supported (for XP and Vista only to begin with). A new sunray hardware supporting Gbit ethernet, USB 2 ports and higher resolution to allow 2 monitors to attach if you wish. SUN VDI 3.0 Sun Storage 7000 support, LDAP integration - and the key thing is you can do the whole thing without VMWare but you can also use them in conjunction with one another - also providing a migration path? SGD another major release has new component called Secure Gateway - this sounds like it will improve secure access into the data centre servers and this is also available for evaluation carsten.thalheimer@sun.com. Using the TCO tool is important when looking at this stuff - it's not about the cost of the client.

SUN Conference Day Two (Giunti Labs)

Quite different - this is a presentation about open standards solutions rather than open source. They have a learning content management system (called learn eXact - llooks like another proprietory alternative to Blackboard but maybe not in academic arena?) They bought Harvest Road Hive a year ago Australian product/supplier previously. The company is still a publisher so is diversifying. Slides about european learning industry group (elig) - why we should start changing our learning infrastructure i.e. moved beyond so called VLE 1.0 (e.g. monolith proprietory systems) through VLE 2.0 which is happening via grass roots content that is self generated and users are exchanging their own contents. Trend towards eLearning 3.0 which is much more personalised, granular content which is mobile, ubiquitous and delivered through open services. Open Knowledge Initiative - don't have a single platform but a bunch of components which you use to build your environment with. Step one is unbundling content from delivery platform also enabling mobile capability. Next step is putting a brokerage between the content and the presentation - is this actually the future of publishing more generally? Some case studies California State University (CalState Digital Marketplace). Technical University of Delft, Ecole Nationale Veterinaire de Lyon called VetTube. Massively complex slides and late in the day so struggling to keep up.

SUN Conference Day Two (PM)

Repositories and preservation archiving - Art Pasquinelli - a very interesting Digital Library Map setting out the key role of the digital library and respository. There is a community involved in this work SUN PASIG Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group. Fedora and D-Space are setting up a joint service called Duraspace a mix of cloud based and institution space. I think that our Bradford Scholars repository is underpinned by D-Space? Storage networking industry says that two thirds of content needs to be stored for >100 years - especially relevant to research datasets and special mention of pharmaceuticals. Lots of issues also around identity management and authorisation.

SUN Conference Day Two (Virtual Desktop Session)

A SUN Partner acceleris based in Switzerland - small team of 30. A poor man's VDI solution is at the heart of this session. An open source product called xVM VirtualBox - one of the things it allows you to do is run a variety of desktop operating systems on the same desktop. They also use Sun Global Desktop (SGD) to provide secure remote management to the Data Centre operations - either via internal network or also using the remote capability. Also a neat session recording facility e.g. for access by a third party company or external company played as a movie.

Couple of open source things provided - scripts and cookbooks on the net - type "Poor Man's VDI" into google (Tim Ebbers?). Will not work for large installations (not defined but not thousands targeted this at Schools initially). Avoids need for VMWare licences. SunVD Software and Virtual Box running on a small server (ultra?) is what you need. Simple and cost effective for proof of concept also. Future product is Xvm VDI 3.0 which seems to now incorporate these ideas - also open source - this is on general release next week.

A company called Cards Group based out of Eindhoven, Nederland. Another smaller company of 40+ in Benelux. What they are doing is building secure portals for clients. An example: scholingsboulevard.nl. This is how they use SGD and Sunray (500 seats currently). Very fast and powerful and key thing - students get it at home. Solution for when you want to deploy lots of seats - storage is key issue - so virtual storage becomes the problem, and massively compress (80%) reduction in storage. Project Virtual Storm. Virtual Storm uses 1.2GB per image. Rolling this out for multi-national client. Lots of interesting eduational clients in the Netherlands. Primary, Secondary and Universities. Primary is real challenge as they use up to 800 applications and many of them are highly graphical/multimedia etc. They have solved the problems ref streaming/video etc? 12k laptops running in the Regional Educational Centres - student chooses whatever laptop and whatever browser that they choose to buy using SGD.

EBOAT case study - 55 primary schools all on sunray no servers in the school. 3000+ clients, 90+ servers for Windows and Sunray.
Scholingsboulevard case study - 450+ clients moving to 8000 in next 3 years - gets rid of well trained parent or teacher to run this stuff - driver is desktop management and power consumption
Noorderpoortcollege case study - 1200 clients. They reckon a 250k Euro saving on power (50 Euro per unit)

other stuff from this company
Sunray power over Ethernet adaptor - saves a wall socket and also less cabling.
Sunray bracket mount - theft part reduced- to screw under desk or onto wall
Interactive kiosk - stainless steel structure with trackball - price is 3k versus 10k per unit - also put SGD on it
Sunray portable - all kinds of flavours - no disk, no memory etc - also working in smartphone device Big trends is to get mobile environment (Board Room?)
Also Mitel ip phones and cisco link to the card
Painted the sunray high gloss white with client logo! reduces theft completely?
USB Device Server - in particular digital smart boards - connecting up to 15 different USB devices.
SunRay biometrics for physical entry control (partner secugen) - finger or thumb log on
Hot Desk printing - walk to a printer connected to a sunray and then it is sent to print (also very secure and multi site).

SUN Conference Day Two (Morning Session)

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) facility is simply mind boggling in size and scale for colliding the smallest of particles. The annual data is in the order of 15 petabytes - 15000 terrabytes - 3 million DVDs - pile them up (without cases) and its 20 kilometres high. And because compute is so intensive they have created a worldwide computer grid with CERN as tier zero and then other worldwide facilities categorised as tiers 1 and 2. Sounds like a way that Universities and other research bodies have found ways to collaborate effectively and share resources. Oh, they also have to run email, web servers and payroll in their computer room. That must be interesting - maybe you can run some admin stuff so quickly that you don't even see it happening.

SUN Conference Day Two (Morning Session)

First session is underway at 08:30 although I'm still adjusting to GMT+1. The first two sessions this morning are focused on data intensive scientific computing and includes a presentation on the Large Hadron Collider. That's been getting a lot of media so I'm looking forward to that. The speaker Mark Hamilton also has a blog including this conference which is much much better than mine. Open Office has a new plug in that says not only save as...but also save as cloud. Mmm that could be interesting as he is giving the presentation that way this morning which is pretty brave (probably).
Tokyo Institute of Technology (TiTech) TSUBAME Supercomputer (weather forecasting?) funded by Japanese Goverment March 2006 built out of X86 components on Open Storage platform ( note that they are shipping 100 Petabytes of open storage every month - does that count as a data explosion?). Feb 2008 TACC Ranger Supercomputer in the US which is the largest open compute cluster in the world (half a petaflop of compute power). Key issues are all around power, cooling no longer footprint. Juelich Supercomputer in Germany in progress. SUN has edged ahead in terms of open storage attached to these devices. That must feed through into the more traditional stuff in most businesses.

SUN Conference Day One Reflection

Last night there was a small supplier exhibition and it was useful to meet two companies who are doing some interesting things - one that we were already aware of (Giunti Labs product Harvest Road Hive) and the other was new to me (moodlerooms.com). They both had a different perspective on "open source". The first product is a storage repository for learning material and allows you to unlock from a proprietory solution by holding the learning content in one place, and the delivery mechanism as a separate layer (e.g. Blackboard, Moodle, Sakai, mobile etc). The second is a professional service to "make moodle easier". It turns out that Bradford (not the University but the Schools) are using both of these products to deliver "open source" learning on SUN technology via Sunray technologies. I found this out over dinner talking to one of the SUN hosts. Its interesting that you have to come a long way to find out stuff that's happening on your doorstep.....last night we walked to the Brandenburg Gate which is splendidly lit up at night and we saw the line in the road where the wall used to be - there are two lines of cobbles to show the location. The snow had gone by then but it was still freezing cold but a refreshing walk after a pretty busy day.

SUN Conference Day One PM Session

This session runs until 6pm

Peter Tandy Sales Manager Europe - SUN Microsystems
The topic of this session is a new paradigm for managing data. Interesting stat over 37% of the world's archived data resides on SUN - seeing customers moving away from proprietory data storage solutions. Another phrase around innovation: "innovation loves a crisis". Over the last three years a big investment in storage innovation compared to previous years. There is going to be a copy of the slides made available so not worth repeating.

Professor Alexander Reinefeld, Head of Computer Science Zuse-Institute
Just some of the fascinating facts
Facebook is processing 10 Million requests per second....
You must replicate - gave examples of a German Library that burnt down in 2006, and an historical archive bulding that collapsed in February this year. We have had a pretty serious postgraduate level lecture on something called Scalaris. I think that one of the most interesting thing I heard was google have a patent pending for a data centre which resides in a boat - using wave energy to power the servers, and the ocean to provide the cooling and the whole thing floats on the high seas. That sounds like an interesting concept in terms of mobility! Overall, the key conclusions were tape archives will be there for a long time (they have long expected lifetime 10-30 years say, and they take little power and cooling). The second thing was RAM as the new disk - Google have one trillion URLs in RAM - better bandwidth and latency. The third thing - transactions are faster on the internet than a single disk access - anytime, anywhere. A nice finishing slide from the cover of Communications of the ACM 12/08 Vol 51 No 12 (which I cannot find online).

Steve Heller SUN Labs Director Collaborative Environments
Really smart speaker covering a very wide range of future technologies under investigation in the labs. Invitation to participate in the community at sun.research.com. Just too much to write about.

SUN European Education and Research Conference 2009 - Day One

Today is the first day of this three day event which is being hosted by SUN Microsystems in Berlin. This morning therefore involved an early 4am start and included an interesting descent into a combined snowstorm and thunderstorm. Might have been a good idea to bring a hat and scarf! The opening session begins with:

Introduction and Welcome – Robert Bergkvist, Regional Director Europe, Government, Education and Research, Healthcare – SUN Microsystems

• Key partners and representatives in Europe. A mix of partners (vendor exhibition/pavilion), customers (17 of these) and SUN executives (from CEO onwards). The US event is 500+ delegates, this event is 150+ delegates – aiming for a regional focus. Born at Stanford University 27 years of busines – the network is the computer (just so no-one ever forgets they relentlessly remind). $2 Billion annual investment in R&D. A win-win situation from the education endorsement of products and services which transfers into the commercial space. SUN has delivered 20 Petabytes (20k Terrabytes) in last few months to tier one customers.

SUNs value proposition to Education – Joe Hartley, Vice President Government, Education and Research, Healthcare – SUN Microsystems

• Download stats for Universities - 20k students or staff who have downloaded SUN open source (free) products from just 7 of the European Universities here today in the last 6 months: creating a virtual developer community. Making the investment in students through the SUN academic initiative (17k learning events this year), open source clubs (OSUM 75k students enrolled from 1400 Universities since Sept 09) and campus ambassadors (520 worldwide). Bradford has one of these.
  
• CEO highlights that students and Universities one of the few brightspots globally and it is innovation that will lead us out of recession. SUN wishing to do everything they can do to extend the student experience and activity.
• Student from Turkey (one of the five campus ambassadors present) who has studied in UK, and is now studying in Stockholm. More interested in free and open beer rather than free and open software!! More seriously, working on a water quality research project using wireless technology sunspots in developing countries collaborating with 5 other global students. Swedish program for ICT in developing regions. Planning to implement in Malawi as a prototype in 2009. A very polished presentation.
• WOW - mention of Bradford - Joe says one of the most innovative programs in the world in terms of the BSF initiative. Technology being developed inside the school - messaging software, moodle rooms and learner environments. He showed some photos of the school site visits that he made in 2008 which included a visit to the University of course.

Suggested that we join the community conversation here which is a new community initiative.

• Another campus ambassador - this student studying IT Entrepreneurship at Master Level again in Stockholm. Providing an open standard software product (delivered via a CD) to convert a PC into a router - early adopters in Malawi and Mozambique - believes open source has potential in terms of the business models for new business.
• Something called the Dunbar number - which is the maximum number of people that humans are able to interact with on a community basis. As there are 150+ people in the room makes a nice link.

Tea Break (I may not keep this level of detail up!)

Consultation event - let's go to the pub

Another consultation event in the Norcroft - this time for parts of Corporate Services. The University cannot be faulted for consulting a lot more in the last 6 months - however, there is a risk that the consultation is not deep enough or engaging enough with so many people and with limited amount of time for interaction - always tricky to find a good balance. At least the tech worked in the room today as it had been fixed by colleagues last week, and the handheld voting machines actually worked quite well and were fun if you like that sort of thing. Our current draft vision(s) are rather un-inspiring for me and not as clear as one of our speakers who was pictured pointing at a place in the distance with a strapline which said (I paraphrase) - see you at the pub at lunchtime. This is the absolute definition of a great vision!! (a) it's the pub, (b) I can visualise a pub , and a pint of real ale and a roaring fire (c) There is a clear time when we need to be there, and there is absolutely no mention of the nitty gritty about how we get there. What our vision(s) currently says is at best woolly and unclear. At conference last week Robin Seiger told delegates that we need clarity of outcome - define purpose cleary and explicitly. That's what we really need - maybe we should just all go to the pub at lunchtime and think about it.

UCISA Conference Day Three (March 13)

Friday the 12th and Comic Relief Day. A well organised charity collection by Richard Murphy in a red wig and fancy dress raised almost £900 - accompanying pictures may follow. A pretty intensive final part of the event with sessions from Robina Chatham on "ten things to take away" and Simon Mingay from Gartner on sustainable IT. Finally, a session from Robin Seiger who had an amusing and powerful story to tell about the recipe for success. Some personal and persuasive examples throughout a riveting session. Helped with final admin and dropping off materials from the stands as well as talking to people as they left. I think it went pretty well overall -we'll have to see what the feedback forms tell us. There will be some things we can improve next time and we know that we cannot please everyone. The organising team and the UCISA headquarters team in particular have done a fantastic job for 2009.

UCISA Conference Day Two (March 12)

Ed Gibson - chief (cyber) security advisor Microsoft.

Ex FBI - made an MOT analogy that it’s not enough to get the ticket once a year without further maintenance and repairs during the year - the same applies to our software systems - we must keep your systems maintained - not just for our benefit, but also to protect everyone else on the network. Not enough people are doing this routinely (reminded me of the virus

Free is not good – the major banks HSBC and Barclays provide free malware software ton online customers and only 5-7% take the offer up. The key thing is to do the software updates. Have a conversation about the impact of social networking sites from a security perspective.

Rod Angood (DynoRod) - University of Bath

Story of putting dark fibre through the drains of City of Bath. Winner of e-Goverment National Awards 2008 for innovation at a local level. Traffic congested city and a world heritage site – a challenging city environment. City based halls of accommodation (3000+ new intake) which are in the City about 2Km away from the campus on the downs. Five halls of residence previously connected via 10MB leased lines. A doubling of network capacity every 18 months was planning scenario. Web 2.0 incoming traffic quadrupled within 5 months . Warty moment - the management board meeting did not receive monitoring information although it was being collected. A system for performance monitoring and stats has now been implemented.

Educational video provided for students by academic staff (warty moment) and this had compounded the problem (not just Youtube). Bath has also recently updated its acceptable use policies – Expanding capacity from 10MB to 1GB and dual-routed for business continuity, upgrade university firewall for increased throughput, Supplier called H2O solutions lease costs £30k per year which are fixed for ten years including the BC (would have been £300k capital and then recurrent). IPTV from inuk adds additional service package for the student – free TV, free radio channels, IP based telephony. By April 2008 – 66% of all students, By Mar 2009 85% in all University rooms of accommodation were using the services. The digital divide – students living in shared accommodation etc who have to make their own arrangements.

UCISA Conference Day One (March 11) - Bucks New University

THis session was all about mentors, but actually asked some questions we'd heard earlier in the day (Sense a pattern here?). We know our students - don't we? We know our academic staff - don't we? Does it really matter that they all come with so many different and personalised requirements and support needs? There are over 600 mentors and growing at this University and managing these "non -paid" staff to provide them with the support they need for individual students in the work place and off-site is a real challenge. We probably have mentors but it's not an issue that I'm aware of - perhaps it occurs in the School of Health (it was specifically mentioned as one environment with diverse mentoring needs. Another place felt this was a really important issue for IT and for providing the support for Learning and Teaching but it just wasn't on many people's radars (yet?)

UCISA Conference Day One (March 11) - Royal Holloway Transformation Program

Key challenge to staff: why are we at Royal Holloway and why have we come to work today?
Set out a set of challenges they faced, did a systematic self-assessment (IT Capability Maturity Model) and came out at level 0 or 1 (out of 5). Eighteen months on, they are measuring 2s and 3s and heading in a new trajectory. Not easy and not quick. Interesting that external contractors came into the team and were helpful in reminding everyone what a good place it was to work (really) and the pride of working for education and "making a difference" rather than "making tin cans". There are three key PI's they adopted in first period:
Uptime of infrastructure 99.9
Delivery of projects on time and budget
Measures of quality and "customer satisfaction"
Lots of audience participation and many messages that other places are going, or have been going through significant change and re-orientation programs. There was a message about "spring cleaning" your processes every three to five years to avoid becoming stale - and the need for this to be ongoing change and not a point-in-time solution.

UCISA Conference Day One (March 11) - Sungard

Bill Graves also keeps a blog where the presentation is available. I think the most interesting stuff was actually off piste (ie not part of the presentation). He talked about some of the tools we use routinely (Google, Amazon, ebay) and whether we care where the servers are located, and how the data and systems are backed up, and who is maintaining etc etc. He reported that the Obama election was won in "the cloud" of social and other networking online. Quite a powerful video with some interesting factoids. Liked the phrase "let's not waste a perfectly good crisis", and a challenge: ask "how we can be the best for the world" versus "how can we be the best in the world (or whatever league table you are after improving)..." Again message about students: they are more under-prepared, there are more first generation (to HE) students, and more "needy" students - the pipeline has changed radically.

UCISA Conference Day One (March 11) - Keynotes

Prof. Steve Kenny PVC at Liverpool JM provided the welcome to Liverpool. Three key messages: we are dealing with a "new student profile", the student demographics are changing (2009-2019), the funding of education, and HE in particular, is going to get tough in the medium term. On the student profile - the busiest time for LJM students is 24:00-02:00 (not sure how measured). There will be a 20% decrease in 18 year olds in the North West in the next decade. Students want social learning zones (beyond learning resource centres and librarys). There is a key staff development opportunity at LJM - 25% of staff are aged 55 or over - there is soon to be a major shift in academic staff demographics too.

UCISA Conference Day One (March 11) - Blackboard

Spent this morning in a workshop hosted by Blackboard on managed hosting. The issues around the participants from other Universities were around "extended hours" (which was referred to as 24x7 but under closer scrutiny this was too broad a term), overseas and international collaboration activities (and managing support for students on those programs), a specific about students based in China (accessing resources through firewalls etc). There was also a fair amount of debate about the total cost of ownership of providing services whether managed or not, including the capital and recurrent elements, and of course the people investment. One Institution has five people running the system infrastructure. Interesting that none have 5 nines SLAs (or SLAs at all). Quite a debate about the mission critical nature of VLEs. So how mission critical are they really? more important than email? more important than getting out to the internet? And if they are so important, our typical culture says if it's important we must keep control by doing it ourselves? The actual business case was coming down to other things like ensuring change is well managed, tested and resourced; difficulties managing a dynamic and interactive environment; finding at risk windows for rigorous test and changeover of systems; delivery of 99.7% SLAs with a guarantee etc. One unrelated snippet worth remembering: the hidden cost of JANET for campus students accessing managed hosting solutions – the recurrent annual osts of outsourcing e-mail were an additional £30k per annum (£30k to £60k) for one Insitution.

IT Services Newsletter #7

Student Satisfaction Survey

At LSS Board, it was agreed to conduct a baseline student satisfaction survey of IT Services at the University of Bradford. This will be for a relatively small cohort of students in the first instance, aiming to get a representative sample of UG and PG students. We will be using an agency called TORA (The Oxford Research Agency) as they have experience in the UK HE sector and they have worked with other UK Universities. We need to be wary of survey “overload” and in future are looking to combine surveys with other colleagues in LSS to maximise returns and minimise the impact on students. This is an attempt to move away from some of the more anecdotal evidence about the customer service provision and IT Service provision to a more specific and statistically significant sample. More details to follow, but if you believe that there are any questions that we should be asking students then please let me know in the next couple of weeks.

Extending out of hours IT support in person

A date has been set for a “soft launch” of the NorMAN out of hours support service. The proposed date is April 6^th – the start of the new tax year, but no relation! “Soft launch” means we will not publicise widely so that we can set reasonable expectations for staff and students of what can be done through a remote service point. The initial contract is for one year. This shared service is operated from Northumbria University and is a 365 day service covering weekdays 5:30pm through 07:30am and through the weekend and public holidays. Thanks to Roger Goodair for co-ordinating with Northumbria and pulling together various documentation to pass to NorMAN for training and set-up of the service.

Environmentally friendly “pull” printing now trialling at School of Health

Another “soft launch” this time at the Unity Building of the Pharos system which combines printer and photocopying facilities for students and introduces a concept called “pull” printing. What this means is that students send something to print and then they release the print using a station located physically next to the printer they have selected. It should avoid piles of unwanted print outs on printers, saving some paper, and saving some students money on the paper they never collect. It also means that they can collect print at their own convenience at a time and place that suits them best. Once the trial is completed, the plan is to move all other centrally-provided student printers onto the Pharos system for the start of next academic session. Thanks to Dougie McHattie and Simon Bower for getting this ready to launch and for supporting the students and library staff during the launch period at the School of Health.

SAINT hardware upgraded

During the “at risk” period in December, IT Services moved the SAINT test and development services on to new hardware systems using a new “architecture” that is more resilient and provides better performance. This was followed up on Thursday 26th February and Friday 27th February when the “live” service was migrated onto new hardware components during the University 'reading' week. By completing the work by 2pm Friday it meant that e:Vision, online applications and enquiries were not affected over the weekend. The upgrade has been successful overall - there are a few issues that are being followed up including with third party packages/suppliers. Overall performance has been good and can be monitored at: http://www.brad.ac.uk/admin/SAINT/servicestatus.php

There were a lot of IT Services people involved in this exercise, and it also involved the SAINT Team in Academic Administration. A session is planned to pull together the lessons learned for such a complex undertaking to transfer knowledge to other system upgrades. Thanks to Philip Briggs and Tim Squire-Watt for co-ordinating all these activities.

ICT Service Desk Annual Report

At the last IT Board, our colleagues in ICT Support provided a comprehensive report on activity and service levels during the calendar year 2008. The report will soon be made available via the intranet . The team were able to report that over 90% of jobs raised with them through our job tracking system (RMS) were completed within target, and that the total volume of jobs increased by 12% over 2007. In February 2009, the service desk team also began a new customer satisfaction feedback process which resulted in 5% of our customers responding to a simple information request when there job was completed. Over 95% of those who responded rated the service excellent or very satisfied. This customer feedback will be continued on a monthly basis and will be reported to the IT board. This information will shortly be posted to the web for all to see. Thanks to Christine Thacker and Roger Goodair for putting the report together and for introducing these customer feedback initiatives.

Web Content Management System (CMS) and Web Team update

The e-strategy funded project on CMS is coming to an end and work is moving from a project status to an ongoing business status. The final stage of the CMS Project will be a formal agreement on the end of the project. This is envisaged to take place during March. The final activities of the project will be for Russell Allen and Claire Gibbons to write a final stage report and a project report which will include a section on the lessons learnt. The Press Office was prioritised as the first new site using the Site Manager product from Terminal Four. This has been developed and went live on 24^th February; see: http://www.brad.ac.uk/mediacentre/ . The Web Team has now been formed with the appointments of Paddy Callaghan as the Web Developer and Kate Wellham as the Web Editor. Congratulations to Claire Gibbons and her team on the successful launch of the new technology, with support from colleagues in IT Services.

Combating e-mail overload

Do you suffer from receiving or sending too much email? I guess sending newsletters via email makes me guilty! A number of people came together last week to discuss the issue of e-mail overload which has been reported through consultation forums e.g. the Making Knowledge Work sessions for the corporate plan, and through recent meetings with representatives in academic schools e.g. SCIM and SSIS specifically. Did you know that we receive around 1 Million messages a week, that 95% of them are rejected before delivery to individual mailboxes (junk, spam etc) and that there are approximately 25,000 active email user accounts for our staff and students. Each message we send costs about a third of a penny. We agreed various approaches in this meeting which will be written up and circulated – Gartner Group (IT industry consultants) make various recommendations to tackle email overload that have been “proven” in case studies. The first thing they suggested we do is ask a lot of questions prior to taking action. On that basis, we agreed to ask specific questions in a staff survey which is happening soon on staff well-being.

UCISA National Conference 2009

During March (March 11-13) there is an annual management conference for the Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association. Last year I was elected (unopposed – no other volunteers!) to Chair the conference for the three years commencing 2009. This is my first event in this role and it is at the new Liverpool Exhibition and Conference Centre. There is a parallel poster session taking place this year, and John Dermo has agreed to provide a poster and represent Bradford University to promote the Computer Aided Assessment project funded partly by the JISC which was launched in January. It is great to be able to promote our work on a “national stage” and I am grateful to Sara Eyre and John Dermo for putting this together. Geoff Bell and I are also travelling early to the conference for a pre-event presentation by Blackboard on its managed hosting solutions. The conference includes an exhibition with over 60 key suppliers to Higher Education and this is one of many events and seminars taking place around the conference programme. I'll be blogging from the conference over the next three days.