Here is the February newsletter. As usual, it only highlights a few things which I hope are of general interest. February has felt a bit of a dark and dismal month down here where the natural light rarely shines in Winter. It feels like Spring has arrived which is welcome. I am away for the latter half of this week involved with the Annual UCISA Management Conference which is at Harrogate this year in the National Exhibition Centre. Our involvement has ensured some inward investment in the Region and that the University of Bradford has a high profile including Prof. Mark Cleary opening the event, a poster presentation on “Develop Me!” and support for the World Cafe session on the hot topic of student attendance monitoring.
Online Applications on the increase
As reported last month new online application processes have been launched in eVISION. Richard Davis has provided the following statistics:
• 32 of the 75 agent login accounts created have logged in at some point.
• 33 new course applications accounts have been generated.
On the non-agent side (standard applications using the same process), we have had 1627 application records created in total (including the 33 Agent ones) since 26th Jan , when we launched the new process. 444 of these have been transferred.
Sunrays in the Estates Rest Room
IT support team has installed and launched six sunrays in the newly refurbished Phoenix North East Building for use by a wide range of Estates and Ancillary staff so that they can access University information simply and easily – including the on-line payslip system in MyView. This new system has been well received by staff in Estates.
Update on Printer Maintenance Protocols
Shukhrat is already fulfilling duties relating to early morning PC/Printer checking and paper filling of printers – this covers all IT Services owned cluster areas. All faults are reported to ICT Servicedesk and routed to the appropriate team. First level printer support processes will change from Monday 1st March. JBP will be covered by Library Assistants and Library Stewards; Shukhrat will still provide printer checking and filling duties for clusters external to JBP. Level one jobs (paper filling and basic faults) will be logged in RMS and passed to the LSC team who will liaise with Library Assistants and Stewards to get these jobs completed.
Repainting parts of level zero one
We have been negotiating a minor works project on Level Zero One in conjunction with Caroline Hicks our Fellow in Arts. We are pleased to report that this has now been agreed and attached to this email is the painting plan. Painting will hopefully start week commencing 29th March. Picture hanging will then commence from week 7th April. We will be placing some of the art exhibition that was recently displayed in the Richmond Atrium (photographs of our own students on campus) and it is the intention to create an art space along the corridors that can be used for exhibitions and displays. I am very grateful to Liz Mortimer who has made all this happen.
“Account Management” Meetings continue
A previous newsletter announced a new account management process. We have continued to meet the School IT Manager’s (and/or nominees) every month since the start of this Session and we are also meeting Academic Schools and Corporate Services teams in regular review meeting including Deans and Directors. We are also getting some excellent feedback from the LSS representatives on the Staff Student Liaison Committees which we are using to follow up and improve services. This process will evolve over the next year but appears to have got off to a good start.
Flexible Working?
The flexible working page is ready to launch. This was first initiated by the emergency project board and prioritised as a result of the adverse weather in December and January. A number of staff and student sabatticals have already been trialling the service. It can be found here and will be launched shortly. You may be interested in having a go with the branded Sun Global Desktop service which provides staff with a remote PC through a web browser. If you haven’t tried this before it is fairly impressive. If you have been using it for a while then you may have just gotten used to it (like me). The service should allow for up to 100 concurrent PC sessions but that is something that hasn’t yet been fully tested so I expect colleagues in the Infrastructure Team would be pleased to have some feedback on how it works including performance before it gets wider publicity.
Green Impact initiatives
Following up the recent energy carbon conference held in February, IT Services will be carrying out a national student initiative called the Green Impact assessment. There is help and assistance provided by the Ecoversity Office. It is something that was also raised through the internal “JAM” sessions run by Jason Maher in LSS. Initially we will involve three colleagues from each of the three IT Teams in this assessment work and (Andy Walmsley, Christine Thacker, Dave Ewen). More information is available here. In the conference we awarded ourselves a silver (for the mini survey) and won a used google Frisbee. Please do not get too excited about the chances of further exciting prizes (but jam may be involved). There have been other “green” goings on this month including our involvement in the User Group for the Sustainable Enterprise Centre building project, and launching a procurement process for sustainable desktop IT in this new building. We have also been invited to participate in a national Sustainable ICT project sponsored by the Environmental Association of Universities and Colleges (EAUC), and we are currently finding out what that might involve.
CampusM
For those with an iPod Touch or an iPhone the suppliers of our Campus M solution have launched an App for the UCISA Management Conference 2010. It is free to install and demonstrates the technology. Just go to the App Store and search UCISA. The App will be made available on other smartphone platforms in the future, and it was a demonstrator for this particular event sponsored by Apple and OmBiel. You may be able to imagine how such an App might be used for internal conference events or Open Days etc. The speed and quality of development and delivery provides reassurance for Bradford’s own Mobile App which is in development.
Further Award Submissions
We have followed up the submission to the Times Higher Award reported last month, with submissions to the UCISA Award for Excellence and the Green Gown Awards (first stage submission for outstanding ICT initiative). We were unsuccessful in the UCISA submission which has been awarded to Canterbury Christ Church with its iBorrow project. Given that there was an iTunes submission from Oxford, I wonder if everything is now “i” instead of “e”. Full details of the UCISA submission and awards can be found here.
IT Services Monthly Customer Survey continues
We continue to provide mechanism for the users of our services to provide feedback both as a result of specific “logged jobs” and also through the general feedback forms. This month wanted to mention just one bit of feedback which simply said: “Just received some excellent help on Meeting Maker, from Alastair Wills, benefiting the whole Team”. As a new innovation, we are now including comments on our services which fairly reflect the feedback we receive both good and not so good, in the monthly IT servicedesk reports which can be found here.
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