Infrastructure Team
During the April period a number of actions were taken including the SAINT service upgrade, which was effectively a double upgrade as the users had postponed one upgrade from Christmas. The upgrade is a team effort including the supplier (Tribal), Sue Schmassmann and Richard Davis on the e-vision functions. It seems to have gone very smoothly. We were also performing a three day pro-active performance test on the Blackboard service with the supplier to predict the service capability when fully loaded and beyond. The tests which were mainly conducted overnight went well and we await the results. Finally a number of services were patched and re-started and this included a switching one of the fibre network channels which also went without a hitch. Thanks to everyone for planning another successful series of service changes and improvements.
ResNet and RoamNet reports
You might be wondering why end of year report now? Well March or April is usually the busiest month in terms of RoamNet (and ResNet) activity, depending on when Easter is. This year after March there's either holiday, exams or general lack of students on campus. Below
Headline figures are:
* Number of usernames logging on to RoamNet is 4162, breaking the 4k barrier for the first time.
* ResNet and RoamNet overall 4759 unique usernames used the service, also highest ever.
* JBP Building had 2176 usernames connecting.
IT Support and Telecoms Team
Saving Money ("low hanging fruit!")
We are reviewing and re-tendering a number of our long term support contracts with a view to delivering budget savings where possible. Roger Goodair has completed a successful tendering process for maintenance of the telephone switch (PABX) and telephones systems support, a two year contract (commencing 1.4.10) has been awarded. This process provided a budget saving to the University. We are currently completing the review of the corporate mobile carrier contract.
IT Services Monthly Customer Survey continues
We continue to provide a 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. We are continuing to including customer 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.
Systems Team
Recent Award shortlisting
A recent project has been shortlisted for an award. It is for the for the Excellence in Knowledge Transfer Interdisciplinary Working Award (phew its a long title). Colleagues involved in the MEDS project have been invited to present to the judging panel on Wednesday 21 April with an invitation to the Awards dinner on 21 April. Congratulations to John Fairhall and colleagues Chris Dearnley , Stuart Walker and Jak Radice. We were not successful on this occasion for the submissions we made to the Times Higher Award or the Green Gown Award for the Computer Aided Assessment Project. It was worth making a submission but the competition is clearly very tough.
Self-Service for annual leave
The MyView service was extended to include the Annual Leave module. This is part of the HRX project developments. It initially allows staff to request holidays online and receive confirmation (or rejection!) from their line manager. This replaces the current variety of paper and electronic systems across campus, and also allows the added functionality of viewing annual leave details online for both individuals and teams. The service was prepared for launch during March with support from Paula Burnett, and went live from 1st April.
New service to streamline annual research monitoring
A new system has been released to support collection of management information from researchers. The Individual Research and Knowledge Transfer Monitoring system (IRKTM) which provides a web-based data collection and validation mechanism for the Individual Research Monitoring return. This has been released initially to a small group of users before full rollout. Tamsin Holt in RKTS is very pleased with the system and thinks it is a great improvement on what went before. She’s particularly pleased with our plan to bring disparate R&KT data from across several University systems into this one for checking in future years. Thanks to Andy Walmsley for making great progress on this project.
Boards of Examiners
As the academic year moves towards is final stages and exams are approaching there have been some further developments to exam board processing. Peter Jones has now completed the Board of Examiners reports to support Foundation Degrees.
UK Border Agency
We have completed the first electronic transmission of data between the University and the UK Border Agency, with thanks to Rick Graves. This uses the new module which provides student data from SAINT to the UKBA’s SMS database.
General Stuff
Green Impact initiatives
Following up the recent national student initiative called the Green Impact assessment, we are now working our way through the departmental green impact worksbooks Initially we have a representative from each of the three IT Teams in this assessment work and (Andy Walmsley, Christine Thacker, Dave Ewen). More information is available here. Please expect a few targeted emails from us over the next few weeks about all things Green as we promote various things that are going on around the University.
UCISA Conference 2010
The annual conference at Harrogate is now available to view on-line at the UCISA website – this includes the videos of each presentation. There is a starring role for our Vice Chancellor Mark Cleary and if you are able to find the time I can recommend a browse and a look at the presentation from Larry Hincker of Virginia Tech about the challenges they faced before during and after the terrible massacre three years ago – including the impact on IT Services in ways you might not have imagined.
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