IT Services Newsletter #43

Small Successes

At the start of our monthly IT Board we begin by sharing small successes over the last month. At today’s meeting:

• There were no service interruptions to report (hurrah!)
• The IT “at risk” period was successful with a number of important changes taking place. The upgrade to the Novell ZEN infrastructure, which directly affects all of the student PC cluster provision, was a particular success.
• A high priority request to re-write Board of Examiners reports for the new assessment rules was completed.
• The Student Union sabbatical elections were a great success in terms of student engagement – the largest turnout ever – and supported by an electronic voting system.
• There were lots of other small successes that weren’t reported!

Project News

At IT Board we reported on the latest rolling plan for IT Services. A reminder that this document and others (like our organisation chart, account management documents, lessons learned and plans etc) are all published here. The overall scorecard of projects is largely the same but it makes a change to report that we had no new “panic projects”. There are 72 items we are tracking on the plan (down from 78 last time) and 35 of these are live activity (versus suspended or waiting for approvals etc). There were 3 items that were reported as completed and/or now business as usual since the last meeting.

 Windows 7/Office 2010 roll-out continues

The migration of the Hub back office to PC’s/Win 7/Office 2010 has now commenced and the IT Support team is aiming to complete this by the end of April. Preparations are now being made for School of Life Sciences rollout (email already gone out to all School staff) to commence in June and to be completed by the beginning of 13/14 academic year.

Upgrade to the Solidus Contact Centre Service

An upgrade to the Solidus system went ahead as planned in late February. The IT Support team can now begin to look into additional functionality such as SMS, chat and social media feeds – Twitter and Facebook. We will be pursuing that with the supplier (Telent).

XCRi Project concluded

This JISC-funded project has allowed us to undertake a thorough analysis phase with many stakeholders and create a full specification of what a new Module/Course Approval system needs to do. Such a system would essentially replace ModCat and a series of largely manual processes. The XCRi Project Board now has a series of options for how progress a new system (ie. buy, build, defer).

SAINT Review

The Project Board for the SAINT/SITS Review was presented with a series of options and took the decision to keep the SITS system, and invest in a development programme to fix current issues and also enhance the usability and usefulness of the system. Next stage is to consider a series of costed options which would lead to formation of the development plan. Tribal have now presented a costed plan and this will be considered at the next Project Board.

Attendance Monitoring

The Attendance Monitoring solution has had its initial software load onto the servers, there is much IT and Estates work to complete between now and student arrival in September. The first fifteen power/network installations were successfully completed over the Easter vacation period.

Upgrade to HR/Payroll Systems

The HR/Payroll system Resource Link was upgraded to allow Tax Year-End processing. It's associated web view, called MyView has also been upgraded, though is currently running slow. There is a plan in place to address this in the short term and a longer term proposal on future support from Northgate (our supplier) at the end of April.

Mobile Apps

The first phase of the Prospectus profile on the About UoB mobile app has been completed. Please take the time to have a look at the app and provide any feedback that you have. If you haven’t already downloaded the App and you have a “smartphone” then why not give it a go?

When the University is closed

A self-subscribe SMS group has been set up for staff and students that want to receive notices about the University closing. Almost 500 people have subscribed so far. The Details are:

To Subscribe, txt “closed” to +447950080705

To unsubscribe at any time, txt “no.closed” to the same number. The full stop is important.

Okay so this happens extremely infrequently, but when it does folk can be inconvenienced with un-necessary travel etc. The service can be used for other things maybe. Something to think about perhaps. Who knows when Spring will begin!

New IT Services Website

We are planning to launch the new IT Services website in August and would be grateful if you could spare some time to have a look at it and let us know what you think.

Please could Jacqui Cuthbert have all responses back by the end of May, to allow for enough time for amendments etc. You can either complete the attached form electronically and attach it in an email to Jacqui (j.cuthbert1@bradford.ac.uk), or print it and return it in the internal mail.

Art Work Changes

The artwork that was previously displayed in the corridors and foyer on Level 01 JBP Building has been taken down in order for a new piece of work to be displayed. The new work has recently been on display in the Richmond Atrium and is called “Leap Year”. It will hopefully make you smile. You may spot a number of people and places in and around Bradford in the work. We have also put some work on display in the foyer area (by Bradford students) and will be displaying some photographic pieces that were previously on display in the Richmond Refectory area. My thanks to our Fellow in Arts for making this happen.

This is just a quick snapshot of some of the projects and activity which might be of interest. There is, as always, lots of other activity happening, so apologies if your work wasn’t included – please let me know for the next newsletter. 
Until next time