To:
All in IT Services
The
start of a new academic year is an immensely busy time as we welcome thousands
of new and returning students back to the University. This year has been
no exception with lots of great events and welcoming activities. For the
first time IT Services had a very visible presence in the “front of house”
enrolment operations based in the Richmond Atrium. This was a success
dealing with lots of questions and providing help and reassurance about a wide
range of technical and not so technical requests. We have held a
follow-up event to collect all of the feedback together and make further
improvements next time. We also had a team of people in Richmond F42 providing the University enrolment helpline and this was an
incredibly busy operation starting as telephone support in the earlier weeks
and becoming face-to-face support during enrolment with the Hub. In
amongst, we also launched the new attendance monitoring system and students
began “checking in” at all the teaching locations on campus (with a capacity of
more than 10) in all the timetabled activities. Students appear to have
adapted well to the new “check in” process and management information is now
flowing about attendance reporting, although much work remains to embed the system
fully.
As
always, comments, feedback and input for next time is always welcome.
Graham
A
Level Results, Clearing and Confirmation
We have received a letter from Prof. Barry Winn in which he asks me to
convey his thanks to all those involved.
Compliments
on the new LSS and IT Services website
There has been a great deal of work in
preparing the launch of the new LSS and IT services web presence. During
September 2013 the amount of web traffic to the site doubled versus September
2012. Sara Marsh commented: “I see the new websites (LSS and IT)
are up and running - congratulations, it's all looking very nice and new (just
like Student Central!). Thanks for all the hard work on getting this
ready in time for the new term”.
New
state of the art student PC facility
We have re-launched our premium PC cluster facility for
general teaching use in the JBP Building (room 01.53). It was further
improved over the Summer with a deep clean like brand new (it had new carpets
and lighting last year anyway), a fresh paint job, 72 brand new computers and
our colleagues in AV services have installed over a dozen large screen TVs to
enable the room to be available for teaching purposes with both music, video,
and screen display capabilities. Take a look – it has a bit of a “wow”
factor.
School of Social and International Studies invests in
student PC upgrades
IT Support has reported the following Summer
improvements in one of our Facility Managed schools:
Pemberton 2.12 (cluster/teaching room) has 20 PCs which have
been upgraded from 5 year old Viglens.
Pemberton 2.08 (postgraduate room) with 7 PCs has been
upgraded from 6/7 year old Nec VL360s.
Pemberton 0.04b (postgraduate room) with 6 PCs has been
upgraded from a mixture of Viglens and NEC VL360s
Ashfield T0.02 (postgraduate room) is also being upgraded
from 5 year old Viglens .
Student Printer Credit
Once again the new students received a print/copy credit on
their accounts at the start of the new year. There were just over 3,500
on campus students (by October 4th) who were each credited with £2.
Performance Recognition Scheme
I am currently meeting with all of the recipients of
awards which were presented to the LSS committee for consideration. This
committee is constituted to look at all cases across LSS and includes external
and HR representations etc. There were a number of successful
submissions. Congratulations to all those who received an award – Sara
has already sent a separate message.
Wi-Fi improvements (Heaton Mount)
Over the Summer the wi-fi upgrades to Heaton Mount Old
Building, Extensions and Bedrooms for universal wi-fi coverage at an estimated
cost circa £15-20k were completed. The School of management has pretty
much universal wi-fi coverage in this space.
It has been a long journey through several Deans and years
to get to this point. Delays were caused by a lack of budget/funding
rather than any technical or other issue – although we did encounter a number
of Estates challenges along the way given the nature of the buildings. The
funding issue was finally resolved when we had agreement from Finance to commit
the monies from central budgets.
Alison Thickett (Senior Operations Manager for Sodexho at
Heaton Mount) commented: “I do want to add that Drew and the team have
been brilliant, they have worked around our schedules and business within
Heaton Mount”
Examinations Feedback
During the late Summer, we were involved in supporting a
wide range of supplementary assessments which were co-ordinated within IT Support team and of course others assisted with
the computer aided assessments in the infrastructure team. This email was
received from the exams office:
“I wanted to let you know personally that the service we
have received from all the IT Services Team during the August examination
period has been excellent. All the team have been prompt, helpful and
responsive to the needs of the candidates. They conducted their business
in a professional and polite manner at all time.” Julie Hodgson (Examinations
Team Leader)
IT Services Annual Report 2012-13 (Draft)
We have been working on a document which summarises the
department’s work over the last academic session. Annual reports for the
last four years are published here. We will be producing a shorter copy which we are working on
at the moment as well as a student summary. In the meantime, the current
working draft is attached and I would welcome comments and feedback in the next
week, before we move to a final circulation. Please let me know if we
have (inadvertently) missed something important that you have been working on
in 2012-13.
Until
next time
