Developments in IT. 1. Desktop Management Software. 2. Wireless Network. 3. Student Records System (SCIMS/eVision)

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1 Developments in IT This paper covers recent developments in IT Services. Annex A details the communication sent to students during Welcome Week. 1. Desktop Management Software IT have successfully set up our PCs in student labs and pool rooms using the new Alteris software agent. This software enables PCs to be configured and managed remotely without the need for a technician to visit each PC to make changes or add software. The plan to deploy this software tool to staff machines is about to begin with a small pilot phase. Once the pilot phase is completed further communication will be sent out and work will commence on other administrative departments and faculties across campus. 2. Wireless Network Our internet link to the outside world has now been upgraded from 1 Gb to 10Gb during July, this is working well and has enhanced the network for both staff and students. As our WiFi coverage does not extend to all outside places on campus the network team have created a mobile portable solution which can be used to increase outside WiFi coverage. The solution was used over the summer for the large outside event, the Keele Cup Football Tournament. This new mobile event WiFi solution means that WiFi can now be accessible in temporary locations such as marquees and outdoors for special events. To arrange set up and hire of this solution please contact the IT Service Desk. The eduroam wireless service has been extended and is now available in Newcastle under Lyme Library and other Staffordshire Libraries across the county. This will be officially announced when the support procedures are finalised. 3. Student Records System (SCIMS/eVision) Our SCIMs team are currently working on a number of projects, the main ones currently being A1/8

2 undertaken at the moment are: UCAS Paperless Admission process being prepared for deployment. Absence recording being used throughout schools. Additional PGR functions under development. Open and Visit Day management migrated to Hobsons Connect. IPP Online applications being tested for deployment in October Revised electives module management and student selection system has been implemented. Student Status Change (Leave Of Absence) system under development Extenuating Circumstances under development 4. Google Mail, Calendar, Docs and Apps The old departmental format addresses have now been switched off. Anyone ing the old addresses will receive a message in reply informing them that the old addresses are no longer valid and directing them to the University s directory service to look up the new address. New Google training courses are planned for this academic year. The training courses will be for students as well as staff. s announcing these training courses will be sent out after the start of semester. 5. Keele Card Work is underway regarding the replacement Keele Card and associated systems. The first steering group will meet in September. Sub groups have been set up encompassing colleagues across campus to look at implementation, access control, cashless vending and card management. The KeeleCard top up site is being redeveloped to provide a more intuitive interface and to comply with the University's branding guidelines. Facilities will exist for students to purchase meal packages online. Keelecard payment stations have been installed in both the campus and CEC library locations, to provide facilities for students to pay library fines using KeeleCard. 6. Replacement HR/Payroll System (Keele People) Work is on going setting up, configuring and testing the new system. Human Resources have developed a communications plan to ensure colleagues are fully briefed on the Keele People project and its progress, along with training and drop in sessions for future key users of the system. 7. Updates to Library IT Suite We have updated the desktop PC facilities in the Library IT Suite. The open access area PCs, along with the PCs in labs 5,6 & 7 have all been replaced with new HP All in One PCs. Using All in One PCs allows us to provide a larger screen whilst still reducing the total amount of desk space the computers A2/8

3 use. This allows students more space for their notes and research materials etc. Also, the AV upgrade work is now complete with all teaching labs in the IT Suite having new projectors, speakers and control panels. Labs 1&2 and 5&6 now also have the facility of linked projectors. The introduction of 2 ipad kiosks in the IT Suite will allow students to carry out self service tasks and access IT help resources out of hours without the need to logon to a PC. 8. AV Facilities Approval has been given to create a Concept Learning Space within the Chancellors Building. This room will showcase the very latest in learning technologies, allowing students and academics to trial new room layouts and teaching methods and provide valuable feedback to shape future learning strategies at Keele. Support from AV staff will be available. Work on the room is about to start with an estimated launch date around the start of semester 2. Summer installations have included 5 new pool rooms (2 in Chancellors, 3 in Dorothy Hodgkin) with a new style lectern being trialled in 2 of the rooms, to provide more desktop space on the lectern. Video production work continues with productions for the Library, Marketing, Student's Union, PAA, Physio and Law amongst others. Graduation streaming went very well and we are now trialling a backup system for Graduation in case of failure of our main streaming unit. 9. XP End of Life The Windows XP operating system is no longer officially supported. Using it is now considered a significant security risk and any remaining Windows XP computers that still remain (without workarounds in place) will be removed from the network. Anyone still running Windows XP on their University owned computer should contact the IT Service Desk or your usual IT support team for A3/8

4 advice. 10. Topdesk Developments Roll out of Topdesk Topdesk 5.2 has now been rolled out to the Security team to replace the dated version of Topdesk Professional 3 which they had previously been using. The Security team collaborate with Occupational Health, Critical Incident Support Team, who are using the system to communicate with students, log campus incidents and report on incidents logged. They also liaise with Estates and Accommodation departments, who have been added to the topdesk system but are yet to use it operationally. Student Support Centre have now adopted Topdesk as their method of logging communications with students. There is still some additional modifications to make to their functionality which will be ongoing over the next few months. HR/Payroll and Library should be going live on Topdesk before the end of IT have also purchased a new Forms module for Topdesk which has enabled us to produce individual incident forms in the Self Service Desk. The advantage of these forms is that it ensures that all the relevant information can be collected at the point of enquiry and completed by a staff or student member. Promotion of the self service desk alongside the use of single sign on will begin in the latter part of Semester Keele Learning Environment The Blackboard Learn software has been updated and all the stability updates have been put in place. This new version of the software has seen a major overhaul of the assignment tool with plagiarism detection and anonymous marking added as well as the ability to allocate the marking duties to any of A4/8

5 the instructors or teaching assistants. You can now create double, triple and quadruple anonymous marking for all submissions or just a fixed number of the submissions with marking duties assigned to individual markers. You will now see an eye symbol on the top bar of your course which allows you to take a look around as if you were a student. This feature is similar to the Edit OFF feature but does give a more complete student view. Pre built content for your course is available from a number of sources. The mashup tools allow youtube videos, slideshare, flikr and xplor content to be added from the Build Content menu. One of the newest mashup tools is xplor which is a content sharing system built by Blackboard which is well worth exploring. Publisher content is available under the Tools course building menu where content from Wiley, Pearson and McGraw Hill can be included. The Partner Content build menu allows access to even more commercial content from Taylor and Francis, Vital Source, and Cengage. 12. WPM Software to manage online payments for a wide range of functions such as Conferencing, Student Fees, ad hoc Sales, Donations, Event Booking, has been purchased and a working group will be established to oversee its introduction. 13. Awaydays A number of consultation Awaydays were held with other IT staff, both within the IT department itself and from other faculties (the Colloquium group), to look for ideas as to how IT might best provide for the future needs of the university. Further Awaydays are planned for Autumn 2014 with faculty teaching staff and students. 14. Protime To compliment the installation of KeelePeople, Protime Time and Attendance, in use in operational areas is being updated to provide payroll interfaces to KeelePeople. Completion is targeted for the end of September Kinetics Procedures to automate the inspection of bedrooms have been put in place and are planned to go live at the start of the new academic year. The system uses handheld mobile devices to record a rooms status based on predefined inspection lists. The system integrates to the Kinetics Accommodation system installed last year. A5/8

6 16. PC Procurement Tender Approval has been given to proceed to tender for sole supplier of desktop PCs, laptops and Windows tablet devices. A technical implementation group is currently being formed involving technical representatives from across the University. Their task will be to complete the technical elements of the tender documentation, and also evaluate equipment once responses have been received. The tender will be restricted to the existing purchasing framework, so the contract will ultimately be awarded to an existing Keele supplier. More details will be communicated as the tender progresses. 17. Storage, Virtualisation and Backup IT have been working to improve the server infrastructure that supports critical applications such as authentication, HR, KLE and the student records system. Over recent months we have migrated our storage to a replicated storage system which improves the time to recover from a catastrophic failure and also allows for systems to expand with less downtime. The KLE database and content storage was migrated over the summer which has greatly improved the response time of the KLE but also allowed an older storage system to be retired. IT are moving most of the service infrastructure to a virtualised environment which allows a lot of flexibility in reacting to changes in the service load. Virtualisation is where a service which would normally be hosted on its own physical server is instead hosted in a virtualised environment on a much larger server. The larger server hosts many virtualised servers which means that we require far fewer physical servers to run the same services which in turn saves power and cooling. Virtualisation has reduced the power consumption of the servers by 30%. Because the virtualised environments can be moved (even while the service is running) this allows a significantly faster response in recovering from failures and allows for some upgrades to be done seamlessly. IT have introduced a new robotic tape archiving system giving 300TB of online tape store with each data centre backing its disk store to the tape storage in the other centre. The tapes are kept for archiving purposes in a fireproof safe. Last updated September 2014 by: NP,JWK,PB, SG A6/8

7 Annex A Hi and welcome from IT, whether you are new student to Keele or a returning student, we hope that you find this useful and it may be one that you need to keep for future reference. eduroam the way to connect Whether you are living on or off campus, you will want to connect to the wireless network, via your smart phone, tablet or laptop. You will see two networks in your wifi network list eduroam or visitor. eduroam is your secure wireless network which you connect to using your Keele address and password. Visitor is a restricted network which you can connect to, it will not ask you to log in but will only give you access to Keele Web pages. Remember that to log into eduroam you will need your Keele Address and password. eduroam is a secure network which has been developed for the international research and education community and therefore enables you to use a secure network in other institutions throughout the UK and world. ****NEW FOR 2014 **** eduroam is now available in Newcastle-under-Lyme Public Library and other Staffordshire Libraries across the county. For a full list of libraries check out Remember if you are using eduroam in another location other than Keele and you experience difficulty, contact the IT Service Desk at Keele. Once connected to Wifi Check out where you can set up your laptop to print on the printers in the IT Suite or connect to your S:Drive. New PC s in the Library and IT Services Building Over the summer we have installed new HP all in one PC s in the IT Suite and in Lab 5,6,7. They take up less space than the old Dell computers, so you have a little bit more desk space to work on. KLE Improvements to the look and feel of your KLE home page has taken place over the summer we have also included a getting started video which gives you a tour of the KLE. You can still customise your front page and include additional modules which are useful to you. Log on to students.keele.ac.uk to check out the improvements. Laptop Loan Scheme Our laptop loan scheme is available for all students. We now have 20 long term laptops for hire at a cost A7/8

8 of 20 for 2 weeks (+ 20 refundable deposit). To book one of these laptops just visit the IT Service Desk. If you just need a laptop for the day our short term laptops are available for hire during office hours and they are free of charge. Laptop Clinic Our Laptop Clinic is available at the IT Service Desk, during office hours, should you have a virus on your laptop or need assistance setting up your games console on the network. For a small fee the technicians will repair or fix the problem. For further details see IT Service Desk Our team of IT Advisors are available to help and advise you on any IT/telephone related issue, so whether your telephone is not working in your study bedroom or you have forgotten your password give us a call, or visit, or us We have extended our opening hours until the 3 rd October as below:- Wednesday 24th - Friday 26th September pm Saturday 27 th Sunday 28 th Monday 29 th September Thursday 2 nd October We are also available in the Chancellors Building on Saturday 27th September between 9.00 am and 3.00 pm. For details of our opening times please see And for when the service desk is not available we have also introduced a self service area where you can log an incident, give feedback about IT, browse the Keele Web pages and change your password. The Self Service Area is located next to the IT Service Desk in the IT Suite, Library and IT Services Building. Why not follow us on or check out our Facebook page. A8/8