A lot’s been happening behind the scenes in IT recently. Here are just a few of the latest developments.
- Update: helping Cleaning Services colleagues set up their IT accounts
- Moving the Image Library to the cloud
- Steps towards a new Postgraduate Customer Relationship Management (PGT CRM) system
- A crowning achievement
Update: helping Cleaning Services colleagues set up their IT accounts
Congratulations to Harriet Boatwright (OD&PL), Dawn Abel (Facilities) and John Dodds (IT Services), who were winners of a Partnership Award for Equality and Inclusion in the Professional Service category.
The trio helped establish a programme where a number of colleagues in IT Services have been volunteering to help run a practical IT session for staff in cleaning services, to help them access things like their payslips digitally.
On the acknowledgement for their efforts, John said: “Chuffed to be nominated. Delighted that we won.
“This is the result of true teamwork to ensure all our colleagues in Cleaning Services have access to their IT accounts and the staff benefits that can only be accessed online.
“Huge thanks to all involved. It's been a huge team effort – network and user admin teams to get things in place and lots of people volunteering their time to help in the practical sessions. Well done everyone!”
Their nomination recognised how the work was "driven by a duty of care and a commitment to ensuring equity of access and inclusion for the whole staff community".
It also highlighted its collaborative nature and the community’s appreciation for development opportunities like this.
Moving the Image Library to the cloud
The University's Image Library has been successfully moved onto the cloud.
Moving core University systems like this to Microsoft Azure – Microsoft’s cloud service – helps to make them more secure and reliable. It also helps reduce the space our technology occupies, and power usage, on campus.
The Image Library itself continues to function in broadly the same way for users, with some additional functions for those who are system administrators. Logging in also now requires two factor authentication via Duo.
This work is the result of close collaboration between the central Communications and Engagement team and the project team in IT – they all faced a number of challenges along the way, but everyone pulled together to complete the project.
Steps towards a new Postgraduate Customer Relationship Management (PGT CRM) system
In mid-April, we soft-launched a new system that will, in time, help make marketing to attract new postgraduates to Leeds a little easier.
This is the first step towards ultimately moving away from the current PGT CRM system, but means that the PGT marketing team have enough access to the new system right now to start building all the campaigns, email templates, and so on that they will need.
The idea being that this means they can get prepared to start using the system in earnest for actual marketing activity in the summer, while making the most of the support from the project team in IT before they fully make the leap to the new system.
A crowning achievement
We'd like to send a big thank you to everyone who worked on – and resolved – multiple major incidents, including one related to Minerva, over the Coronation bank holiday weekend. It involved some excellent coordination and customer service with limited personnel and resources.