Archive for January, 2010

January27

Beyond the ‘website’… what do we do?

By: Alison Kerwin

It is often difficult to get across the range of work we, in Web Services, are involved in. Obviously working on the new external website is a priority for us at the moment but what else do we do?

I’ve recently had to try and pull together some information to detail our work in other areas so I thought it would be worth sharing via this blog.

The following table shows our responsibilities on top of the development and management of the University website(s). Alongside these we also provide training and support for the vast numbers of web maintainers across the University. On average we deliver one training session per week and deal with approx fifteen support requests per day.

Please note this list is not exhaustive.

Service / Application name Brief description URL Role
Learning Materials Filestore (LMF) Storage facility for sharing large files (developed in-house) http://www.bath.ac.uk/lmf/ Development, Maintenance, Support
Wiki Collaborative tool allowing the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked pages

(third party software hosted in-house)

 http://wiki.bath.ac.uk Development, Maintenance, Support
Content Management System System for managing the content of our website(s) (third party software hosted in-house) http://cms.bath.ac.uk Development, Maintenance, Support
Blogs Blogging service (third party software hosted in-house) http://blogs.bath.ac.uk Development, Maintenance, Support
Instant Messaging Service (Jabber) IM solution for the UoB network (third party software hosted in-house) http://talk.bath.ac.uk Development
Opus (integration with CMS) Development of features to use Opus data (publications) on our website(s)

(developed in-house)

 http://opus.bath.ac.uk/ Development, Maintenance, Support
Person Finder / Person Info Staff and student directory

(developed in-house)

 http://www.bath.ac.uk/contact/ Development, Maintenance, Support
Personal Information Portal (Pip) Academic profile information store (developed in-house and now integrated with Opus) http://www.bath.ac.uk/pip/ Development, Maintenance, Support
News system Central news system used by our Corporate Communications team to publish news articles (third party software hosted and further developed in-house) http://www.bath.ac.uk/news/ Development, Maintenance, Support
inPictures Picture gallery for promotion of events (developed in-house) http://www.bath.ac.uk/inPictures Development, Maintenance, Support
Play Multimedia channel for video and audio content (developed in-house) http://www.bath.ac.uk/play Development, Maintenance, Support
eProspectus (UG & PG) Online prospectuses both external facing and admin interfaces (developed in-house) http://www.bath.ac.uk/study/ Development, Maintenance, Support
(Use of) Google Analytics Generation of reports for Recruitment and Admissions, Corporate Communications and Academic Departments (third party software further developed in-house) N/A Development, Maintenance, Support

Posted in: communication0 comments

January21

Welcome back!

By: Phil Wilson

So what an exciting first few weeks back we’ve had!

We started off nice and easy, picking up all the support requests that had been filed over the Christmas break and, after a suggestion from Kelvin last year, put together a demo of an augmented reality map of the University campus using Layar (which I will post more about later).

We also started preparing for our next set of work, delivering the most-requested features and fixes to our news publishing service, which is based on WordPress.

The shortlist of work we’d do was created in December during face-to-face meetings with members of the Press Office after which it was published on our wiki using the survey macro to give everyone a chance to vote and comment on which items were most important. At the same time, we got on with estimating all of the listed items so that once voting was complete we’d be able to balance the importance with how long they were going to take!

And then the snow came.
Twitter message about the closed campus

Snow on campusFortunately the University had prepared for this already and an emergency telephone number had been set up with the current status of the campus and there were prepared news articles ready to be published. Of course, yet again the use of Twitter was instrumental in delivering the message that campus was closed as quickly as possible (and at least one person enjoyed their 7.30am tweet delivery!)

Sadly for us in Web Services, there are excellent remote working facilities provided by Computing Services, with a good VPN and remote desktop connection to work PCs and a wake-on-lan facility if your PC is off. There is also an instant messenger server which enables both one-to-one chats and chatrooms for groups of people which enables us to co-ordinate effectively even when we’re at home in our PJs.

The combination of remote desktop provision and web-based tools for documentation and issue-tracking meant we were able to complete the work for the news system on time. Now that the snow’s melted we’re just waiting for a moment to deploy our changes and show the Press Office what we’ve done!

Posted in: communication, development, team, tools0 comments

January18

Blogging

By: Phil Wilson

Last year Web Services managed 37 blog posts, down from our 2008 total of 63. This is obviously a reflection of the fact that we’re working so hard on our new website that we don’t have time to blog!

For 2010 it would be great for us to get to at least one per week, and a minimum of 52 posts spread across twelve months doesn’t sound unreasonable; it’s not as if there’s not a lot happening at Web Services towers, just that we forget to tell you all about it!

Here’s looking forward to a plentiful blogging year!

Posted in: Featured, communication2 comments

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