Newsletter October 2010 Information Services

Information Services
Newsletter
October 2010
Web team developments
From WebCT to Moodle and MMS
Unimail news
University of St Andrews: IT Services + Business Improvements
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Web team developments
Gareth J M Saunders reports:
Since 2006 the University Web team has
grown from two to five members and with
it the demands made on the team have also
grown. In November 2009 we recognised
that we were trying to do too much at once:
we were running 24 projects concurrently,
had a backlog of around 120 projects that
we estimated would take around 13 years to
complete, and were responding to between
50 and 100 support calls a week. This year
we’ve been looking closely at how best both to
manage the projects that we have committed
to and to keep people informed about what
we’re working on.
Managing projects
During the last ten months the Web team have
begun using Agile software development
methodologies to manage how our projects
are run. If you’ve not come across it before,
the Manifesto for Agile Software Development
(www.agilemanifesto.org) is a good
summary of the philosophy behind Agile:
“We are uncovering better ways of developing
software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:
• Individuals and interactions
over processes and tools
• Working software
over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration
over contract negotiation
• Responding to change
over following a plan.”
We’re broadly using the Scrum method that
breaks a project down into smaller tasks,
which are scheduled into short iterations
(typically one to four weeks) called sprints.
Each morning during the sprint the whole
team meets in a Scrum to communicate what
you did yesterday, what you intend to do today and whether you have encountered any
October 2010
issues that need to be dealt with before you can
continue. At the end of each sprint you have
working software (and in our case websites).
Agile methods such as Scrum consist of
individual elements called practices, many
of which have been around for a long time,
which can be combined to drive projects
forward very efficiently. I tend to think of it
like a toolkit where you select the tools that
you need for a particular job.
One obvious example is the ‘informative
workspace’. If you’ve visited the Web team
office recently you will have noticed the
whiteboard we use to track the progress of
projects. At a glance everyone can see who
is working on what and which tasks are
still outstanding. We also use it to track the
volume of support calls we answer each week.
Support calls
By tracking the calls received we’ve discovered
that every week the Web team answers on
average 98 support calls, which takes us
around 30 hours – that’s almost a full-time
job just dealing with support calls; our busiest
week back in April 2010 saw us answer 219
calls. These calls come from a number of
sources: via the IT Helpdesk call management
system, phone calls, personal visits and emails.
In order to manage more efficiently how calls
are answered we would like to encourage as
many people as possible to email their support requests to webteam@st-andrews.
ac.uk rather than directly to individual
members of the Web team. These calls can
easily be assigned to any member of the Web
team using the IT Helpdesk call management
system; direct emails cannot and run the risk
of not being attended to at all if the recipient
is on holiday.
In discussions we found that many people
erroneously thought that webmaster@st-
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andrews.ac.uk was the University Web Manager Dr Stephen Evans’ personal email address.
It’s not, so the [email protected] address was created to reflect that these emails
are sent to the whole team.
Twitter and blog
In order to keep people informed about what we’re working on, the Web team now have a
Twitter account: twitter.com/stawebteam, a blog: stawebteam.wordpress.com and
a handful of plans to further improve how we can support you online. Feel free to follow us.
From WebCT to Moodle and MMS
During the summer, the University’s
Virtual Learning Environment ( VLE ) was
changed over from WebCT to a combination
of Moodle and MMS . Early impressions
appear positive, with substantial numbers of
modules appearing on Moodle that did not
have WebCT presences previously.
Although originally only around a third of
all academic schools indicated they would
be using Moodle, compared with two-thirds
moving to MMS, nearly all now have some
form of presence in Moodle, and initial
estimates show usage to be about even with
MMS. Both systems are seeing usage around
four times that of MMS for the academic year
2009–2010, and 15 to 20 times that of 2008–
2009. A chart showing the breakdown of load
on the server in the first week of semester 1,
relative to the average for the same week in
2008–2009 (about 20,000 requests per day), is
shown below.
A full analysis and survey is planned for later
in the academic year, along with details of
how we’ll be taking MMS and Moodle from
here.
October 2010
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Unimail news
The Microsoft Office 2010 and 2011 upgrades
are going well, with a large number of service
units and several schools now upgraded.
are part of a school, your school’s Computing
Officer may have collected these details for
you.
Full migration of email started in mid-October,
with several service units now migrated to
Unimail.
We now have an online form for doing this,
and so we are asking all members of staff to
provide the required information in this convenient way, if they have not already done so.
At this stage of the project, we do need to get
the details for all staff as soon as possible.
There is lots of information about Unimail and
Office 2010 on the Unimail pages:
www.st-andrews.ac.uk/itsupport/
accounts/unimail
Online information form
When you are preparing for migration, the
Unimail team needs to collect information
about the type of computer system you have,
your current version of Microsoft Office and
the email program you use at present. If you
If you have yet to provide your details for the
Unimail migration, we would ask you do so
now, please, using the online form. If this is
the first you are hearing about Unimail and
the online form, don’t worry, you can simply
fill in the form now; it will take only a few
minutes to complete. You can find the form
via the Unimail pages (see Information Form),
or directly at:
www.st-andrews.ac.uk/itsupport/
accounts/unimail/InformationForm
This monthly Newsletter is also available on-line (with search facility) via the ‘Computer and IT Support’
web pages, and is edited by Peter Adamson (telephone 2762, email pga).
The deadline for contributions for the November 2010 issue is Monday 15 November.
Circulation list updates to IT Services Secretary at Butts Wynd (2770, [email protected])
Main address:
Butts Wynd, St Andrews, Fife KY16 9AL
telephone: 01334 462770
The University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland : No SC013532
October 2010
fax: 462759