I caught up today with some a former colleague from Professional Support Services (PSS) IT. They’ve been working on some interesting initiatives to simplify their current web development. The University of Manchester centrally supported content management system is TerminalFour and the PSS team have developed a set of standard templates to accelerate the design process. These are available as part of a dedicated support website. They’ve already produced a site for the President’s Doctoral Scholar Award using this superstyle template and there are more being worked up in the pipeline.
The work includes an implementation of a dedicated LimeSurvey installation for PSS to use, providing a simple and straightforward way to create surveys. These can be directed at anyone – staff, student, or the public at large. The product has been skinned to give a corporate University look and feel and runs across encrypted HTTPS, also making it suitable for gathering personal details. This system is being used for creating registration systems and has a suite of in-built tools for advanced data analysis and response control. It’s underpinning the mechanism for the Hall Sport student registration system and the production of barcode slips that I mentioned last year as part of the Hall Sport programme.
I tweeted about the inappropriate use of QR tags (being used without context they’re pretty hopeless) recently, but not only have the PSS team integrated a QR generator into their support site, they’re also come up with a great usage suggestion. They’re putting dedicated tags on each cluster computer with a summary sticker explaining that if you need to report a fault with a PC not working you can just follow the QR link and it will log the details with the servicedesk support team with the specific details of the problematic machine. A neat solution!
There are a few other interesting things being worked on at present and it will be interesting to see how these are delivered over the course of this year.
Cris Bloomfield's Professional Blog 