My Manchester for Staff – Phase 1

Over recent weeks I’ve published several posts about activities I am involved in outside of IT Services, but have not updated on My Manchester for Staff. Since the end of the Pilot phase we have been preparing for the launch of the environment to a much broader audience.

On Monday we demonstrated the environment to the Programme Board which was well received and since them there have been a number of lab-based UAT sessions and a further presentation yesterday (delivered by Allan Copley and  featuring a demo that I led) to our internal IS staff forum.

In summary, My Manchester for Staff offers the following advantages:

• A new way for staff and PGR students to obtain on-line information and services
• Improved user experience
  • Personalised working environment, with a more consistent look a feel
• Integrated platform
  • Bringing together Staff Portal and Staff Net functionality and content,  plus access through to all other on line services
• Improving the efficiency and effectiveness of business processes
  • Find and access information and tools more easily
  • Starts moving towards a task driven environment

The Phase 1 release will see the My Manchester for Staff environment rolled out to three representative schools (CEAS, School of Social Sciences and the Institute Of Population Health) and one PSS Directorate (HR). Phase 2 will see the rolling deployment to the remaining groups of Schools & Directorates across the university.

Following the completion of UAT, the release of My Manchester for staff and PGR students will be via the common website address http://my.manchester.ac.uk

Underpinning this is a technology change from uPortal to .Net/IIS and a much tighter integration with other applications that have been bothe delivered (eProg, Training Catalogue, My Research, etc) and are in the pipeline or advanced stages of UAT (My Students, My Staff, Absence Reporting).

From an enduser perspective the initial navigation to services will change, but there will be no change to the services or applications, in terms of functionality or website address.

We will continue to maintain the highly successful My Manchester for Students environment which is not affected by the release of the staff and PGR environment.

Web Template Development

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.

JQTouch

Mobile developers ought to check out the jquery ‘touch’ library at:

http://jqtouch.com/

It’s a javascript library that is able to take advantage of swipe and touch gestures in iPhone and Android phones — basically allowing developers to make regular web pages into cross-platform mobile apps.

Posterous

Posterous

Can autopost to loads of social networking type sites from a central point.

Adobe Browser Lab

Adobe Browser Lab

Preview and test your webpages on leading browsers and operating systems – on demand. Adobe BrowserLab makes it easier and faster than ever before to see web pages in development.