Answering The Flood

3 02 2010

Further to the revelation that there are students out there capable of voicing an opinion, we now have to deal with the resulting fallout. At this point I need to quote Joss, the nice man from CERD, who likened my approach to IT support to this:

Whilst I’m tempted to staple this notice to the front of the helpdesk and watch confused students ask “will you really set us on fire?”, it’s actually better to deal with stupid questions by documenting your response, on the basis that the universe never ceases to provide a constant stream of the terminally confused, people who don’t bother to read the dialog box which pops up with important information and clear instructions, and people who believe that the helpdesk are there to actually operate the computer on their behalf.

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GSFN, PFMPC, LUNA and other acronyms.

30 10 2009

Okay, it’s been a while, so here’s a roundup of what’s going on in the land of Nick.

Get Satisfaction

My never-ending quest to get the University using Get Satisfaction seems to be nearing an end with the news that we will very soon (Monday!) be getting on the basic level of subscription services. This brings all kinds of cool new stuff to the service, including more moderation tools (so we can keep the conversation relevant and better manage how we respond to things), the ability to flag student reps as awesome (so more people listen to them), extra branding opportunities (so you know it’s about Lincoln), more widgets (for letting people use Get Satisfaction from within other sites) and most importantly the support of the University!

Now all we need is a cool name. So far thoughts include feedback.lincoln.ac.uk, thoughts.lincoln.ac.uk, qipp.lincoln.ac.uk, comments.lincoln.ac.uk and my personal favourite (although highly unlikely) wtf.lincoln.ac.uk – anybody got any more ideas or preferences? Let me know.

Print From My PC

Our ‘wireless printing’ service is still on track for a week 6 soft launch, although we’re experiencing some interesting glitches with printing from Ubuntu and other Linux flavours since they don’t trust our certificate provider. Kirsty took a brief wander around the library to work out where we could put posters advertising the service and you should hopefully see them appearing soon (so that you can break things and complain at us).

Lincoln University Network Access

This is a new one – LUNA is the name for an updated network access controller which will be rolling out to Student Village after the Christmas break. It includes improved security, better guidance on what to do when things go wrong, and (best of all) redesigned pages so you still feel like you’re within the University. Guess who’s been tasked with dismantling the existing pages, figuring out how they work and redesigning them all? Yup, it’s me!

All in all it’s a load of exciting things going on here in ICT. Hopefully once Get Satisfaction is working I can get cracking on another Service 2.0 thing (I want to see if there’s something I can do with the helpdesk…), there are some big enhancements to timetabling floating around in the cloud, and there’s a huge (and I mean huge) set of changes to student communications in the pipeline.