Category: Get Satisfaction

The Roadmap

Nick Jackson / / CWD, Get Satisfaction, Labs, lncn.eu, LUNA, Open Data, Posters, Print From My PC

Just to keep you up to date, here’s what’s planned to be happening on a few projects we’ve got kicking around over the summer. This is in addition to some other big ones we’re working on like Project Jerome (a brand new way of interfacing with the Library systems) and online postgraduate applications.

Authentication

  • Completion of our OAuth 2.0 interface for login.
  • Application Directory to handle issuing of API keys, secrets and tokens.
  • Taking a closer look at seamless SSO.
  • Adding the ability to use University usernames and passwords at Get Satisfaction.

Linking You

  • Administration interface.
  • Even faster.
  • Improved statistics.
  • Link checker (monitors for broken links and notifies accordingly).
  • Support for custom minified keywords.
  • Support for alterable destinations using 307 redirects instead of 301.
  • Improved metadata & thumbnail gathering.
  • Warnings for potentially unsafe or unsuitable destinations (to stop link masking).
  • Support for web hooks.
  • Membership of 301Works.

A-Z

  • Admin interface.
  • Link checker (monitors for broken links and alters lists accordingly).
  • Highlighting of links requiring login.
  • Support for even more export formats (CSV, XBEL and XML) on top of JSON.

LUNA (Network Access for Student Village & Riseholme Park)

  • Updating the design to the CWD.
  • Faster.
  • Removing dependence on JavaScript.

Posters

  • Going live on the production network, ready for its shakedown in the public eye over the summer.

Common Web Design

  • Even more blisteringly fast.
  • Lots of behind-the-scenes goodness to get it looking even better on older browsers and Internet Explorer.
  • Unicorns.
  • Various tweaks and fixes.
  • Custom styling for even more elements of the page so you don’t have to.
  • Moving to a new domain name and production server so we can roll it out to even more sites.

Printing

  • Better compatibility with more operating systems (hopefully).
  • Colour printing support.
  • Integration of Pay For Print, so everything is in one place.

The Get Satisfaction Crash Course

Nick Jackson / / Get Satisfaction, Service 2.0

Get Satisfaction is getting its first public airing on a mass distribution tomorrow morning when the student email goes out. In preparation, I’ve knocked up this crash course on how to post topics, reply, get signed up and tweak your preferences and personalisation.

This particular version is aimed at students (although should provide a good grounding for staff wanting to get involved), a more in-depth staff-friendly one will be along in a day or so with more detail on things like moderation.

What people talk about…

Nick Jackson / / Get Satisfaction, Service 2.0

Now that the University has some Get Satisfaction support goodness going on, there are all kinds of cool widgets we can use to integrate the support community with other websites. The Blogs help page sports a “Feedback” tab on the left hand side of the window, powered by Get Satisfaction. My other blog has a page explaining about what I do as a Student Rep, and includes a feedback widget right in the middle of the page. In fact it’s so easy to do that here’s an example of our most recent active topics, embedded into the middle of a blog post.

Hang on a second, communicating with the mothership…

Clever, huh? If you’ve got a site which is relevant to the University and you’re wanting to get hold of a widget to expand your direct support methods then just let me know!

What, Why and How

Nick Jackson / / Get Satisfaction, Service 2.0

Sadly, my efforts to make wtf.lincoln.ac.uk the official address for our Get Satisfaction account weren’t successful, despite receiving widespread support. We are, however, now sporting a brand new and shiny URL at http://wwh.lincoln.ac.uk. The WWH stands for What, Why and How which neatly encompasses a lot of the things which Get Satisfaction will be dealing with. Other suggestions included huh.lincoln.ac.uk (as in “Huh? What?”) and a variety of “eh” and “umm” derivatives.

However, we also have some good news in that we now completely support Get Satisfaction! We can properly moderate conversation to keep it relevant, make sure the Student Reps get recognised, keep people up to date easier and more! Expect to see more news about this through some more channels soon, but if you want to tell anybody to use Get Satisfaction (or What, Why, How) then please feel free.

GSFN, PFMPC, LUNA and other acronyms.

Nick Jackson / / Get Satisfaction, LUNA, Print From My PC, Service 2.0

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.

The SU are Getting Satisfied!

Nick Jackson / / Get Satisfaction, Service 2.0

The SU plugged Get Satisfaction today at the Student Reps training session!

My student side declares a victory (“Hooray! Advocacy as a Student Rep worked!”) but my staff side now goes “umm… now what?”. See, at the moment it’s impossible to moderate discussions, or to change the state of a topic without posting a reply. This means that if someone answers a question who isn’t a staff member there’s no way to say “this has been answered” without also weighing in and adding unnecessary crud to the thread.

$99 a month for moderation tools… which it’s impossible to justify without a detailed survey and explanation of how it works. Which is impossible to generate without users. Which are difficult (but not impossible) to get without promotion. Which the University won’t approve without some form of moderation tools and staff training in place.

Hmm. Anybody got experience with this kind of ‘just trust me on this one’ promotion? Get Satisfaction is so unique that there’s nothing in the market to compare to, and so new that there aren’t any big case studies. Nor does it help that there are only a scant handful of educational institutions who only half use the service.

Either way I’ve switched the default login method from Get Satisfaction’s own user database to Facebook (although the former is still available) to make it more immediately accessible. We really could do with getting SSO working; but that’s another story and more money.

The “What We’re Working On” Feed

Nick Jackson / / Get Satisfaction, Service 2.0

Through the amazing power of Yahoo Pipes and the Get Satisfaction API, I’ve cobbled together this little widget to show “what we’re currently working on”. In effect this is any idea or problem which is marked as “in progress” on Get Satisfaction. This data is available as an RSS feed as well (or JSON if you prefer), which could possibly be integrated with Portal to show what’s currently going on around the University or run through a visualiser and displayed on a large screen somewhere, just to be a bit more proactive in telling everybody what various parts of the institution are getting up to.