The Students are Back!

Nick Jackson / / Print From My PC

Hooray, it’s Freshers’ Week! Today involves having to negotiate the swarms of scared looking freshers as they look in a confused manner at maps of campus. It’s also the day when ICT is watching the servers nervously, as 10,000 students all try to retrieve their (still not published, so don’t bother) newly published timetables. Here’s an important message: don’t panic. If you get lost or confused just grab a helpful looking person and 9 times out of 10 they’ll be happy to point you in the right direction.

In the slower-paced world of Online Services R&D my task for today (in between the mind-numbing tedium of SU induction workshops) is to iron out the last few kinks in the printing implementation, more specifically those to do with user rights. Once that is done I can get cracking with test servers and get a functional SafeCom system working. Despite needing to dip in and out of the office this week to attend inductions, welcome backs and Freshers’ Fayre (come visit Drama Society, we’re awesome!) I realistically hope to have a workable solution in place by the start of term next Monday.

Continue reading “The Students are Back!”

Almost There…

Nick Jackson / / Print From My PC

Following a break from routine yesterday (I went to Sheffield to attend TEDx, where I learnt that I should listen to the Beatles, build cool things with Arduino, use my right brain more, disrupt things, adopt a workflow with no incentives and finally think inside and outside the box at the same time) I am back today and looking at the final pieces of the remote printing puzzle before I get back to revolutionising the way we deal with support queries.

It turns out that Windows Server since 2000 has included IIS components for doing IP Printing (IPP for short) as standard, and all you need to do is share a printer and tick a box. Even better, it comes with support for Windows Integrated Login (the amazingly annoying one which means you need to put “NETWORK\” before your username) and HTTP authentication for those of us who enjoy the *NIX approach to life (Mac guys, that includes you as well). The icing on the cake is that this authentication information is still passed all the way to the spooler in the same way as when you print locally or over the domain (as Lincoln’s printing works at the moment).

So in summary: we already have a fully featured, standards compliant (although admittedly I still need to work out exactly which ports need punching on the firewall for it to work without the HTTP transport) printing solution for non-domain machines of all OS flavours which supports authentication against our existing Active Directory with no additional hardware, software or expenditure and only a short afternoon’s work to implement it

I’ll let you know when we’re ready to let you play around.

Printing From Afar

Nick Jackson / / Print From My PC

Whilst I’m waiting for various bits of Get Satisfaction (and similar services) to get back to me, I am getting on with my second quest of bringing good, reliable and easy remote printing to the University. By this I mean that anybody – be they in the Atrium on their own laptop, in the student village, up the hill or on the other side of the planet – can send documents to their University print account, wander up to one of our SafeCom printers, punch in their numbers and pick up their printing.

This of course runs into some interesting challenges and raises some questions, which I’m going to ask you all to answer in the comments box. Alternatively if you don’t understand logging in to these blogs, are a fresher without an account or just can’t be bothered doing it any other way you can fire me an email.

So, questions.

  1. Do you know how to print from inside the University, and to collect your printing using SafeCom?
  2. Have you ever wanted to print from outside the University? If so, what kind of things (Word documents, images, PDFs etc)?
  3. Do you know how to add a new printer to your computer?
  4. Would you be happy installing a bit of software on your computer to look after remote printing?
  5. How important to you is being able to adjust the default settings, for example single/double sided print or stapling?
  6. If you can’t change your system settings or add a new printer, would you be happy to send your original document (by web or email) and let us try to print it?

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.

Web 2.0 and the University

Nick Jackson / / Web 2.0

Whilst running around the Internet dredging up case studies for how companies have used Get Satisfaction, I stumbled upon this presentation by one of the founders on how businesses need to change and adapt to the post-Web-2.0 world. It makes some excellent points about how you need to get used to losing control to some extent, a fact which I’m eager to see the University embrace.

I may have to highlight some of these points when I start drawing up reports. In the meantime, feel free to let me know your opinions on how the University is doing with regards to the whole Web 2.0 revolution. Feedback is always useful.

Blogging my way through ICT.

Nick Jackson / / This Blog

Hello everybody, it’s Nick here with yet another blog. You may have come over here from my student blog, where I’ve spent most of the summer rambling about how I think bits of the University may be tweaked. Well, I’m now working for the lovely people in the ICT department and looking at the feasibility of implementing those tweaks!

I’m kicking off my first ‘proper job’ by looking at Get Satisfaction (read up on my other blog) and IP printing (or; being able to use the MFPs in the University from anywhere). This blog will be a repository of how everything is going and what sort of cool, new and exciting things I’m in the process of prodding until they break.