Just Blog

Nick Jackson / / Stuff Which Doesn't Live Anywhere Else, User Experience

Today in the daily staff alerts I spotted an update about the new Engineering Hub. This is the University’s newest new building (the newest building is the refurbed Business and Law building in the old Echo offices), and will be the only new engineering school in the country for many years. However, this blog post isn’t about that.

Instead I’m wondering why news about this building (and indeed any building project) is limited to very infrequent updates on the staff mailing list (but not students, I checked). Students and staff alike are interested in what’s going on; they want to know about how new buildings are coming on, what kinds of work are being done, and why that door at the west end of the MAB is never working properly. University building projects already have a blog, last updated well over a year ago. It takes all of 5 minutes to throw together an update, or perhaps 15 minutes to do a roll-up (with photos) of what’s been happening over the last week.

Anyway, for those who are interested the building is on schedule, with piled foundations, ground beams and some ground floor slabs done. The steel frame of the building is starting to go up next week. Oh, and you’ll be pleased to hear that “method statements for the safe steel erection have been developed in conjunction with the contractor, Estates Infrastructure team and the university’s own construction health and safety team”.

This isn’t your grandparents’ support desk

Nick Jackson / / Service 2.0, User Experience

Recently, in amongst the myriad of Jerome and Total ReCal (not to mention G2, the CWD revamps, fixing LUNA bugs, Dashboard, Nucleus, Linking You, Get Satisfaction, colour remote printing and a swathe of other Labs projects) I’ve been taking a serious look at Zendesk as a replacement for our current service desk ticketing system. In short I’m sold, and I’m pretty sure that a few other people are as well. After looking at a few other SaaS ((Software as a Service)) helpdesk providers Zendesk wins out for me on a number of features, but first and foremost on its simplicity and flexibility. Let me elaborate.

Yesterday we switched on a sandbox for us to play around in and use for testing. It’s already visually customised, using our SSO ((Single Sign-On)) solution, using a custom domain, running with an SSL certificate, has custom fields in the ticket view, implements some of our business logic in triggers and automations, has our SLAs built in and flags trouble tickets, integrates with our Twitter account and Get Satisfaction support portal, has a variety of custom reports ready to go and has a small set of knowledge base articles available. Not bad for a few hours work.

We also gain the inherent benefits of SaaS, meaning that we no longer have servers or infrastructure for our support desk solution to worry about, and we gain new features the moment that they’re available without needing to sign up to another n-year contract. Licensing fees are on a per-agent basis so we’re not spending any more than we have to. We can access it on and off campus (something we can’t do at the moment without resorting to VPN. There’s even a mobile application so our roving support technicians can update tickets as soon as they need updating.

Alongside this there are a few other side effects. Our knowledge base can finally be extracted from the inner depths of Portal (where it resides in a set of PDF files and Word documents) and updated so that it’s finally up to date. We can have more agents, so that finally issues can be assigned to the right people. We can email everybody when things happen to tickets so they don’t languish at the bottom of the queue forever. There’s a nice web interface for everybody, so both agents and users alike can look through their own ticket history.

My target is to have us using it in two weeks. Wish me luck.

Make It Look Good

Nick Jackson / / User Experience

Take a look at this website.

This is our current staff directory search. It’s very simple, does more or less what it says on the tin, and looks like it’s been thrown together in Front Page in about a minute. Whilst normally I’m not a massive fan of websites which are chock full of unnecessary imagery, there are some situations where you just have to go “you know what, why can’t we make this look good and be functional at the same time?” So I duly busted out my CSS-fu and had a go.

It loads just as quickly, it does exactly the same thing, but it looks so much nicer. It also avoids words like “criteria”, which sound a bit over the top for native English speakers and just confuse the hell out of those who have it as a second language. Behind the scenes it also avoids a load of the crap which Microsoft decides is necessary to build a web page (apparently JavaScript is a necessity to submit a POST form), and since it uses the CWD it is mobile ready without any extra effort.

You may never see the result of this quick hack I did today, but I really hope you do.

Designing for Everybody

Nick Jackson / / CWD, Web 2.0

If you’ve kept up to date with our blogs then you’ll know that Alex and myself have, over the past few months, been slowly working towards a unified design for all of the University’s online services. This is the Common Web Design (or CWD for short), and provides the underlying page structure, semantic layout, design, typography, colours, UI and UX widgets and more for the entirety of our online services provision.

A few people have asked, and quite rightly, what was wrong with the old designs. It’s a sensible question, after all there’s no point wasting effort fixing something which isn’t broken. However, the answer is not that the old designs were broken or wrong, but that a new design could offer a lot more.

Continue reading “Designing for Everybody”

Raise Shields!

Nick Jackson / / Stuff Which Doesn't Live Anywhere Else

Today we’ve just finished setting up and testing our brand-new, very shiny SSL certificate for our primary Online Services support server. This means that the CWD is now ready to be used on all of the University’s secure systems, starting (hopefully later today) with a roll-out of the new wireless sign in page.

What this also means is that we’ve been able to tighten the security on Nucleus so that in future all requests must be over SSL. For those using Nucleus for things please take this as a warning – as of the end of the week all Nucleus requests over HTTP will fail.

Finally, we’re a step closer to our complete OAuth implementation! We’re still ironing out a few bugs and awaiting our security audit, but it’s getting there.

Welcome to…

Nick Jackson / / Service 2.0

With Freshers’ Week looming over the horizon, I’m led back to memories of when I first arrived at Lincoln. I very quickly learnt that the best way to find out anything important was to grab someone in a neon yellow Fresher Helper t-shirt and ask.

This led me to wonder “why don’t University departments do that?”. In all seriousness, it works for Apple stores. Put people in uniform, even if it’s literally a coloured t-shirt with the University logo on the front and “ICT” on the back and I bet you’ll get an increase in queries. Make the support available right there on the front line, never mind tucking it away at the back of a building somewhere staffed by a nondescript bloke whose only association with the University is the ID badge he’s got clipped to his belt.

It’s Just Awesome

Nick Jackson / / Open Data

Today and yesterday, between various other things, I’ve had a crack at solving Universal Search (mentioned previously), and I’ve currently got a bit of a mockup going at Labs. At the moment it’s only searching a very, very small set of test data but the entire supporting architecture is there; this is a working system, it just needs the content and a bit of polish on the front-end to handle some edge-case errors and IE6 (predictably). Obviously there’ll be some documentation on how to provide search sources and how to actually write some badass queries, but the majority of it is done.

It's the Universal Search!

The next step is to start plugging this in to external services. I’m going to start with the Library catalogue search from Jerome, making use of Sphinx’s distributed indexing model to avoid the need to double-up on data. Over time new services will be added, either sporting their own Sphinx search endpoints (the preferred way) or by outputting XML files for indexing by Universal Search itself.

Oh, and of course it comes with an API endpoint.