IT IS News
Portal Groups
Portal group owners are being encouraged to now use the University’s web-based collaboration tool, Workspace, to share documents and information instead of Portal Groups.
Existing groups, currently associated with the Intranet Portal, will be removed during May/June in preparation for upgrading the Intranet Portal over the summer months.
Most of the 1200 plus groups listed on the Intranet Portal have been unused over the past year. Where owners can be identified, they will be invited to delete redundant groups (and their files), or to transfer all live material into Workspace. They will also be recommended to archive older material.
Over the next two months, group owners will be given as much help as necessary to make the transition from Portal Groups to the Workspace. IT Support teams will liaise with schools for any help needed.
Project Manager, John Horton, will be very pleased to meet with Heads of Schools, School Managers, academics and others if it would assist them. John can be contacted at: john.horton@nottingham.ac.uk
Professional Development are also running short courses on using Workspace, and introductory and advanced materials have been prepared for those who prefer to teach themselves. Staff are encouraged to attend one of the widely available training sessions over the next few months. Details can be found at: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/csc/course/WRKSPC
Research groups will find Workspace ideal for writing collaborative sites which are likely to include contributions from all of their readers. Other benefits include:
Further updates will be published over the coming months.
Password expiry
Please be aware that the University’s password expiry reminder service has now resumed following a short break while changes were being made to the system.
Staff and students whose passwords are due to expire will receive an email from the IT Helpline giving them 30 days notice to change their password. The message will be repeated at intervals until the password is changed.
All staff and students should be made aware that these messages are genuine and are not phishing attempts. An example is shown below:
UoN-secure wireless network
The UoN-secure wireless network service is the University’s primary way of accessing Wi-Fi following the successful de-commissioning of the UoN-standard wireless network.
UoN-standard was removed from the last remaining sites at Jubilee campus at the end of March.
Information on the supported operating systems has been published at:
www.nottingham.ac.uk/is/connect/wireless/uon-secure.aspx
If you have any issues connecting to UoN-secure see an IS Service Point, Library HelpDesk, or contact the IS Helpline on 0115 95 16677 or email student-ithelpline@nottingham.ac.uk or staff-it-helpline@nottingham.ac.uk as appropriate.
New travel and expenses service seminar
IT Reps are invited to attend a seminar on the new travel and expenses service on:
The new service has been developed in partnership with Commercial Services and Information Services and will provide business travellers with a complete online service that will provide freedom of choice in how travel is booked and paid for and how expenses are paid. It will also offer sales and emergency support.
The service will first be piloted by the Faculty of Engineering at the end of June and introduced to the rest of the University later in the year.
To book your place at the seminar please contact June Makin at: june.makin@nottingham.ac.uk
Central Unix cluster improvements
In April, IS has completed a major piece of work on one of its core technologies – the Central Unix Cluster.
This cluster consists of a group of servers that were originally designed to be split over two separate locations, but which, due to infrastructure development, had to be temporarily housed at King’s Meadow Campus (KMC).
These have now been split so that half the cluster has been moved to the Cripps Computing Centre. The process of moving the clusters and bringing them back online and connecting with the cluster at KMC was done without any break of service and was totally invisible to users.
Some of the applications and services that rely on the Central Unix Cluster are:
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WebCT
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The Intranet Portal
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The University web and FTP servers
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Library Services (including UNLOC and the e-Library Gateway)
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Wiki and blogging services
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The interactive Unix service, and other parts of the IT infrastructure
Myspam – changing Outlook junk email settings
Since the introduction of Myspam over 12 months ago, more than 86 per cent of spam email is being detected and not being delivered to the University’s email system. However, IS has been receiving complaints that some legitimate email has been classified as spam by our Exchange email system and Outlook.
We have now completed work to resolve this issue by removing Spam detection from our Exchange email system and setting Outlook’s junk mail settings. This will happen automatically for computers that are within the Active Directory (AD) and are running Outlook 2007. The Myspam service will, however, continue to pick up spam.
Anyone using a computer that is not a member of AD and who is experiencing issues with legitimate email being placed in the junk email folder is encouraged to change their junk email setting in Outlook.
To change settings in Outlook 2007:
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open Outlook, then from the menu bar select Tools
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from the dropdown menu select Options
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click Junk Email this will then display the Options pop-up shown below:
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select No Automatic Filtering
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click Apply and OK
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click OK on the Options screen
Please contact the Staff IT Helpline for further help and advice.
New system for Installing software to Windows PCs
Information Services (IS) has started to use a new software management to remotely install software to Windows PCs.
Installations can now be done automatically, being largely invisible to end-users. The system will even inform IS of deployment problems or failures.
The software management system called SCCM (Software Center Configuration Manager) will be used to install and update:
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key software on Windows PCs (i.e. centrally-funded site-licensed software that’s included in the “standard University Windows XP Pro image” mentioned in the ICT Standards)
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local software within a School, with the prior agreement of the School
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an emergency change (if necessary), for the security of University computing facilities
Information about any large scale software installations using SCCM will be posted on the Service Status page: http://status.nottingham.ac.uk/
As part of a forthcoming upgrade to the email system, SCCM will be used to upgrade every staff PC in the University over the coming months to ensure that they have all the software needed to access the upgraded Exchange system.
Improving the email service
The University is migrating its email servers to Exchange 2007 from the 2003 version, to provide a faster and more resilient service.
The migrations will take place from the end of May to the end of June and will be carried out overnight between 10pm and 7am. By migrating the mailboxes overnight, staff and students should not be inconvenienced.
While mailboxes are being migrated, (which may take a few minutes or a couple of hours depending on the size of the mailbox), users will be able to access Outlook or other clients (including BlackBerrys) to see existing mail but not to send or receive new email. They will also be able to see their own calendars but will not have access to anybody else’s. Outlook Web Access (OWA) will be unavailable during each mailbox migration.
A message informing users that their mailbox is currently unavailable will appear if they do try to send or receive mail during the migration.
After the migration there will be no obvious change in Outlook or other clients. Outlook Web Access (OWA) will have a new-look login page. The new page has been design to reflect the appearance of the University’s Intranet Portal but will work in exactly the same way as the existing login page.
The email Exchange migration and new login page will be publicised to staff and students over the next few weeks.
IT Helpline
The helpline is staffed between 8am and 6pm, Monday to Friday & between 10am and 4pm Saturdays excluding Bank Holidays and University closure days