Category: ICT

ICT Customer Services Restructure – What does it mean for FoM?

ICT Customer Services is currently undergoing a restructure led by the Head of Customer Services, Leigh Davenport. The new model is designed to allow us to focus more on the operational relationships with the faculties by giving the faculties a dedicated resource who will be their day-to-day interface. Whilst we are focusing on the customer relationship we are also going to improve the efficiency of service delivery, making better use of the staff we have by pooling our resources and continue our trend of improving resolution times whilst driving down Service Level Agreement breaches. The changes are due to take place in a structured and phased way, over the next 6 to 8 weeks.

New roles and changes to teams

  • A new function has been created called the Customer Services Management team, headed by Dawn Beaumont. Customer Services Managers will own the operational relationship with customer departments and manage customer satisfaction within ICT. As well as leading the new team, Dawn will also be the Customer Service Manager with responsibility for Medicine.  Dawn has spent her entire career at Imperial providing IT support to Medicine, worked at all of the Medicine campuses and has for the last 15 years been the Faculty Support Manager responsible for the teams providing IT Support at the Medicine sites.
  • The ICT Digital Partners will still own the strategic relationships with the departments, initiating and guiding new projects and will work with the Customer Services Managers to champion the “voice of the customer” within ICT.
  • The Faculty Support team will report into a single Faculty Support Manager, Jamey Khan, who will oversee the services of resource teams providing deskside support in departments and via the ICT Service Desk in Central Library for South Kensington-based staff and existing local offices on remote campuses. This move should allow improved responsiveness of engineers to adapt to changing demands across the organisation.
  • Elmy Thompson, the current Site Manager for Hammersmith, Charing Cross and White City will be moving to take up the role of Departmental Operations Manager taking charge of the ICT’s Admin function. Dominic Spencer who currently covers St Mary’s, Chelsea and Brompton will have responsibility for managing deskside support teams across all the College’s remote campuses.

In terms of how things will work, for support requests and faults, please continue to submit as usual. Full details can be found via the ICT pages

Staff on clinical campuses will continue to have access to their local teams.

If you have any questions or would like more information, please contact Leigh Davenport, Head of Customer Services.

Data Protection (GDPR) in the Faculty of Medicine – practical information and Q and A sessions

From October to December 2018, the Faculty of Medicine will be running information and Q&A sessions for staff to accompany the launch of the Faculty’s new Codes of Practice for information governance and for handling health and social care research data.

These new codes of practice will provide practical guidance, processes and advice on how to comply with current key data legislation (GDPR) and to implement the College’s associated policies within the Faculty of Medicine setting.

Dates of drop-in sessions

Drop in between 10:00 – 16:00

Thursday, 22 November 2018 – St Mary’s Campus,  Medical School, Hynds Computer room

Friday, 30 November 2018 – South Kensington, SAF G28

Monday, 3 December 2018 – Hammersmith Campus, Hammersmith Library computer training room

Friday, 7 December 2018 – South Kensington, SAF G28

Monday, 10 December 2018 – South Kensington, SAF G28

Please see further information on the Information Governance SharePoint site.  (more…)

New Research Data Service from ICT

ICT has launched a new service this month that is designed to meet the demands of today’s research community. The RDS is a new central service for storing large volumes of research data. It has a number of key features, for example:

  • Ease of use: accessible as a fast network drive across the college network, and directly on the ICT computer systems.
  • Cost-effective: generous standard allocations for individuals and projects, with metered rates for additional storage (see Wiki.Imperial for a comparison of storage options).
  • Secure: will become an ISO-certified system for secure, GDPR-compliant data storage.

The service includes the following storage space options:

  • Project Space: as a PI you may create as many separate project allocations as you need, with each project receiving 2Tb of online storage. Additional storage will be available (chargeable at the metered rates shown below).
  • Individual Space: as an active user of the Research Computing Service’s HPC systems you will also receive an entitlement of 1TB for private working space. This space provides snapshots, allowing you to retrieve deleted or earlier revisions of files.
  • Ephemeral Space: projects and HPC users alike have access to temporary working space. This ephemeral space can store an unrestricted amount of data for up to 30 days before it is automatically deleted.

(more…)

New system for recording holiday and sick leave

The College will be implementing a new availability and absence management system, called TeamSeer. The system has been designed to record and manage staff availability such as holiday, sickness and other absence types required by the College. The system has been piloted across the College, and feedback has been gathered to ensure it meets the College requirements.

The go-live date for the new system will be in time for the new annual leave year on 1 February 2018.

The system is a user-friendly online planner, which will be accessible using your College username and password. When the system goes live, you will receive an email from TeamSeer with a link that will give you access to your account. In the meantime, if you would like to familiarise yourself with the system you can view video tutorials at the weblinks below: (more…)

Lecture recordings

The College provides Panopto to support recording of course lectures. While not obligatory, there are many good reasons to use this technology and the College encourages staff to make use of its capabilities.

Panopto is a flexible and easy-to-use platform that allows Imperial College staff to record audio, video, PowerPoint presentations and capture secondary sources e.g. visualiser. It can be used to record lectures, module introductions, assessment feedback and a range of other multimedia content.

Find out more and how to get started 

 

College license for GitHub.com

github.comWhat’s changing?

With immediate effect, ICT is pleased to announce that all College users of GitHub.com are now entitled to create unlimited free, public or private, code repositories, under a new site licence secured by ICT for the College.

GitHub.com is an externally-supported, cloud-based version control repository that is used by researchers, teaching staff, students and software developers for versioning and collaborating on code, both publicly and privately. It offers the functionality of Git (an open source version control system) with additional user features. GitHub.com is an externally-supported cloud service and anyone may set up a user account.

What this means

Imperial College users are entitled to the following, for no charge:

  • To create unlimited free public or private repositories within Github.com
  • To move existing ‘paid-for’ repositories to the College license
  • Use a range of add-on tools and integrations are freely available from GitHub
  • As a later phase, an on-premises version of GitHub, known as GitHub Enterprise, will also become available, for code that needs to meet stricter security conditions. This is targeted for Spring/Summer 2017.

Find out more

For more information about GitHub.com and how to access free private repositories, visit:

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/admin-services/ict/self-service/research-support/research-support-systems/github/

Support/Contact

If you have any concerns in advance of this change, contact the ICT Service Desk who will be happy to help.

Anyone experiencing problems with accessing or using IT services and machines should contact the ICT Service Desk (0207 594 9000, Ext 49000), Dept IT Reps, or your local Faculty Support teams.

Office365 to be rolled out to staff and PG research students

office365The College has recently successfully completed roll-out of cloud-based e-mail accounts (on Office365) for the student community here at Imperial. Following on from this, the next few months will see a similar migration programme for the e-mail accounts belonging to College postgraduate research students and staff here at the College.

This migration of email accounts to the Cloud is but the first in a series of steps as we move towards a full deployment of Office 365. The new accounts will offer significantly more storage capacity (50Gb) – but this is not the main motivation for this change. More significant is that it lays the foundations for what will be a transformational platform that will enable us to move ever closer towards a truly Virtual Office.

Future benefits will include, for example, the ability to create videoconferences on demand or for teams to work collaboratively on a document in real-time, no matter where they are located. Staff and Students will be able to connect from anywhere and at any time using whichever device they prefer – whether it is smartphone, tablet, laptop or PC. Office will be fully functional on any device.

Over the next few months, staff and postgraduate research students will receive detailed e-mails individually explaining what will happen for their own accounts as the migration programme rolls-out. However, if you would like further information please contact Ellen Pengelly, Digital Partner for the Faculty of Medicine, ICT.

Dr Ellen Pengelly
Digital Business Partner – Faculty of Medicine
Service Strategy & Planning
Information & Communications Technology

Read more about the roll-out and get answers to FAQs on Imperial’s ICT website at: www.imperial.ac.uk/ict/email-migration

College-wide access to lynda.com

I am writing to you to let you know about College access to lynda.com, a high quality video training site for IT, business skills and general interests which may be of interest to your Faculty. The College has purchased a one year license for all College staff, renewable depending on take-up.

What is lynda.com?

lynda.comlynda.com provides a vast online library of instructional videos covering the latest software, creative, and business skills. Taught by accomplished teachers and recognised industry experts, lynda.com is a high-quality resource for Students and Staff looking to develop skills in Microsoft Office, the Adobe Creative Suite, Project Management, Personal Development, Social Media and a wide range of other topics. With more than 3,000 courses and more added every week, lynda.com is designed for all learning abilities and is available whenever you’re ready to learn. You can even view it on your iPhone, iPad, Android phone or tablet, or other mobile device.

Access

Access is via College user accounts for both staff and students. If you already have a lynda.com account, you can merge this with your College account.
Go to lynda.com via the ICT website for more information on the service and to provide feedback.

Support

lynda.com have offered to provide sessions on the product if you or your colleagues would like to understand more about it and how it can be used. If you would like more information please contact me at e.pengelly@imperial.ac.uk. If you have any concerns or problems with usage or access, please contact the ICT Service Desk.

Dr Ellen Pengelly
Digital Business Partner – Faculty of Medicine
Service Strategy & Planning
Information & Communications Technology