ICT Support

Dear all,

From 5pm this Friday until 5pm on Sunday, there will be limited access to the shared staff area and also the staff mail system as we are performing system upgrades and changes.

Staff Shared Area

The staff shared area is being moved to another larger server as we have found that we have run out of space on numerous occasions during the year, and this is the only safe time to carry out the change.

Another change that we are having to implement is the addition of quota’s on  Staff’s  “my documents”. 

Staff will be limited to 5GB in their personal areas, which should be more than enough and will also ensure that we have no issues with backing up the data.  We have a list of those that are over the limit and will work with them to bring the size down, or if justified extend the quota for that case only.

We are not expecting to put on a quota to the staff shared area, however we will be monitoring this and the staff personal areas to see if we need to make any changes.

Staff and Students E-Mail

We will also be carrying out work on the staff and student e-mail system in order to migrate to Exchange 2010 for Staff and live@EDU for students.  There will be interruptions during the week end to the e-mail service, and all student accounts will lose e-mail capabilities until the start of the academic year. (please note, Staff will not lose their e-mails during this period)

We will continue to update you on Summer work as it progresses.

Cheers

Phil

Dear all, Pro monitor and Pro achieve are unavailable today for upgrades.

Cheers

Phil

Dear all,

The College sysem will be down for part of today while an old Domain controller is being taken out of services and a replacement installed.

Cheers

Phil

Dear all,

Summer works have started and there are some dates for your diary coming up where access to IT Services will be limited, they are; 

• 23^rd July – Photocopying Facilities will be limited while those that are being replaced are being removed.
• 26^th July to 30^th July – Photocopying Facilities will be limited while new MFD’s are being installed.
• 27^th July – Pro monitor, Proachieve and Progeneral will be unavailable while we are upgrading the systems.
• 29^th July – Disruption to Internet facilities due to instillation of a new firewall
• 30^th July – Limited access to the Shared Drive (J Drive) while a new Network Storage Device is installed limited access to EBS from 4pm onwards due to update.
• 31^st July /1^st August – All core New College systems will be unavailable while we upgrade the Active Directory Structure
• 7/8^th August – G02, G04, G06 and G07 will be out of action while we rebuild all the machines with Office 2007  Staff and Student e-mails will also be out of action while we work on upgrading Exchange and implementing live@edu
• 14/15^th August – G01, G11, G12, G13 and G14 will be out of action while we rebuild all the machines with Office 2007  Staff and Student e-mails will also be out of action while we work on upgrading Exchange and implementing live@edu

We will as always try to ensure that disruption is as minimal as possible.

Cheers

 Phil Quinn

ICT manager

New College Swindon

 Morning, 

Over the next year we will be putting emphasis on ensuring that our resources are being used appropriately.  

One thing we have found is that some staff have more than one resource (i.e. a laptop and a workstation), so we will be reviewing the allocation of laptops / macs / workstations to staff in order to find who has more than one allocated to them.  Those with valid reasons will keep them, the others will lose the least used resource and it will go into the pool to be re distributed or used as a classroom resource. 

Another area that has been highlighted is classrooms, and in particular workstations being left unused.  We are in a position to monitor the usage of workstations, and over the summer we will implement MAC monitoring. 

We will be monitoring usage on a monthly basis,  the results of which we will be publishing on the ict support blog. 

Under used resources will be investigated to find out the reasons for lack of use and if appropriate re allocated. 

We will update the blog as we progress. 

Cheers 

Phil