In response to your feedback, we have published a short report that details some of the changes we have already made and some of our future plans.
In March of this year, we asked for your views on IT services at the University by inviting you to take part in our annual survey; we published the results on our website in May.
Many thanks to all who took the time to complete the survey; as well as completing the questionnaire we also received over 1,700 staff and 3,900 student free-text comments.
In response to some of the points raised by you in the survey, we have published a short report that details some of the changes we have already made and some of the plans we have for the future. All have been influenced by your comments and feedback.
You can read the full report on the IT Services website, but here’s a summary:
- We have made substantial improvements to the wireless network, including replacing wireless access points (WAPs) in high use areas with faster devices and deploying over 90 additional WAPs in areas identified as having poor signal coverage. So far, feedback suggests that performance is much improved, but please let us know if you are still finding issues.
- Over the last year, we have replaced over 1,200 staff PCs across the campus and over 400 student classroom PCs. This is part of our ongoing commitment to replace 25% of the University’s computer stock annually in order to ensure it meets the high demands of staff and students.
- This summer, we installed ultra-fast disks on all lecturer PCs in classrooms, speeding up boot-up time to under 30 seconds.
- With the migration of all staff email to Office 365, each member of staff now benefits from 50GB of cloud–based email storage.
- We increased network storage for researchers. Each Principal Investigator (PI) can now access up to 2TB of secure network storage.
- We recently introduced the Maxwell cluster as part of our new research computing initiative. This HPC (High Performance Computing) service gives researchers access to facilities that can significantly speed up data analysis that previously might have taken days, weeks, or months to complete. Over 60 of you are already active users.
- We have a new, dedicated 08:30-17:00 Media Services help line to handle urgent calls with issues in teaching spaces. Dial 3000.
- We introduced a new, browser-based VPN service – Remote VPN – providing staff with secure remote access to systems and data for personal devices.
- Following up on survey requests, we now hold site licenses for Adobe Acrobat Pro, Matlab, and NVivo.
We hope this will assure you that we are committed to improving IT service provision and that your feedback is invaluable in this process.