Computing Service Newsletters
Computing Service Newsletter 231 (January 2007)
Progress Reports
The Progress Reports made by the Computing Service to the IT Syndicate in October and November 2006 included the following items not covered elsewhere in this or earlier Newsletters:
User Services
The pre-arrival registration scheme for staff and academic visitors has made a great difference both to User Administration staff and to Institutions.
The UK e-Science Certification Authority audited the UCS in July. All procedures were found to be satisfactory.
Technical User Support
The Michaelmas term saw a record number of bookings (just under 3000) for Computing Service courses.
Institution Liaison
A Small Institution Support Specialist post has been approved and graded to provide IT support for some small non-school institutions without their own IT staff.
Networks and Small Systems
The number of users registered for the VPDN service is now over 2200 and it was used by 484 distinct users during the month to 10 November. The number of CUDN dialup (Magpie) accounts has fallen again, with the start of a new charging year, to just under 800.
Lapwing deployment is proceeding and the headline measure of number of distinct users per week is now around 350.
The PWF eCredit facility, offering online payment for PWF common balance print credit by debit and credit cards, has collected more than £3500 worth of payments since its release.
PWF Windows testing has started, ready for the phased introduction of TCP/IP in place of IPX during the Christmas vacation.
The introduction of Internet Explorer 7 is being delayed to the Long Vacation to ensure that it does not adversely affect existing courses and to provide adequate time for testing and documentation.
The scanning facilities on PWF Windows have been enhanced to include options for optical character recognition for multi-page documents using either manual or automatic document feeders.
As part of commissioning the Managed Cluster at Education, a 'SmartBoard' system was integrated into PWF Windows. The 'SmartBoard' system combines a computer and whiteboard to give an interactive whiteboard, and could now be offered at other Managed Cluster sites.
Unix systems
Over one hundred University institutions or research groups now use the managed web server to provide their web sites.
New DSpace communities have been set up for the Law Faculty and the Departments of Earth Sciences and Engineering.
Following our application for an Accelerated Experience Scheme secondment in January, we received permission to advertise a position to work on the Streaming Media Service. Work has started on the web front-end which will permit easy upload of raw digital video and trigger automatic conversions into streamed formats and their availability over the internet.
The frequency with which some email viruses change has caused us to increase the frequency of checking for new virus signatures on the central email scanner, from once an hour to once every fifteen minutes.
The mirror service run to support various Unix and Linux operating system and application software installs in the University has been made more resilient to hardware failures by the addition of a back-up system run on second hand hardware.
The title of this document is:
Computing Service Newsletter 231: Progress Reports
URL:
http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/newsletter/2007/nl231/progress.html