Over the past few months in IS SSP we have been working on two major SITS projects: UG Paperless and Direct Paperless Admissions. Both projects have come out of the push towards moving away from paper applications and doing all of our admissions processing online. The UG Admissions project was first implemented last year and is now in its second iteration. Direct Admissions will be released for the first time this fall. Continue reading “Overlapping projects: two sides of the same coin”
An ERASMUS study visit
We have said goodbye to our visitor from the University of Trento, Mauro Ferrari. Mauro is a web application developer and used the EU’s ERASMUS scheme to fund a two-week study visit to learn how we develop software and in particular how we implement the University’s portal, MyEd.
Mauro’s highlights were:
- Learning about MyEd, particularly Martin Morrey’s EDUCAUSE talk on analytics
- Talking about our project methods, especially agile projects
- Seeing how we use development tools such as JIRA and Bamboo
- Learning about the Drupal Features module for managing changes in Drupal modules
Mauro also complimented us on our attention to the experience of users and our commitment to migrate data across versions. He was interested to learn about SAP BI Suite and could see how it would help his University but thought that this would be beyond his team’s current capabilities.
Mauro was more critical of some aspects of the user experience in MyEd. One example he gave was the way that the whole page redraws when a user changes something in the Event Booking portlet. He also thought the list of available portlets was hard to scroll. He gave demos of the Trento portal to several of us; there may be lessons that we can learn from their work.
I was interested to learn of Trento’s approach to managing identities with multiple roles. Each of their systems prompts you to choose your role when you log in, so you have a single identity and can select which role to use if more than one applies. Their portal allows you to group all your portlets regardless of role. This would be a big change for us and I am not suggesting that we change tack, just noting that it was interesting to see the different approach.
Mauro also demonstrated their system for creating and managing applications, which covers everything from Doctoral positions to summer school places to public lectures to internal events and more. Basically it is a sophisticated form editor with a back-end that lets organisers check applications and so forth. It clearly works for Trento; for us I think the question it raises is whether a central service of this sort would be useful. Such a service would combine Events Booking, (use of) EventBrite for public events, OLLBook for evening courses, and possibly more. I don’t see this as a priority but again it was interesting to compare the approaches.
My overall lesson from his visit is that we are a very effective and mature organisation with much to teach other universities. Which is not to say that we know everything or that we cannot learn from other universities in return.
I would like to thank everyone who gave their time to talk to Mauro for helping to create a successful visit for our guest. I also thank Mauro for choosing us for his study; we were very pleased to be his hosts.
Resilient File Infrastructure
Resilient file infrastructure
In the last 2-3 years a number of key services have been advanced, upgraded and replaced. With these changes have come some architectural alterations that have strained our ability to guarantee data integrity in the event of a disaster. This has come about due to design choices by vendors primarily on how they retain objects in their applications. For example in some of the services vendors choose now to retain both transactional database information and real objects that are referred to in the database in associated external file systems. This might take the form of a Word document or a PDF for example where the application holds metadata in the transactional database and the real file in an external file system.
Databases are now typically synchronised in real time across two datacentres at King’s Buildings and Appleton Tower and it follows that it is now very important that the objects held in the external file systems are replicated in a similar manner to ensure that in the event of a disaster both transactional database information and the associated external file system objects can be recovered to the same point in time with no data loss.
Most recently attempts were made to address this problem and within the tel013 and uwp006 projects a resilient file system that could replicate content from King’s Buildings to Appleton Tower was prepared and evaluated. However during evaluation a number of technical constraints emerged that proved that this solution would not be viable.
The requirement for the resilient file system still exists and so we propose to do the following;
• Gather a complete set of the applications and their priority that should make use of this resilient file system service
• Evaluate the technical demands that these applications will impose on a resilient file system and prepare a set of technical requirements
• Catalogue a set of potential solutions that might be used to satisfy these requirements
• Evaluate these potential solutions against the technical requirements
• Identify the preferred solution and prepare a recommendation on which solution to implement
The information gathering and evaluation will be carried out by staff in both ITI and Applications Division
Iain Fiddes
Bursary Management first releases
A new development was implemented in July 2014 to enable processing of Access Bursary applications within EUCLID.
Access Bursaries are one type of a number of centrally and locally administered bursaries and scholarships available from the University of Edinburgh. Access Bursaries are centrally administered by the Student Administration department.
The internal user base is very small, and the main business user worked closely with the project team to produce a tailored solution.
The project was implemented mid-cycle and therefore started in the middle of the process. All applications for 2014/5 had already been received, reviewed and scored in the legacy system. Data was exported from the legacy system to create fund bid records in EUCLID.
Bursary staff have a suite of screens allowing them to:
- View basic application data and imported references
- Make initial decision (award, reject or place on waiting list)
- Allocate the applicant to a specific bursary fund
- Release bursary transactions to Finance for payment (due September 2014)
A further release is scheduled for October 2014, to include an online Application Form, Reference request and upload, and staff application processing with full application data.
Jon Martin and Morag Iannetta
Online Registration Phase 2 implemented
Online Registration was implemented late 2013, enabling all students registering on programmes starting on or after 01 January 2014 to register online. The process allows students to confirm personal details, submit queries regarding information held, and to register for, or decline places on, programmes. If the student requires Immigration clearance, they are only partially registered via the online registration process: Immigration Compliance staff at the University will then check appropriate documentation and complete the registration for the student.
In the Summer of 2014 the Online Registration functionality was enhanced ahead of the registration period for the main annual cohort of students:
- Additional protected characteristics questions have been added to the registration process to satisfy HESA requirements
- When registered/partially registered, students are able to view, update and upload documentation for passports and visas via student self-service for Immigration Compliance
- Immigration Compliance functionality has been enhanced to allow users to mark documentation as checked, to request further documentation, and allows the user to complete the registration process for international students from ‘Immigration Overview’ screens in addition to ‘Validate International Documentation’ screens.
Jon Martin and Morag Iannetta
MyEd Updates 2014/5
One of the major projects over summer 2014 has been the update to MyEd. Behind the scenes we’ve moved from uPortal 3 to 4, although for most users the clearest changes are the excellent work done by Learning Teaching & Web on the new theme. The migration itself has taken months of effort, with many portlets (applications running within MyEd) essentially requiring to be completely rewritten for the new version. The configuration of the two systems are not directly compatible, and tools had to be developed to update and maintain configurations for over 100 channels (the small sectons seen by the user, such as “Learn” or “Staff Details”) across three different environments (development, test and live), testing each of these changes both in isolation and integrated into the complete system.
Many of these channels also depend on other applications (such as accommodation, event booking, Learn, etc.) which in some cases needed to be modified and those modifications tested. Extensive load testing was performed to ensure the systems would handle the very high load anticipated for any major university service at the start of term. Hopefully this helps to give an idea of the scale of the project.
So what next for MyEd? Mobile support was disabled in the current deployment, but a project is currently underway to add support for mobile devices for a number of core parts of MyEd. I’m sure many will be pleased to know this is expected to include both campus maps and timetabling, with email, calendar, Learn and a number of other tools available at launch. Naturally both iPhone and Android platforms will be supported, with full details to follow.
Testing Times – hubs, nodes and grids
I have been doing some basic testing experiments within the SSP. I thought it was a good time to try out Selenium GRID which brings cross browser testing to selenium and Appium for mobile testing.
So I thought I would share how I set up some basic settings to get started with Selenium GRID and Appium.
Path: A new stack of PHP, Yii and Oracle
Path has been through a variety of environments over its two-and-a-bit-year life. When it was a student project, it started off on servers run by EUSA. It then moved to IS’s webhosting environment. Now it’s on a proper supported LAMP infrastructure, with three environments and the sort of features you might have come to expect. This is fantastic news for Path’s future, but it hasn’t been the steadiest journey.
uPortal release 4.10
uPortal version 4.10 has been recently released, which has lots of great new features, most notably the move over to a Bootstrap 3 responsive design.
http://www.apereo.org/uportal/download/uportal-4-1-0
We’re also pleased to note that Ross Nicoll in Development Services has contributed to this release. That’s great to see, and hopefully something we can do more of in subsequent releases.
Thanks Ross :)!
A new Course Timetable Browser
Last week we released a new Course Timetable Browser (CTB), aimed to let students and staff select a bunch of courses and see how they might timetable together. This is aimed to complement the Web Timetables provided by Scientia, and provide some similar functionality to the retired Timetab (a student favourite). You can access the Course Timetable Browser at the link below: