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Winner of Tribal University of Year Award

During Tribal SITS:Vision Annual Customer Conference 2014 in the Celtic Manor resort, Newport on 15th – 16th July, Tribal has announced their customer awards for 4 different categories and the overall award “Tribal University of Year”

The 4 categories are

  • Most Improved Student Experience
  • Outstanding use of Innovation and Technology
  • People, Process, Performance
  • Improving Efficiency, Achieving Effectiveness

We have been named as the winner of the overall award “Tribal University of Year”, and also named as the runner up for the following three categories “Outstanding use of Innovation and Technology”, “People, Process, Performance” and “Improving Efficiency, Achieving Effectiveness”.

Tribal Award pic
Award for Tribal University of Year

The following are our entries for the four categories of Tribal customer awards:

Most Improved Student Experience

Why: In University of Edinburgh, we have implemented the student self-service project from August 2013. It provides a number of functions to allow student to:

  • view their details in the university portal;
  • update a set of personal records in eVision.
  • perform online registration including requests for programme changes and submission of immigration documents in eVision.

The benefits include:

  • Student can view their real time data
  • Students can register online
  • Students are informed when they have not matriculated and what actions they must take
  • More timely data – students are recorded as registered earlier and queries can be actioned immediately rather than when the paper form is found
  • Removal of paper-based process;
  • Data entered by the source
  • Student Administration and their temps no longer needs to undertake manual keying.  The amount of corrections to data by Student Admin has dropped 90% compared to a year ago.

Since August 2013 until end of May:

Details Updated

Volume of changes
Address

26000
Known as name

2500
Mobile/personal email

11000
Emergency contact

16000
Students have completed online registration (with Start date >= 1 Jan 14)

1316

 

Outstanding use of Innovation and Technology

Why: The University of Edinburgh has always delivered the majority of functionality through e:Vision. From two years ago, we started to integrate other web development technology and frameworks (like Bootstrap, JQuery plugins, Ajax etc.) into our SITS eVision to improve the user interface design and system performance combining with the latest development in eVision from Tribal. Now we have established a set of frameworks for our own development which deliver a much improved UI and good performance. This has reduced the overall development costs and improved the building quality. In the same time, the user experience with our recently development has been improved.

The technology we have used included

– Using Bootstrap toward responsive design

– Use global stylesheet (CSS) across eVision and use LESS framework to manage changes

– Testing framework to allow automated testing for bug and performance

– Integration eVision process with database programme (PL/SQL) to improve performance

– Configuration management using Project to detect dependency between different ongoing project works and support works and to manage the deploying changes across different environments

We have delivered a number of projects using these framework include paperless admission, student self-services, direct admission, UKBA data capture and management etc., Student bursary management.

 

People, Process, Performance

Why:

We have developed the marks upload function to upload exam marks and the resit marks in eVision directly two years ago which schools can upload the marks from any exam into SITS. The marks are validated automatically before saved into the system.  Recently we have worked with Tribal to develop the similar function for award upload which allows the schools to upload the award directly into eVision and control when the results for a programme are published to students.

The benefits of these two functions include

  • Both of these functions have delivered control to the end user so they can better supports students who have queries resulting from the processes.
  • Students will have access to consistent guidance on what resources are available for support following publication of end of stage results.
  • The upload and keying process will systematically validate against the student record.
  • The system will provide Schools with oversight of students expecting to graduate at a particular time of year, and allow them to identify missing or incorrect information
  • Schools owning programmes will have control over when Awards are made available to students.
  • The current reliance on Academic Registry keying awards into EUCLID will be removed.
  • Scope for errors in keying will be reduced

 

Improving Efficiency, Achieving Effectiveness

(same entry as most improved student experience, see above)

 

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Query the SQL which drives an Oracle view.

If you’ve ever wanted to find out which views reference a certain table/column condition in an Oracle database, there is a view called user_views which can be queried as the owner of the view and contains the sql used to define the population of the view. There is a slight trick to querying it though, as that column is a Long datatype. You can use the following SQL:

select * from user_views
where dbms_xmlgen.getxml('select text from user_views 
                          where view_name = ''' || view_name || '''') 
                         like '%<thing I want to search for>%';

Just replace the like with the thing you want to search for. Hope that’s useful!

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SITS Technical Working Group and STUTALK User Group Meetings

The SITS Technical Working Group and STUTALK User Group meetings take place every six months. Every time meetings are held in different locations and are organized by different Universities. The last meeting took place on the 22nd and 23rd of May and was hosted by the University of Bristol. We had two representatives from the Student System Partnership Team (SSP) – Tomasz Pogoda and Jon Martin.
The purpose of the Technical Working Group meeting was to discuss issues related to the SITS software updates, new features of the latest software version 8.7.1, de-suported components and the Document Manager tool.
On the STUTALK User Group Meeting we had a chance to discuss – What are institutions using STUTALK for and what they have done in terms of the STUTALK implementation. Also a new features and the road map were presented by the Tribal.

On both meetings there was a number of presentations delivered. There were three presentations delivered by Tribal:

– Email Configuration, troubleshooting and attachments – In this presentation a new email features which will be available from version 8.7.1 have been presented.
– E:Vision, HTML5, Accessibility & Responsive Design– Tribal The overview of new features related to the Mobile strategy, responsive design and HTML5 has been presented.
– STUTALK 2.0 – in this presentation the features of the new version of STUTALK have been presented.

There was one presentation delivered by the Kings College London:

– STUTALK and mobile timetabling – presentation given by Kings College London.

We also had a chance to share our recent experience with Bootstrap/Jquery/CSS stylesheet within our SITS configuration. The  topic of our presentation was: Improving the e:Vision user Interface using JQuery and Bootstrap.
We have recived a very positive feedback and most of the institutions were highly interested in our experience.

The presentation slides BootstrapTWG_Edinburgh_University and minutes from both meetings STUTALK User Group Meeting  Technical Working User Group Meeting

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Drupalise me – confessions of a born-again Drupalist

In September 2013, in the early stages of the ongoing project to replace the University’s central CMS with Drupal, some of the project team attended DrupalCon in Prague. It proved to be an educational and fun introduction to the Drupal world. There were many fascinating sessions, focusing not just on Drupal but on web and Open Source topics in general, and we met tonnes of interesting people who are passionate about what they do. Drupalists are a vibrant, welcoming and supportive bunch; when they say ‘Come for the software, stay for the community.’, they’re not kidding.

On the 9th and 10th of May, the University was one of the sponsors for DrupalCamp Scotland, giving us an ideal opportunity for a more local dose of the Drupal community spirit, and some socialising afterwards! The keynotes on both days were insightful, and there were talks from other people doing interesting things with Drupal – from DevOps, to testing with Behat and Selenium, as well as working with particular Drupal modules. We met other Drupal developers from around Scotland and the UK who share our enthusiasms and frustrations, including Drupalists from the University of Dundee who are very active in the Scottish Drupal community. This time, however, we weren’t just there to observe and absorb, we were taking part and sharing our own experiences with Drupal.

On Friday the focus was the Business perspective. Stratos Filalithis from the University Website Programme team gave a great presentation on the vision for the University’s central Drupal CMS. On Saturday, things got more technical!  Myself and another developer on our Drupal team, Adrian Richardson, presented a session on how we’re combining our automated deployment toolkit with Drush and Features to support the deployment of the new Drupal CMS. For me personally it was a daunting prospect, especially given the technical credentials and Drupal kudos of the other DrupalCamp speakers! However,  the audience were friendly and interested, and asked really good questions at the end of our talk. Later, people were keen to discuss their own thoughts on the topics we covered. We got some great feedback on our approach to deployment and testing, giving us confidence that we’re going in the right direction. It was a rewarding experience and, unexpectedly, it was fun!

What has struck me about both DrupalCon and DrupalCamp is the genuine sense of community evident at Drupal events.  The obvious drive of those present to share their experiences and to be involved with the community is infectious.  I will be at the next DrupalDrinks in Edinburgh to talk more to the people I met on Saturday, and whilst I haven’t yet contributed to code on Drupal.org, I’m now keen to attend a code sprint and get on the Drupal Ladder!  There are many developers all around the University who are using Drupal to build websites and by virtue of using Drupal, we are already part of this amazing community.  On Saturday the keynote speaker, Robert Douglass, talked about how easy it is to get caught up in the trials and tribulations of our own complex Drupal projects and to lose sight of the bigger picture. Being at DrupalCamp was a reminder that by placing Drupal at the core of the University’s website we are placing ourselves firmly in the midst of a dedicated, talented, enthusiastic and supportive Open Source community.  We can contribute to that community and we can learn from them, and we can also be inspired by their ethos when it comes to our own internal Drupal community and the future of Drupal at the University.

Here is a PDF of the slides from our presentation at DrupalCamp, including notes, along with a link to Adrian’s prezi covering the technical aspects of our talk:

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Open Source updates

Open Source projects and code are an important aspect of what we do, so it’s good for us to be able to contribute and share with the wider community. Here’s an update of some of the recent work we’ve been doing.

uPortal

On the uPortal front we’ve contributed a bug fix to the core uPortal framework which should be incorporated into the uPortal 4 patch releases.

And the Blackboard  Virtual Classroom portlet which we originally contributed to the Apereo foundation (then JASIG) has been updated by the University of Wisconsin to version 2.

Blackboard Learn

We have submitted a building block we wrote a while ago to do dynamic web forms to project oscelot, which is an open source community site based around eLearning. We chose to release the bb-webform-tool (as we call it) code on Github.

We have also submitted the a Building Block which allows creation and integration with Confluence Wiki spaces to Project Oscelot, and have put the bb-confluence-tool code on Github in preparation.

The portlet and building block code above have been released under the MIT license.

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Stylesheet Documentation

As part of our CSS review we were looking at how to document and maintain style guides.  This is quite an open field but are currently trying StyleDocco.

You can write your comments in Markdown and present it along side your CSS to have examples of your HTML+CSS.  It’s all in one place and rather handy.

StyleDocco Example
StyleDocco Example
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X-ray Tomography Control

The School of Geosciences has an X-ray computed tomography (CT) scanner installed within one of its basement laboratories, which researchers within the school have assembled from individual components. The scanner consists of a number of independent elements, including an X-ray tube and corresponding camera, air table for holding and rotating samples and PCs for controlling the X-ray tube and handling image capture from the camera. Custom software to control the image capture process was written by a PhD student, and this software was driven by Testpoint (which also controls the table on which the sample sits).

CT IMAGE

The original implementation was based around a Windows 98 installation, and while this solution was rock-solid, time taken for the image capture process was significantly longer than ideal, at around 6 seconds per image (with a 0.5-1.5 second exposure time). Additionally, with the existing high resolution camera displaying worsening artefacts from X-ray exposure, a more modern camera was purchased and required to be integrated into the image capture process.

CT SCreenshot

IS Apps successfully bid on the work to replace the existing PC and software, as an alternative to either purchasing a complete pre-assembled solution, or outsourcing the work to a third party. Limitations of driver availability for the hardware used meant Windows XP was the most recent OS which was suitable for the task, although fortunately this posed relatively few difficulties bar sourcing a new license!

A new C++ application was developed, using the Microsoft Foundation Class library to provide the user interface. C++ was chosen as both the original image capture application, and the majority of worked examples for the hardware, were written in C++. The desire to improve performance, and memory usage of the image capture process, also indicated towards C++ for the fine-grain control the language provides.

The interface was streamlined to eliminate unused options, the image processing options were expanded to clarify the available options, and a control added to allow the camera hardware to be chosen. The image capture process itself was encapsulated within a new dialog window which is displayed when the process is running, and contains the progress indicators and status display (start time, estimated end time, number of images captured, etc.).

CT SCreenshot 2To enable development without requiring constant access to the hardware, support for “dummy” camera and table hardware was added, where the application emulates the relevant hardware internally. As the components operate independently of each other, the user interface, table and camera all operate on individual threads within the application, ensuring that interaction with any of these three elements is processed as close to real time as possible. Communication within the elements is handled primarily via MFC message pumps from the hardware threads to the UI thread, with semaphores and events used to pass data down to the hardware threads where required (most hardware threads as given a fixed task to complete, and are expected to return only when it has finished).

This revised coupling of the hardware control, in combination with reduction in how frequently the cameras require to be re-initialised during an image capture, reduced image capture overheads to a fraction of their previous times. Early estimates are around a tripling in performance, with actual exposure time taken by the camera now dominating time taken.

An example of the resulting rendered “slices” of a section of meteorite, after reconstruction in Octopus, is shown below:

IMAGE0091

Obviously we’re very pleased with the project results, and hope this provides a clear illustration of the level of work IS Apps is capable of, as well as the cost benefits of in-sourcing of applications.

 

 

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Testing Times in the SSP

For a recent project we needed to establish some base line timings using selenium and the process had to be automated.  We solved this by combining Firebug and Selenium and producing HAR files.

This article outlines combing firebug and netexport which gives you a very handy export for analysing all of your timings.  Your can then use the HAR viewer to have a look and see what is going on.

Another approach which we tried was http://assertselenium.com/2012/11/02/performance-data-collection-using-browsermob-proxy-and-selenium/ – using a REST based proxy tool to record the har files.  This means you don’t have to use the firebug part so could be used cross browser.

We also are having a look at a couple of javascript based testing tools which are well worth a look:

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SITS upgraded to 8.7.0

We have upgraded our SITS system to the version 8.7.0 over the last weekend. This was a double upgrade from version 8.6.0 to 8.6.1 and then from 8.6.1 to 8.7.0.

The upgrade process went well. It started from 1pm on Friday 28th Feb, and completed by Saturday evening. This allowed the technical technical tests to start from Sunday morning, and by the 4pm Sunday afternoon, the system was ready and re-opened to the public.