Category: Projects

Things I do.

PFMPC – The Vista/7 Update

Nick Jackson / / Print From My PC

As promised – an updated about the state of PFMPC and Windows Vista / Windows 7:

We don’t know what’s happening. All our testing works perfectly, with every combination of things we can find, but there are still some end users (students) who can’t connect to the server. It only affects Windows Vista and Windows 7. Firewalls, antivirus, service packs, settings, existing printers, wireless drivers and everything else seem to make no difference at all, but the problem is replicable on the same computer.

There’s also a second issue (we think it’s unrelated) to do with 64 bit systems installing the printer driver (we think it’s Windows 7 only), but again this is only on some systems and not others.

Turns out it’s not ready for the prime time at all – we’ll keep working at it. In the meantime if you know of anybody with problems using PFMPC please get them to drop me an email at nijackson@lincoln.ac.uk and we’ll try work it out.

Shiny New Network Access

Nick Jackson / / LUNA

It’s been a while since I’ve given you an update, so here goes: Next week I’ll be looking at developing a whole new service for communications. For now, however, it’s more on what I’ve been doing for our top secret project (which anybody has been able to find out about, we invited people to focus groups about but nobody showed up, and which you’ll hear more about from just about everybody very shortly) – LUNA.

LUNA stands for Lincoln University Network Access, which we know is technically incorrect because Lincoln University is either in Nebraska or New Zealand but it sounds cool. It’s the nickname for a huge set of updates to the workings of the network access controller which is responsible for connecting people in University accommodation to the internet. You know, the thing which asks you for your username and password and sometimes dumps you into the mysterious quarantine.

Continue reading “Shiny New Network Access”

Designing for Everything

Nick Jackson / / Print From My PC, Projects, Web 2.0

As promised not long ago (earlier today, in fact) more work has been done on the Common Web Design to make it a bit shiner and a bit more ready for prime time. In all honesty, Alex did a lot of the work to actually make the design fit together, and now the challenge is how to make it friendlier for things like large text browsers. I suspect there will be much mucking around replacing pixel values with em values.

Anyway, regardless of what needs to be done I thought I should share with you some of what has been done – specifically mockups of a shinier Print From My PC support website, and the beginnings of my.lincoln. I’d like to point out that these designs aren’t put together in Photoshop, they are genuine renders by the browser, in this case Safari. They also work in Internet Explorer as far back as IE6, Firefox, Opera, Chrome and even Lynx (people using screen readers will love us).

Mockup of Print From My PC using CWD.
Mockup of Print From My PC using CWD.
Mockup of my.lincoln using CWD.
Mockup of my.lincoln using CWD.

Shiny, huh? A nice side-effect of this design – and one which was planned to be doable from the beginning – is that they are easily tweakable to be touchscreen friendly with big, chunky menu buttons and fixed height presentation. I’ll leave it to your imagination as to what we could do with touchscreens and a nice web interface to University services, because we don’t have any plans (or even solid ideas) at this end.

The Get Satisfaction Crash Course

Nick Jackson / / Get Satisfaction, Service 2.0

Get Satisfaction is getting its first public airing on a mass distribution tomorrow morning when the student email goes out. In preparation, I’ve knocked up this crash course on how to post topics, reply, get signed up and tweak your preferences and personalisation.

This particular version is aimed at students (although should provide a good grounding for staff wanting to get involved), a more in-depth staff-friendly one will be along in a day or so with more detail on things like moderation.

What people talk about…

Nick Jackson / / Get Satisfaction, Service 2.0

Now that the University has some Get Satisfaction support goodness going on, there are all kinds of cool widgets we can use to integrate the support community with other websites. The Blogs help page sports a “Feedback” tab on the left hand side of the window, powered by Get Satisfaction. My other blog has a page explaining about what I do as a Student Rep, and includes a feedback widget right in the middle of the page. In fact it’s so easy to do that here’s an example of our most recent active topics, embedded into the middle of a blog post.

Hang on a second, communicating with the mothership…

Clever, huh? If you’ve got a site which is relevant to the University and you’re wanting to get hold of a widget to expand your direct support methods then just let me know!

What, Why and How

Nick Jackson / / Get Satisfaction, Service 2.0

Sadly, my efforts to make wtf.lincoln.ac.uk the official address for our Get Satisfaction account weren’t successful, despite receiving widespread support. We are, however, now sporting a brand new and shiny URL at http://wwh.lincoln.ac.uk. The WWH stands for What, Why and How which neatly encompasses a lot of the things which Get Satisfaction will be dealing with. Other suggestions included huh.lincoln.ac.uk (as in “Huh? What?”) and a variety of “eh” and “umm” derivatives.

However, we also have some good news in that we now completely support Get Satisfaction! We can properly moderate conversation to keep it relevant, make sure the Student Reps get recognised, keep people up to date easier and more! Expect to see more news about this through some more channels soon, but if you want to tell anybody to use Get Satisfaction (or What, Why, How) then please feel free.

GSFN, PFMPC, LUNA and other acronyms.

Nick Jackson / / Get Satisfaction, LUNA, Print From My PC, Service 2.0

Okay, it’s been a while, so here’s a roundup of what’s going on in the land of Nick.

Get Satisfaction

My never-ending quest to get the University using Get Satisfaction seems to be nearing an end with the news that we will very soon (Monday!) be getting on the basic level of subscription services. This brings all kinds of cool new stuff to the service, including more moderation tools (so we can keep the conversation relevant and better manage how we respond to things), the ability to flag student reps as awesome (so more people listen to them), extra branding opportunities (so you know it’s about Lincoln), more widgets (for letting people use Get Satisfaction from within other sites) and most importantly the support of the University!

Now all we need is a cool name. So far thoughts include feedback.lincoln.ac.uk, thoughts.lincoln.ac.uk, qipp.lincoln.ac.uk, comments.lincoln.ac.uk and my personal favourite (although highly unlikely) wtf.lincoln.ac.uk – anybody got any more ideas or preferences? Let me know.

Print From My PC

Our ‘wireless printing’ service is still on track for a week 6 soft launch, although we’re experiencing some interesting glitches with printing from Ubuntu and other Linux flavours since they don’t trust our certificate provider. Kirsty took a brief wander around the library to work out where we could put posters advertising the service and you should hopefully see them appearing soon (so that you can break things and complain at us).

Lincoln University Network Access

This is a new one – LUNA is the name for an updated network access controller which will be rolling out to Student Village after the Christmas break. It includes improved security, better guidance on what to do when things go wrong, and (best of all) redesigned pages so you still feel like you’re within the University. Guess who’s been tasked with dismantling the existing pages, figuring out how they work and redesigning them all? Yup, it’s me!

All in all it’s a load of exciting things going on here in ICT. Hopefully once Get Satisfaction is working I can get cracking on another Service 2.0 thing (I want to see if there’s something I can do with the helpdesk…), there are some big enhancements to timetabling floating around in the cloud, and there’s a huge (and I mean huge) set of changes to student communications in the pipeline.

The SU are Getting Satisfied!

Nick Jackson / / Get Satisfaction, Service 2.0

The SU plugged Get Satisfaction today at the Student Reps training session!

My student side declares a victory (“Hooray! Advocacy as a Student Rep worked!”) but my staff side now goes “umm… now what?”. See, at the moment it’s impossible to moderate discussions, or to change the state of a topic without posting a reply. This means that if someone answers a question who isn’t a staff member there’s no way to say “this has been answered” without also weighing in and adding unnecessary crud to the thread.

$99 a month for moderation tools… which it’s impossible to justify without a detailed survey and explanation of how it works. Which is impossible to generate without users. Which are difficult (but not impossible) to get without promotion. Which the University won’t approve without some form of moderation tools and staff training in place.

Hmm. Anybody got experience with this kind of ‘just trust me on this one’ promotion? Get Satisfaction is so unique that there’s nothing in the market to compare to, and so new that there aren’t any big case studies. Nor does it help that there are only a scant handful of educational institutions who only half use the service.

Either way I’ve switched the default login method from Get Satisfaction’s own user database to Facebook (although the former is still available) to make it more immediately accessible. We really could do with getting SSO working; but that’s another story and more money.