Category: Service 2.0

The Power of Open Policy

Nick Jackson / / Open Data, Service 2.0, User Experience

One of the outcomes from the Orbital project that I’m part of is a set of new policies on the subject of research data management. Early on it was decided that this would – in the spirit of open research – be made available under an open licence along with the rest of our resources on the subject (such as training and support materials).

Being the technically minded folk that we are, we wanted to make sure that several of us could work on documentation at the same time without running the risk of overwiting each others changes. We also wanted a comprehensive versioning system to be in place from us putting the first words into the keyboard so that we could see every single change and who made it, something that we think is a big part of making a resource truly open. Finally, we also wanted a mechanism which could allow other people indirectly connected to the project to propose changes. Given our history of using similar systems to manage code there was an obvious choice – the Git source control system.

Git is a system which primarily relies on tracking line-by-line changes, meaning that when we wrote stuff we’d want to use a file format which behaved on a line-by-line basis. This made compiled binary formats such as Microsoft Word or even PDF a bit unsuitable, since a small change could result in a huge set of changes spanning hundreds (or more) of lines. We also wanted to use an open standard which didn’t have prohibitive licence restrictions and which was simple enough to be read and understood by anybody with a basic text editor. There are quite a few standards out there which meet this requirement, but again based on past experience we’re using Markdown for our RDM Policy.

Finally, inspired in no small way by the efforts of the Bundestag to convert their entire body of law to Git we wanted to store policy on a platform which not just allowed community involvement, but which positively encouraged it. GitHub is the world’s largest repository of open development, covering every language under the sun and projects ranging from hardcore low level programming through writing documentation through to communal story writing. Even better, they provide free hosting space for open projects. We already had a University of Lincoln user kicking around from past work, so it was a logical place to stick our Git repository. If you’re interested you can take a look at what we’ve got.

What’s interesting about using open text-based standards to write policy, Git for managing revisions and GitHub as a storage provider is that we’ve inadvertently made it very easy for people to do things that they couldn’t do before.

Continue reading “The Power of Open Policy”

Is Blackboard down? Now you can find out.

Nick Jackson / / Service 2.0, User Experience

Today I’ve been looking over some of our stats for service uptime, and realised it would be handy if we could let you (the staff and students using them) know when things were broken.

Now you can, as I’ve just added another three of our core services (Portal, Email and Library Catalogue) and one non-core but useful service (Blogs) to our Pingdom monitoring system. They now join Blackboard on a brand new public status page. Even better, because we like being open with things like this, you can see the history of our monitoring as far back as it goes. For the new ones this means you can look over history back to today, but for Blackboard this goes all the way back to February.

Pingdom’s monitoring is from a variety of locations around the world, meaning it reflects ‘real’ availability and not just what we can see from our own internal network.

See what’s up and what’s down, any time, at stats.lncn.eu.

So, what’s going on?

Nick Jackson / / CWD, Jerome, Linking You, Nucleus, Open Data, Service 2.0, Total ReCal, User Experience, Web 2.0

Good question. It’s been a while since I’ve blogged, so here’s a really quick overview of what I’m currently working on, pretending to work on, worked on but haven’t done anything with, or planning to work on.

  1. Linking You, our current JISC project on institutional identifiers. Finishing up next week, and currently causing Alex and myself epic amounts of beating our heads against the desks.
  2. Jerome, our other JISC project on making libraries slightly more awesome.
  3. Zendesk Phase 2, including bits and pieces of integration work to make it smoothly flow through everything else we’re doing.
  4. Nucleus (and assorted fluff), our epic store of everything, being brushed up, pinned down and fully documented.
  5. Authentication being made even cooler, and more reliable, along with support for more stuff like SAML.
  6. GAME, our application management environment, being made more awesome.
  7. Room Bookings will be coming over the summer, allowing people to find and book rooms faster than ever before.
  8. Lots of QR Code goodness all over the place, including on room labels (this hooks up to room bookings for added goodness).
  9. Possibly a bit of hardware hacking in the Library with RFID stuff.
  10. CWD updates to version 3. Faster, lighter, more accessible and generally good.
  11. Total ReCal rollout to replace our legacy Timetable system (we hope).
  12. Replacing the legacy phone book with the new one (we hope).
  13. Data, data, data.
  14. A bit of mucking around with telephony, just for kicks.
  15. Taking another look at our Student Communications project to try and address a few annoyances.

Information Everywhere

Nick Jackson / / Labs, Service 2.0, User Experience

In the past few weeks I’ve been dabbling (in between my ‘real’ projects of Jerome and Linking You) with the concept of ‘dashboard’ displays and information radiators. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept they are fundamentally a place which presents information in an easy to digest format. Some are pinboards, some are whiteboards, some are clothes lines with bits of paper pegged to them and some are displays or projectors.

What I’ve opted for is the display method, in no small way inspired by the guys at Panic. However, since between ICT we have what is generally referred to as a metric shedload of information that we want to get hold of I decided that instead of crafting a display for each individual group’s specific needs I would instead come up with a sexy looking framework for rapidly building dashboards. These are designed to live on large screens dotted around the office, visible all day to anybody who happens to look at them.

There’s already an example in use at the Service Desk, where a trusty old iMac is proudly displaying various stats from Zendesk (our ticket manager) to the support team. Initial feedback is that people really like being able to get an overview of what’s going on in one place, as well as any urgent jobs and their feedback averages.

Down in the depths of OST, on the other hand, we’re not massively bothered about our ticket stats in such an immediate manner. Instead we’re far more interested in things like our server availability, response time and load. This means that the modules on our dashboard currently pull data from our Nagios monitoring tool, informing us with the red alert klaxon from Star Trek if things go horribly wrong (causing much turning of heads towards the board to see what’s happened, and everyone else in ICT looking at us in confusion).

Hopefully as time goes on more people will find data which can be represented using these boards, meaning that they will start popping up in more places and exposing data which lets us make faster, smarter decisions about what we’re doing. I’ve already started working on a dashboard for getting the data from the agile development tracker that Alex and I use into a really easily digested format, and I’ll be talking to the Projects team to find out exactly what they want to see with regards to more overarching project management.

Easier? I think so.

It’s Time for Support Zen

Nick Jackson / / Service 2.0, User Experience

It is with great and unreserved pleasure that I announce the grand opening of one of ICT’s latest projects, which has been occupying a surprisingly large amount of my time over the last two months and which has led to me wrapping my head around some quite interesting bits of JavaScript.

Zendesk is here. Or, as we prefer to call it, the Support Desk. It’s a one-stop shop for all your ICT and Estates queries and requests, managed by our crack group of support agents and backed by the combined centuries of knowledge and experience offered by the ICT and Estates teams.

It’s been an interesting journey thought the backwaters of the University’s policies and processes, a less than enjoyable romp through bits of law which I didn’t even know existed, and an exhilarating codathon whilst I wrapped my head around slinging JSON across the ether and inserting it into some HTML elements which don’t exist on a page I don’t control using nothing more than a well-crafted bit of JavaScript and a paperclip. All that is behind us now, so it’s time to tell you what’s new and awesome in the world of getting ICT and Estates support at Lincoln.

First of all, we’ve taken the best bits from both, ditched the worst bits and then streamlined the whole process. From the moment you call or email your request it’s placed directly into Zendesk from where we can monitor how it’s doing. Even better, why not submit your query online using our new request form, now with even fewer annoying questions which you don’t know the answer to than before. It’s a simple matter to sign in using your normal University details and skip the whole process of telling us your name, email address, room code, phone number, line manager, inside leg measurement and what you had for lunch yesterday.

As soon as your request is logged you’ll get a request tracking number within seconds, followed up by emails every time we update your request with something you need to know. You’ll never be out of the loop again, and you can even go online and check all your requests to see how we’re getting on. Leave comments, upload files, tell us that it’s solved and more all from right within your browser.

We could have left it there, but we weren’t done. It only took a few minutes of looking to realise that our how-to guides, instruction manuals, FAQs and more were scattered hopelessly around the Portal, Blackboard, paper help sheets, PDF files, student guides, posters and more. This wasn’t good enough, so we decided to bring them all together into Quick Answers. It’s the place to find solutions to your problems both common and esoteric, guides to walk you through getting things done, information on what’s going on and all kinds of other things. Just type your question or a few key words into the search box and see what we can tell you. Think something’s missing? Just drop me an email and we’ll get it added.

At the end of Phase 1 we’re really excited about the changes and we hope that they make everyones lives a lot easier, as well as helping you to get your problems solved faster than before. Support Desk: now open.

The Dashboards Are Coming!

Nick Jackson / / Labs, Service 2.0, User Experience

Hot on the heels of my ability to extract key information from Zendesk, I’m pleased to announce that we now have two new bits of data available for people to digest. The first one is a set of numbers from our current service desk software, which will (hopefully) be appearing in the ICT service desk sometime in the next week whilst we try hammer through some old tickets.

The next, more usefully for everyone on the academic side, is a summary display of PC availability in the GCW. There’s a bit of worry that the numbers may not be 100% accurate, but we’ve got a hardware audit planned so hopefully by the 24/5 opening these stats will be shockingly accurate, and possibly arranged into zones so you can find a free seat even easier.

Enjoy!

A Dashboard of Joy

Nick Jackson / / Service 2.0, User Experience

As you will know if you’ve been kicking aroud ICT for any length of time we’re moving to a brand new helpdesk software provider, the delightful people at Zendesk. Aside from the massive list of benefits we get from this (you’ll see loads about it when we launch at Christmas) we can also now tap directly into our helpdesk’s statistics to generate useful information in real-time. Going one better than this, we (finally) have the ability to put useful information on a giant display in the helpdesk, letting them know a few useful numbers and pretty graphs.

This is using a combination of live queue data from the Zendesk API, and graphs generated daily from the nice people at GoodData. Obviously as we get a better grip on what people want to know we can mix and match even more, graphing things like trends and response rates down to the minute.

Even better, this same framework can be used for other key information throughout ICT. I’ll be updating it to a more modular system capable of supporting things like server response data and network status graphs, paving the way for even more big screens of knowledge to give a bird’s-eye view over all our systems at once.

“But it’s not our fault…”

Nick Jackson / / Service 2.0, User Experience

There’s been an article recently on Bullet Online about the new self service machines in the library, and how some students find them difficult to use. This, I feel, is a fair point given that it took me a couple of minutes to get to grips with them and I’m pretty darn technology savvy.

What annoys me however is not that the Library didn’t make fixing the problem its number 1 priority (which it should – the system should have been overhauled for usability within days, not 2 months later and nothing done), but what one of the comments on the blog says. I’m not even annoyed at the contents of the comment, but what a subject librarian said when a student rep brought up the issue in a subject committee:

The subject librarin told us that the machines are state of the art and that the library has recived national regonision for this.

How to issue books using the self service machines.

Step back, and think about that. “It’s not a problem, these machines are state of the art”. So was the baggage handling system at Heathrow Terminal 5, and look what happened there. “It’s not our fault that your bags are lost somewhere because we didn’t test and train properly, the machine is state of the art”. That subject librarian should be hauled over the coals. It’s a problem because the student rep has told you it is, so what you need to do is acknowledge it and say what you’re going to do to fix it.

It has taken me a few minutes to put together this poster which explains (very clearly) how to take books out in 8 steps, and what to do if things go wrong. In my personal opinion this is about three steps too long, but these things can be improved on later. It is something like this which the Library should have done as soon as they realised there was a usability issue, not form a subcommittee (yes, there really is one) to discuss how they can improve usability and consider writing some help documentation.

This isn’t your grandparents’ support desk

Nick Jackson / / Service 2.0, User Experience

Recently, in amongst the myriad of Jerome and Total ReCal (not to mention G2, the CWD revamps, fixing LUNA bugs, Dashboard, Nucleus, Linking You, Get Satisfaction, colour remote printing and a swathe of other Labs projects) I’ve been taking a serious look at Zendesk as a replacement for our current service desk ticketing system. In short I’m sold, and I’m pretty sure that a few other people are as well. After looking at a few other SaaS ((Software as a Service)) helpdesk providers Zendesk wins out for me on a number of features, but first and foremost on its simplicity and flexibility. Let me elaborate.

Yesterday we switched on a sandbox for us to play around in and use for testing. It’s already visually customised, using our SSO ((Single Sign-On)) solution, using a custom domain, running with an SSL certificate, has custom fields in the ticket view, implements some of our business logic in triggers and automations, has our SLAs built in and flags trouble tickets, integrates with our Twitter account and Get Satisfaction support portal, has a variety of custom reports ready to go and has a small set of knowledge base articles available. Not bad for a few hours work.

We also gain the inherent benefits of SaaS, meaning that we no longer have servers or infrastructure for our support desk solution to worry about, and we gain new features the moment that they’re available without needing to sign up to another n-year contract. Licensing fees are on a per-agent basis so we’re not spending any more than we have to. We can access it on and off campus (something we can’t do at the moment without resorting to VPN. There’s even a mobile application so our roving support technicians can update tickets as soon as they need updating.

Alongside this there are a few other side effects. Our knowledge base can finally be extracted from the inner depths of Portal (where it resides in a set of PDF files and Word documents) and updated so that it’s finally up to date. We can have more agents, so that finally issues can be assigned to the right people. We can email everybody when things happen to tickets so they don’t languish at the bottom of the queue forever. There’s a nice web interface for everybody, so both agents and users alike can look through their own ticket history.

My target is to have us using it in two weeks. Wish me luck.