Recently I’ve been looking at some exciting new changes which might be in the pipeline for the IT helpdesk, namely replacing our old and somewhat rickety system with a new, shiny SAAS one.
Aside from the savings of £14 bazillion pounds a month this will make (which I may have exaggerated, but it will save us money) and the fact it’s a simply better service, not to mention the way it’s web based with mobile clients so support techs can use it anywhere, its support of elegant automated workflow processing, better information capture and integration with everything else we use; it’s a very social piece of software.
We’ve currently got it working in such a way so that if you send us a problem over Twitter we can seamlessly pull it into the system, deal with it, and respond. You need never know what’s happening behind the scenes, all you know is that we’re handling your problem. However, what we need to know is more than just your Twitter handle – we need to know your full name, your student ID number, which course you’re on and various other things so that we can actually solve the problem. There’s also the fact that anybody can email the helpdesk from any account which produces this same problem. We know exactly who you are if you use your student email account, but we struggle to know who xx_bubble_princess_xx_28463 is.
Continue reading “Why we should care about students’ email addresses and Twitter names”