The Christmas run up has begun!

University Christmas Card 2010

So, 26 days to Christmas and we're officially feeling festive! We have the usual internal ideas knocking around, we should the Christmas party be this year, who do we need to send cards to and how do we 'festivise' the staff website, do we go with a sprig of holly or a christmas pudding?

This year we will be sending out a card designed by one of our staff members and in aid of Victim Support. However, the big development for us this year is going to be our 'going green' move of offering a digital Christmas card for our staff to send out. We've had them previously and they did go down rather well but there was always a question from our ISD department about the security of an online system. So this year we've tackled the problems head on and decided on an internally hosted software solution with LDAP authentication! This solves the problem of how to keep the system secure and also means that we will be able to use the system for other cards during the year.

A win win solution that keeps us and ISD happy, the only question now is when do we release it to staff, after all , it is almost December!

Yourls, our in-house URL Shortener

So, we are already using Bitly.Pro for a custom domain name and to monitor the stats from our tweets and some radio adverting and it works fantastically well! But, we had a proposition from our ISD department about the use of an in-house solution as well.

Now, we always like to do things in-house if we can and this seemed like an ideal solution, the same functionality as Bitly.Pro with the added extras of being able to update the destination of the URL's, update the short link ending and far better filtering of results and lists.

So, we're going to use them for publication in printed materials, much friendlier than using the long URL and we can use a custom address to ensure that it stays looking corporate. The best part will be that we can get some feedback on how closely people using the printed prospectus interact with the website. Throw in a few trackable phone numbers and we'll be looking at pulling in the most stats we've ever had on a printed publication!