Workshop, workshop, workshop...

It's been a manic few weeks with a huge number of Analysis workshops both with Squiz and Internally but we're making some really interesting conclusions around the user journey within our site and also the availability of content for visitors. We've had workshops to cover LDAP, content migration, design, user journeys, wireframes and taxonomies!

The conclusion is that we're looking at rolling out a shiny new website with some very clever functionality that reflects the needs of our audience providing them with everything they could need to find a course and make an application. Hopefully we'll be able to pleasantly surprise a few of our key stakeholders whilst we're at it as well!

So, we have another three weeks of analysis workshops and then we'll be looking at starting the build. The migration stages are going to be interesting with a variety of different systems all required to pull various pieces of data. Our saving grace at the moment is the inclusion of Funnelback within our planning, this could be the answer to at least a couple of our issues!

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!