Information Services are excited to share the following technology updates and news taking place in early 2019:

Office 365 guides now in SharePoint

We have moved our Office 365 guides from Workspace to a new SharePoint site within Office 365. This site is a collection of ‘how to’ articles to help you get started with Microsoft Office 365. There are also some news posts which feature improvements or suggestions on how you can make the most of Office 365. We hope you enjoy the new guides. Find them here: https://uniofnottm.sharepoint.com/sites/Office365.

FindTime — arranging meetings made easy

Finding it difficult arranging meetings? Microsoft FindTime might help — it’s a tool you can add to Outlook that sends a meeting poll to colleagues. It’s a lot more democratic than your regular Outlook appointment and works for people inside and outside of the University. You don’t need Office 365 — just an email address.

Find out more on our Office 365 guide.

Microphone upgrade in teaching and learning spaces

Starting January 2019, Information Services are working with GV Multimedia on a collaborative project to upgrade microphones in more than 360 centrally timetabled rooms. This project is a Digital Futures investment of over £380,000 and is expected to last until Easter to complete all rooms. GV multimedia will be working four nights a week between 6pm and 10pm to install the new equipment across campuses.

We hope students, academics and all staff will benefit from the improvements to sound recordings in teaching and learning spaces.

IT Freshers survey result

This year IS ran our fourth annual Freshers survey with a record 1,000+ number of responses. The feedback on our core services was positive with most services being easy to use. The prize winner and early results from the survey can be viewed on our Digital Network blog. Students have provided constructive feedback and we will publish further articles with quantitative results.

Finance System upgrade

IS are working with Finance to deliver an upgrade to our ‘Agresso’ Finance System. The project, sponsored by Sally Blackamore, commenced September 2018 and falls under the ‘Digital Futures’ programme of work.

The newer version comes with a change of name and is now known as ‘Business World’. The upgrade project will deliver some much needed improvements to usability and process; a cleaner and more modern look and feel, and; much improved web based functionality through a single sign on.

The upgrade is on track to go-live in May 2019, during which there will be a period of enforced ‘Agresso’ downtime. For more information, see the Digital Network blog.

Echo360 lecture recordings migration

Thank you for your support and use of Engage, our new ‘Active Learning Platform’. We know that it has been challenging moving to Engage at the start of term, but we are pleased to report that there have been over 16,000 recordings since 23 September 2018, and 235,000 hours of viewings and downloads.

Now that Engage is live we will soon decommission the old service. This is the final call for requests to migrate recordings from the old system to the new. Find out more on the Digital Network blog.

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) — coming soon

As part of the overarching Security Remediation project, we will soon be introducing Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA).

MFA is used to mitigate against password guessing and theft, including brute force attacks. MFA can also be called 2-step verification or 2-factor authentication (2FA). It requires users to approve access requests via the Microsoft Authenticator app.

This year IS will be introducing MFA to a number of remote working services. Find out more on the Digital Network blog.