Project Lists.

Seeing as how i'm feeling inspired by others who have been publishing their project lists for this year, and seeing as how this is a development blog, I thought I would do the same.  This year I will be developing (and attempting to blog on) the following:

• Professional Placements
• Transfering our professional placements team from an access database into the SITS family including e:Vision functionality for placment providers and academic staff.
• Student Account Management
• Integration of our Finance department with the full SAM component inc on line payments (yes I know! and no we dont have this function yet. )
• Key Information Sets
• 'nuff said I think.
• XCRI
• Yep, that old chestnut
• Paperless Admissions
• We are attempting to go completely paperless with our admisisons processes, wish us luck! :)
• Applicant Portal
• Document Manager
• Marketing IPP Enquiry Forms
• Timetabling and Scheduling inc e:Vision personalised timetables
• We are moving from Scientia as our institutional TT and moving to the SITs solution lock, stock and barrel.  This is a 10 month development which is to go live by the start of next academic year.  No pressure then! :)

In amongst this we will be doing a total hardware replacement and system reinstall (in place upgrades aren't an option apparently) into virtualised environments. *twitch*

Need a job?

Need a job as a developer?  Have knowledge of SITS?  Apply to work for me! :)

Systems Develepor Position @LeedsTrinity:

http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/ADU425/student-systems-developer/

Friday Frustrations!

*Rant warning!*

Today, i've been trying to fathom the SITS ipp enquiries component, specifically customisation of siw_ipp_lgn page, new enquirer user setup and getting mua records setup, as you do!

Now those of you in know will understand MRCs and MRA's?  Well we have no MRA set for our IPU MRC, as a result it is not creating an mua for a new enquirer, so there's my starting point.  This got me looking at the siw_ipp_lgn.hts file for translation fields for the MRA record.  Now I get the X-Entity, x occurence and x-subst, ie A_TABLE.ENTITY.DICTIONARY, what i don't understand is how to translate x-subst statements that dont conform to this (you know, like it says in the manual!).

For example, a line that says for eg,  password1.dictionary.entity, how do you translate that?!? Manuals & online help have shed no light.  I'm guessing it will turn out to be something stupidly simple and make me look like an idiot.  Watch this space!

I received this in my Twitter feed today and felt the need to add a blog entry about it. :)

All those frustrating password changes you are made to do by IT and systems admins, adding a capital letter here and a number there.  All this is actually done for a reason, take note!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8898482/25-worst-web-passwords.html

Risk vs Reward?

Being relatively new to the world of management I am starting to understand others ffrustrations.  Being a small team we are always pretty stretched on both time and workload. Our course management system is expanding exponentially within the the institution and I find that we are fire fighting more and more, our efforts are concentrated on the smooth running of the system rather than the development of it.

Unfortunately, this means that development has to take more of a backseat or we have to specifically set time aside, plug in head phones and shut out the world to get things done.  From conversations at various conferences with other colleagues in HE it sounds like we are not alone in this situation, where as other HE's seem to have an abundance of developers to create new weird and wonderful content for their students.

Developing and releasing new content quicker would be fantastic, a bigger team could accomplish this, but i guess its all relative.  Obviously in the current climate you need a very good reason for additional staff, is the risk of employing more staff and increasing the team, improving the developments and thus (hopefully) student satisfaction worth the reward to to HE's in general?

I would find it interesting to hear how other SITS development teams function, how big are the teams, how are they organised etc. Is there an acceptable ratio of 1 developer to X amount of students?

Anyway, enough of this deep thought malarkey, I'm off down the pub.... ;)

System Patches & Upgrades

Well here I am, 8 o'clock in the evening, still at work doing system fixes and patches and generally swearing at some software that has no idea that it is causing me to miss the pub quiz.

We seem to have encountered a few issues since an upgrade which I am trying  rectify tonight.  Hopefully this will help with some processing issues we've been having in our IPP component.

Whilst I am on the subject of working after hours. is it just me that has a 'working late process'?  This generally goes something like this:

1. Waiting for everyone to leave the office
2. Put the kettle on
3. While kettle is boiling create a to do tick list
4. Create playlist of suitable angry music
5. Make coffee
6. Hunt for biscuits\chocs\nibbles.
7. Hit Play and turn up speakers.

Then and only then am i ready to go. :)

The On-Demand world.

As a systems developer in this 'on-demand' world of ours, managing the expectations of users is continually becoming more important.  We have instant online access to so many  products and services in our world that if you are not providing this service, it is a big deal.

My teams current projects at Leeds Trinity are aimed at enhancing the on-demand provision for our students.  Personalised timetables, on-line registration and management of professional placements to name but a few.  I  feel pressure as a developer to get this functionality out to our student body as I know students now expect this to be available, and to be honest, so would I.

I think this is the reason that keeping users informed, so they are aware of what enhancements are coming is vitally important.  Managing their expectations of what we can deliver and when, give them the option to feed in to developments making them apart of it is important.

***Profound thought Warning!***
An interesting thought that struck me while i wrote this, is a consequence of our on-demand world a gradual reduction in human patience?