A reminder that we’re co-hosting a free ‘Business Intelligence in Universities’ event in Melbourne on the morning of Wednesday 12th October, at our Freshwater Place offices. It will be a focused roundtable event, where you’ll be able to learn from the experiences of other universities, as well as the speakers from Microsoft and CALUMO.

Senior executives from both Finance and IT will benefit from attending the event.   It’s an opportunity to learn what your peers are doing, have achieved and the lessons learned.

CALUMO, who are specialists in applying effective Business Intelligence at Higher Education Providers, will bring you up to date on trends and achievements in the Higher Ed sector, including

• Top BI implementation lessons for Universities
• Exposing Load Planning from out of the ‘black box’
• Course profitability – is it a dirty word(s)?
• Issues around Research Reporting and compliance
• Making budgeting and forecasting useful to everyone involved
• How to trust your data
• How the value of the Finance & IT Teams were recognised in previous projects

The Microsoft speakers will provide updates on the key capabilities and the next evolution of the MS offering, including;

• The current version of MS SQL Server 2008 R2, and what’s coming in the next release, code named “Denali”
• Data Mining to better understand trends and relationships (for Alumni donations, student planning, learning analytics)
• Master Data Management and BI Symantec layer – Cleaning and managing data
• Statistical forecasting and predictive analytics
• Enhanced visualisation for information delivery.

We will also discuss how Universities are managing Cost Reduction, obtaining extra value from existing licensing arrangements and delivering at lower cost to the Uni.

The best value from the briefing will be achieved through having an attendee from both Finance and IT, so that both the user-perspective and the IT-services perspective can be discussed.

If you’d like to get an invitation to this briefing, then drop an email to Mike Henegan at Calumo, who will provide full details for event, which is from 9:00AM to 11:00AM on Wednesday 12th October

Email Mike Henegan for more info

Of course, we all know we’re living in a connected world, with ‘always on’ technology. Our students have never known a different one. My children live in a fairly high-tech household, but even I was shocked when I realised we’ve got 13 internet connected devices in our household - all squeezing data through a wireless router connected to a very thin Internet pipe. My kids have never experienced anything else. So this video, which gives you a trip across a day full of hidden devices, wouldn’t seem strange to them - it’s how they live.

This was made by the Windows Embedded team, to show some of the places where Windows exists

I know I’ve grown up in this world too, but it’s when you stop and think about the huge change that’s occurring that you realise that the ‘old ways’ of doing things are gone forever.

What made me think about this was the fact that I was in a supermarket, whilst on holiday, that was selling packs of 3.5” floppy disks. Three things hit me: (1) I didn’t realise people still used floppy disks (2) How did I ever cope with storage media that could only store 1.44MB (3) For my kids, it was a museum exhibit, just like a dinosaur - they were extinct before they were born!

Phi Delta Kappa - a US teachers professional association - use Gallup to carry out a poll of 1,000 Americans about their attitudes to education, teachers and related areas in the public schools system. There’s some interesting statistics in there (which made me wonder whether Australia is similar, or very unlike the US education system), as well as some hot political issues that are current in Australia too. For example, there’s a question about whether standardised test scores should be published for individual teachers (parents marginally in favour). You can read a summary of the survey here, and the full report here

There is a specific section about ICT in education, which makes interesting reading. Here’s a couple of interesting things I found:

ICT is very important to learning, but less so for ‘academic success’

70% thought that is was very important ‘that all students have access to computer technology’, but only 52% thought that access to computer technology was very important ‘for ensuring student academic success’.
They don’t explore the reasons for this - I wonder if it is a reflection of the disjoint between learning (often using technology) and the exam process (often pen and paper based)?
See page 15, Table 17

Which is better - a more effective teacher online, or a less effective teacher in the classroom?

This was the question that the survey asked:

“Suppose a school wants to offer a new class and is considering whether the class should be taught online or in person. Would it be best for the school to hire a more effective teacher who was only available to teach over the Internet or would it be better to use a less effective teacher who could teach the class in person?”

I was really surprised by the result - almost evenly split:

• More effective teacher online - 46%
• Less effective teacher in person - 50%

I feel there could be hours of debate about why parents answered this question in particular ways. But if you were considering talking about the use of video conferencing and online learning to support a wider curriculum, you’d know from this that half the room may not like the idea, whilst the other half would be focusing on the quality of the teacher on the other end of the video link or system.
See page 16, Table 22

Find out more, and download the full reports, here

Only two webcasts to know about this week - and they are both education-specific ones. There’s the Microsoft Mondays webinar on Lync, and the Tech Tuesday one for school IT managers and elearning leaders, about the work that Janison have been doing in online assessment.

All of the timings for the webcasts are AEST (Australia East Coast time).
See ** below for more details on how the webcasts work

This week’s webcasts

Microsoft Monday - How to 'Lync-up' with Colleagues and Students

Using Lync as the enterprise equivalent of Skype, Kirsten Gilbertson will walk through the benefits of instant messenger as a productivity tool.
Monday 12 Sep 2-3PM AEST
For: University and TAFE lecturers and support staff

Monday 12th September 2-3PM AEST - Register here

Tech Tuesday - Microsoft Partner story - Janison

Janison won the Microsoft Australia Education Partner of the Year Award 2011, for their online examination project for the NSW Online Science Assessment.
For: School IT teams and eLearning leaders

Tuesday 13th September 11AM AEST - Register here

Future webcasts

** By running them as webcasts, our aim is to allow you to get the latest news, without travel costs, or event fees. And with all of the advantages of being able to watch an online webcast whilst also being able to do other things if necessary.

All of the free webcasts this week are one hour sessions, and combine presentations and live demonstrations.

You’ll need to register in advance, and you’ll then receive a Calendar note as well as info on how to join the Live Meeting online. All of the timings given are for Australia East Coast time.

One of the most-read blog posts from the last six months was “Something for the weekend - free ebooks from Microsoft Press”, listing 9 free e-books available in PDF format. The bonus news is that the Microsoft Press team have now made five of them available free in two additional formats, DRM-free EPUB and MOBI.

Which means you can now read them more easily on a wide range of ereaders, notably Kindles and iPads - as well as the Nook, Sony Reader and Kobo eReader. As the MS Press team point out on their blog:

	Of course these files can also be read with ereading apps for the various devices on netbooks, laptops, and desktop PCs. The key difference between these formats and the previously-offered PDF and XPS files is that the text is “reflowable,” meaning that it recomposes depending on the width of the screen (or as you resize a Window).

Hint: Choose MOBI format for Kindles, and ePUB for most others

Here are the links to the free ebooks for Kindle and other readers

• Charles Petzold’s Programming Windows Phone 7 is available here as EPUB and here as MOBI.
• To get Moving to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 by Patrice Pelland, Pascal Paré, and Ken Haines download here as EPUB and here as MOBI.
• Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 by Ross Mistry and Stacia Misner is here as EPUB and here as MOBI.
• Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2 by Charlie Russel and Craig Zacker with the Windows Server Team at Microsoft is here as EPUB and here as MOBI.
• And finally, Katherine Murray’s Own Your Future, Update Your Skills with Resources and Career Ideas from Microsoft is here as EPUB and here as MOBI.

Go get em…

If you’d describe yourself as an ‘end user’ of data, then this isn’t for you. But if you’re the kind of person that is wondering how to bring your different sets of data together to get real insight into some aspect of your school/TAFE/university, then read on. Especially if you’re job title includes the word ‘data’ or ‘developer’, or you think of yourself as a ‘power user’.

The case for using Business Intelligence (BI) in education is growing stronger all the time, as massive amounts of data that could enable individual students to achieve of their potential is being collected and made available from external sources. As it’s in its infancy here in Australia, then the leading edge users are going to need to understand more about the technical intricacies, so that they know what’s possible so that they can become demanding users & buyers.

The free ebook ‘Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2’ (wow, mouthful) is aimed at database administrators, data analysts and data programmers - and I think they are the kind of people that are going to start on page 1 and work their way through to page 213.

However, the whole of the second part of the book is specifically about the Business Intelligence -BI - capabilities that are built into the system (really important point here: You get Business Intelligence as part of your Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 - you don’t have to buy an additional BI system from us).

I’ve read across these BI sections to understand what’s valuable reading if you are thinking about BI in education contexts - such as performing complex mixing of school data and learning analysis reports. And I’m wondering if the book is the wrong way around for people like you and I - because the most useful, and technically least challenging, part is Chapter 10.

Where to start from a “BI in Education” point of view

My recommendation is that you take a look at Chapter 10 - about PowerPivot - to understand how you can give self-service BI for principals, senior leaders and teachers/lecturers. And instead of producing reams of reports that tell them things they may want to know, you see if it could help you produce simple spreadsheets that they can manipulate easily, so that they can answer their own questions - and be inspired by being able to dig into their data.

If Chapter 10 is good for you, then perhaps work your way back through Chapter 9 and 7, looking at some of the other facilities added (and stop when it starts to get too complex).

Here’s the full detail on Part 2 of the book - Business Intelligence Development

I’ve listed the chapters in Part 2 in reverse order, because that’s the order you might want to read it.

• Chapter 10
  Self-Service Analysis with PowerPivot
  PowerPivot is without doubt the unsung hero of the business intelligence system. The reason is that it keeps control of the data in a central place - where it can be secured, cleaned and managed - and it devolves analysis out to users, by giving them a toolset that means that they can dig into data, understanding reports, patterns, and performing ad-hoc analyses in Excel. It means that you can link together multiple data sources, and analyse them simply from one spreadsheet - through the PowerPivot Excel add-in. If you are used to working with any of the usual reporting tools, to create reports and datasets for other users, then PowerPivot will make things much easier - for both you and your users. And because it can bring together data from lots of different sources, it is ideal for the massively fragmented data challenge that exists in education. (For example, it can bring data together from SQL, Oracle, Access, Informix, Sybase and other ODBC databases, as well as from Excel spreadsheets, plain text files, SharePoint lists, and commercial datasets online.
  To the end user, it simply looks like you’ve created a friendly-spreadsheet, with the ability to filter and select different information. In some ways, a bit like a pivot table, but drawn from many sources.
• Chapter 9
  Reporting Services Enhancements
  This chapter, with Chapter 10, are probably the two that are the most widely useful, as they look at the less technical services available - and help you to understand how you could link the multiple data sources within your institution together. Although these are still written for programmer/IT Services level readers, they do a good job of explaining the kinds of scenarios that the reporting systems in SQL Server 2008 R2 allow - such as having a single reporting system that can collect data from its own SQL database, as well as users’ Excel spreadsheets and SharePoint lists. And report them in tabular, chart or map format.
• Chapter 8
  Complex Event Processing with StreamInsight
  This is all about aggregating and handling rapid streams of complex data, and acting upon triggers. Although this might be a feature that is used extensively already in university research projects, there are likely to be more scenarios where school education systems are coping with rapid streams of data, as we move to fully online, real-time assessment
• Chapter 7
  Master Data Services
  This chapter is about the maintenance and organisation of ‘master data’ - the things which tend to be more static (eg students/academics/places) as opposed to transactional data (eg attendance records for each lesson/lecture; assessment marks). Master Data Services is all about creating a Single Point of Truth - the one student identity record or one authoritative source of a student’s address(es)and then sharing that across the applications that need it.
• Chapter 6
  Scalable Data Warehousing
  Probably not the place to start, as this is principally about massive data appliances, which would only be used at the top-end projects for BI in education (such as university research, or massive scale analysis)

How to get the free ebook

The good news is that the ebook is free, and available in a number of different formats

• For a Kindle/iPod get it here as MOBI
• For screen reading/iPod, download the PDF format here
• And for other eReaders (Nook, Sony) here as EPUB

I guarantee, you’re either going to learn something that you can use yourself, or some important questions to ask potential BI suppliers.

* Mike Henegan, at Calumo (one of our BI partners in education here in Australia), has weighed in with his thoughts on this too - take a look over on his blog.

Reading last week’s Campus Review, there’s an article about the cost of energy, the impact on Australian universities and the fact that computing is a large element of their university electricity usage:

	Power bills to force an IT re-think If electricity prices surge post-carbon tax, universities could face huge extra cost burdens because computing is a prime suspect when it comes to sucking up power.

The article quoted some statistics - like 7.1% of electricity consumption in Australia is by computers - and then went on to say that up to half of universities’ power bills might be for IT. This is because of the large fleets of computers on campus, and their associated datacentres. The other statistic that caught my eye was that the average Australian university data centre has a PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) rating of 1.9 - which means that for nearly every $1 spent on running the servers, there’s another $1 spent on electricity that’s ‘lost’ - in cooling, inefficient energy design, lighting etc.

The lower the PUE, the more effective data centre is (a PUE of 1.5 means you’re only ‘wasting’ an additional 50 cents for every $1 of computer power). So, if we’re building data centres in the Cloud to run services like Windows Azure, how can anybody afford to keep them running?

We have a team, called Microsoft Global Foundation Services, who have the job of building clouds. Or at least, building ‘the Cloud’ – they design, build, run and support our global data centres which are at the hub of all of our cloud services. Our nearest datacentre to Australia is in Singapore. I don’t know about the Singapore one, but the Chicago one is 65,000 square metres - about 10 football fields.

Obviously, at the rate we’re building these data centres, and the huge cost involved, there’s a constant journey to work out how to make the data centres increasingly efficient – especially because of their energy usage, which is a huge part of the cost of running a data centre.

Now, some of the lessons we’ve learnt aren’t things you can apply in your university server rooms easily (like cleaning the roof and painting it white, which reduces cooling cost), and playing around with the wall positioning to improve air flow. Having said they aren’t things you could easily do, that’s probably wrong - you could paint the roof white if you could cost justify it?

However, some of the things that have been learnt could be of use to you, and help you to reduce your carbon emissions and running costs – like making a trade-off in processor performance to achieve the most efficient Performance per Watt per dollar (which is one reflection of the true cost of providing a server service). We’ve also made adjustments to the temperature servers are cooled to – and switching to using more free air cooling to replace air conditioning. And we’ve even experimented by operating servers outside under a tent. The Microsoft data centres were quoted as already hitting a PUE of 1.22 in 2008.

The good news is that as we do this work, we publish it in a consumable format. If you’re interested in how to help reduce your server running costs, or in what we’re doing when we’re building massive data centres, then I can recommend “A Holistic Approach to Energy Efficiency in Datacentres” from the Microsoft Global Foundation Services team.

There is also a lot of detail about different projects going on to look at energy efficient computing, within data centres and elsewhere, on our www.microsoft.com/environment website. Some of the research up there is around Cloud Computing futures, data centre monitoring and optimisation, reducing disk energy consumption, universal parallel computing and power aware developer tools.

And finally, if your interest knows no boundaries, then you might be interested in the MS Datacenters blog, which tells the story of how we’ve grown our data centres around the world over the last few years, and shares some more of the lessons we’ve learnt.

Hopefully, there are some lessons which will help you to deliver more energy efficiency - and save money - in an Australian university data centre.

Last month, I wrote that two-thirds of PCs are still running Windows XP, and wrote about some of the things that hadn’t been created when Windows XP was launched (Feeling nostalgic? Your students may not be). It surprised me to hear that there are so many out of date PCs (as Windows XP is a decade old now).

However, I’ve just read on ZDNet, reporting on a Gartner analysis, where they are predicting that by the end of the year, 42% of PCs worldwide will be running Windows 7. Which means there’s a massive wave of upgrades and deployments going on right now…

Read the full story on ZD Net - 42% of PCs will be running Windows 7 by year-end

Following on from my previous blog posts, ‘Ten of the best SharePoint School websites’ and ‘Ten of the best SharePoint University websites’, then it’s time to get closer to home with Ten of the best Australian school websites built on SharePoint (or best TAFE websites or best University websites).

The reason I’m focusing on ‘built on SharePoint’ is because most Australian education institutions have SharePoint, and have it integrated into their identity management system and their security model. So extending that same system to run your public-facing website means that you can easily create a website that allows students to access their course materials from home, and staff to be able to use the document storage and workflow, without having to setup yet-another login or user list on yet-another system. Anyway, back to the best school websites list…

I’ve had help from colleagues tracking some of these down, and recommendations from customers and partners. But ultimately I take total responsibility for the completely subjective Top Ten list and their rankings!

So here’s my top ten of the best education websites built on SharePoint in Australia

It’s my take on 10 School/TAFE/University websites, built on SharePoint, that are worth looking at for design ideas and inspiration for functional ideas - or simply because you want to nudge another colleague towards seeing that SharePoint can deliver a beautiful experience for staff, students and prospective students.

Click on any of them to link to the live website

1. Gordon Institute of TAFE, Victoria

   This was easy for me to pick as Australia’s best education website built on SharePoint. I’m sure this website must inspire potential students - it gives off the impression of a vibrant learning community, with a fun attitude to the serious subject of learning. And the design makes it easier to navigate to the key information - and encourages you to explore more.
   
    

2. Victoria Department of Education - FUSE

   An amazing interactive experience which puts access to learning materials right at the front of the site. And let’s be honest, it breaks the mould for ‘policy-type’ websites, because it’s putting the ‘fun’ into ‘functional’.
   
   

3. Abbotsleigh School, New South Wales

   You can tell from the very first page that this is a school that takes learning seriously - and the strong photography shows how it puts students at the centre of the experience. With many private and Catholic schools, you can see the increased importance of needing to ‘sell’ the school to prospective students and parents, as well as keeping in touch with the parents of existing students.
   
   

4. Trinity Grammar School, New South Wales

   Another design-centric site, but with a clear navigation structure that means students & parents can easily find the section that’s relevant for them. (Pipped by Abbotsleigh for #3 position because it didn’t have Search on the home page)
   
   

5. The Learning Place, Queensland

   Another government site, which are often some of the trickiest to design and run, because they are trying to meet the needs of so many stakeholders. Although the SharePoint portion of the website sits behind the login screens, there’s an excellent video here that shows what Stage 2 is delivering.
   
   

6. Brisbane Catholic Education, Queensland

   Although this doesn’t have the high graphic design of some of the previous sites, the navigation here is clear - with the tabs at the top helping users find their way quickly to the section that is right for them - students & parents; schools & curriculum; employment etc.
   
   

7. Bendigo Tafe, Victoria

   Another great TAFE site in Victoria (is there a secret recipe they have there?). I particularly liked the 3D box design, which was very simply to create, and added to, rather than confused, the navigation.
   
   

8. John Paul College, Queensland

   A nice looking site that crams a lot of information onto the home page - but without making it too busy. A slow rotation of the main picture adds interest, but without detracting from the content and links.
   
   

9. Hale School, Western Australia

   A slightly more traditional design, which puts details on the front page, rather than just short links. As with the others, it’s often the photography that makes the first impression.
   
   

10. Australian School of Business, New South Wales

    Okay, this may be 10th out of my list of 10 - but there’s hundreds of sites that didn’t make it to the Top Ten, so it’s still good going. I like the way this page is easy to read, and has all the vital components - news, events and search - right there.
    What would have given it a higher rating? Less ‘stock’ images and more good photos from the School of Business itself would have helped me, as a parent, to imagine my daughter going to study there.
    
    

Download the PowerPoint Top 10 Australian Education websites on SharePoint

The Microsoft Australia Partner Conference 2012 is in three weeks (4-6 Sept). To help our education partners get more from the three days, we’ve decided to get the whole Microsoft Australia education sales team up there, to give you the chance to have 1:1 meetings with our customer account managers. If you are working in particular parts of the country, or segments of the market, then booking 1:1 sessions with some of the team has got to be one of the best ways to get really specific advice to help your sales strategy. As we discovered last year, it's also a very big opportunity for you to ensure our account teams know about your solutions, and can talk to their customers about them.

Meet the Microsoft Australia Education Team at APC 2012

Government Schools

New South Wales Government Schools & TAFEs

Jane Mackarell is the new Microsoft Account Manager for New South Wales Department for Education and Communities (DEC). In a 1:1 session, Jane will be able to share information on the way that the new NSW DEC licensing will help partners to implement new solutions at a lower cost to the customer, and what software is available to each school and TAFE licensed in NSW. NSW has 2,176 state schools and 11 TAFEs    
Mark Tigwell , the Account Technology Specialist (ATS) for NSW education, will also be at APC to meet with you. 

Victoria Government Schools & TAFEs

Trudi Grant is the Microsoft Account Manager for Victoria’s Department for Education and Early Childhood Development (DEECD). Although she's on holiday during APC, the other member of the team, Emilio Parente, the ATS for Victoria Education will be at APC and available for meetings. During a 1:1 session, Emilio can share how our current agreements can be used by partners to offer new business solutions to DEECD, and how the licensing model reduces the cost of these solutions at DEECD, school or TAFE level. Victoria has 1,548 state schools and 18 TAFEs.     

Queensland Government Schools & TAFEs

Lance Baldwin, the Account Technology Strategist for the Queensland Department for Education and Training (DET), will be available for meetings, as Mark Kenny, the previous Account Manager has moved on to a new Microsoft role. Lance can provide a good overview of the Queensland state education market, and insight into the ICT projects that we have been involved in. Queensland has 1,235 state schools, and 13 TAFEs.

Higher Education

This year we have made changes to the way we manage our university accounts, which has increased the amount of account management each university customer will get. It means that we've now got three account managers covering higher education – rather than just one! Two of the account managers – Joseph Alvarez and Ken Rankins - will be at APC, and between them they'll cover the accounts of Lucy Segal, who'll be travelling overseas that week.

Joseph Alvarez is the Higher Education Account Manager for the 14 larger universities across Australia (yep, you guessed it he's friends of the Frequent Flyer clubs!). Joe also works closely with CAUDIT (which is an industry wide group of the IT Directors/CIOs of all universities in Australia), so has a great insight to share on the current trends in higher education and the practicalities of our licensing arrangements for universities.  

Ken Rankins is the second of our Higher Education Account managers that is going to be at APC too. Ken is the account manager for a dozen of the universities around the country (Lucy manages the other 11). Although Ken's worked in the Microsoft Education team for a while, he's new to the world of universities, so he'd really appreciate meeting up with partners already working with higher education customers.

If your business is working with a number of universities, then you'll probably want to meet all of the account managers at APC. Or, if there are just one or two universities that you want to talk about, then let me know which ones, and I'll schedule a session with the specific account manager(s).

Non-Government Schools

Vanessa Gage is the account manager for Catholic Education across Australia. Most of our work on this is done with the peak bodies for Catholic schools around the country, and Vanessa will be able to share how the schools across each of the Catholic consortia are able to access their respective Microsoft licensing programmes, and what schools are already licensed for (this is especially useful if you're looking to support schools to roll out cloud or on-premise infrastructure projects)

Ken Rankins gets to appear twice as he is also our national sales lead for all 2,815 private schools. His team work with the larger schools individually, as well as with the peak bodies for private schools. The importance of this group of schools is that most of them make their own independent decisions about ICT procurement.

As many partners know, it can be tricky to get time with our Account Teams during the year, and they are rarely (if ever) all together and available. So this is a great networking opportunity, to learn more about the Australian Education marketplace, as well as to put faces to names (on both sides!)

How to book your 1:1 meetings

If you are going to be at the Australian Partner Conference 2012, then you can book 1:1 meetings with the relevant members of our Education Account Manager team in advance.  

It’s simple to do - Just email me, and let me know:  

• Who you would like to meet (multiple meetings are okay)
• Whether there are times when you can’t meet (all meetings will be scheduled during the tea/lunch breaks in the conference on the 5th and 6th September)
• If there are specific subjects you want to discuss (helps the account managers prepare)  

Not booked for APC yet? Do it here