I’ve just been at the Capita Further and Higher Education National Conference, in the lovely (if wet) county of Warwickshire.

I read recently that many people can’t put Warwickshire on a map, because it is one of those ‘in-between’ kind of counties, but it’s got lots of lovely countryside, and it starts only 15 minutes up the road from my house, so I can definitely put it on the map.

The subtext of the conference was “Facing Challenging Times”, which isn’t something you could disagree with, whether you are a student, work for a college/university or are a government policy maker in the world of either FE or HE.

I’d been asked to do a little crystal ball gazing about the direction that students’ lives are going, and their expectations, and to talk in broad terms about how we see SharePoint’s position in helping organisations manage the changes needed to react. The SharePoint area was specifically to link into some of the product announcements made by Capita at the conference.

You can download the presentation from my SkyDrive, and I have also uploaded the two videos that I used – both are shortened versions which you may want to use. If you stick all three files into the same directory, then the PowerPoint presentation will find the videos and show them in the right place. Unfortunately, I’ve done my usual mode, which means that the slides aren’t designed to be clear without my explanation, so perhaps I’ll be able to get a copy of the audio recording of the presentation, so that I can put words to it.

(If you’re reading this in an RSS reader, then here’s the links to the presentation, and the first and second videos)

The first video is a shortened version of Shift Happens, which was originally created to show to a large group of Diploma students who visited Microsoft a month ago. It doesn’t jump into all of the detail about the pace of technology change, but instead focuses on the way that today’s students are being prepared for tomorrow’s workplace.

The second video above is an edited version of our FE & Skills demonstrator – the full length video is available to download here

Whilst this is not Further Education this is a really interesting video showing how Surface can be used to aid learning.  Whilst this is clearly not FE I’m sure you’ll get the idea of just how Surface can transform some learning processes.

It is a great video showing how both Students and Teachers can engage and use Surface within Education. Without prompting they talk about the interface, collaboration and interactions and what it means to them. Are we really tricking them into learning!

Please get in touch if you want more information.

I’m pleased to introduce the following webinar for later in April which I hope will be an illuminating event and something you may wish to attend.

Discover Microsoft CRM for Education - Free Webinar, Thursday April 24^th, 10:00am

Pythagoras CRM for Higher, Further Education, Schools and Learning Academies provides the tools for easily creating and maintaining a clear picture of the information that educators and administrators need. This solution developed with Microsoft Dynamics helps drive consistent, measurable improvements in daily work processes, promotes more effective cross-departmental collaboration, and enables new levels of efficiency.

Our free webinar will take you through Pythagoras’ offering and introduce our unique approach to the sector. Register here to take part.

The pressure is growing on educational organisations to perform with the efficiency of a for-profit business. A customer relationship management (CRM) solution enables you to build closer relationships with your students, tutors and lecturers. It helps you improve your student recruitment and retention rates and, by combining data sets, lower the administrative burden.  This Student Relationship Management (SRM) solution combined with all the usual features of Microsoft CRM creates a cost effective and flexible solution.

The above image represents the classic student journey at UK Education establishments. But typically how many systems do you use to track this crucial journey ? The chances are there are many, but a Pythagoras’ SRM solution provides a single point of reference for the whole student lifecycle.

SRM – Managing the full student life-cycle

The latest version 4.0 of Microsoft CRM is ideal for the Education sector.  The new version allows you to help streamline vital processes around the organisation. Microsoft Dynamics CRM fits the way you work. CRM integrates easily with your existing systems, including the Office system software your users rely on, and has the flexibility to wrap around your processes. And through Academic license pricing, the upfront cost is significantly lower than any off-the-shelf Education CRM solution.

Alan Enfield, Vice Principal at New Line Learning Academy, said: “We chose Pythagoras because they listened to what we wanted, and they set up a working model with our data. The fact that they have a dedicated educational business unit showed us that they were serious about what they do and not just after adapting a standard sales model to get a quick financial return. They were interested in our approach to the problem, and we felt that they wanted to produce a good working solution almost as much as we did.”

Tuesday 24th March 2009, 15:00 - 16:00

Overview

This session will be presented by Microsoft, Oxford Computer Group and Alistair Sandford from the University of the West of England and will explain how education providers can:

• Manage secure access to applications from within the firewall or for remote access
• Support internal, remote and external users with improved security, an enhanced user experience and simplified management
• Protect applications and provide the following; end point security, single sign-on, access policies and control, data cleaning, integrated application firewall and granular access control

Agenda

• Introductions from presenters
• IAG Solution Overview and Demonstration
• Customer case study review of the solution by Alistair Sandford from the University of the West of England
• Q & A

Event presenters

Dominic Watts (Microsoft), Darren Bonehill (OCG) and Alistair Sandford (UWE)

Registration

Registration is quick and easy, please use the following link to confirm your attendance and you will receive an Outlook calendar entry with full details:

https://www.livemeeting.com/lrs/microsoft1/Registration.aspx?PageName=tfdt6krqtfndgzrt

About Oxford Computer Group

Oxford Computer Group (OCG) is a Microsoft Gold Partner and Partner Of The Year Winner (2008) that specialises in identity and access (IDA) management. OCG has an enviable repository of expertise, solution components and training courses from 300+ identity and access deployments and from training 3,000+ people on Microsoft IDA technologies. Education customers include King's College London, the University of Reading, Royal Holloway University of London, University of the West of England and many more.

Last year I was surprised and pleased to learn that I’d somehow made it to become the Computer Weekly 2008 Public Sector blogger of the year (for my Schools blog). And it led to me running a few internal training sessions for Microsoft people, talking about blogging and offering advice for people who are considering starting blogging, or had made some first tentative steps.

A colleague suggested that I should offer the same session to other people – so here’s the invitation!

On 15th April, I’m going to run a “Blogging over Breakfast” session at our offices in central London, for unexperienced or less experienced bloggers – if you’ve always itched to tell your story, then this may be for you. It’s not going to be about the technology of blogging, but will focus on generic advice on blogging in the UK Public Sector. I’ll cover a bunch of things from the basics of sitting down to write, to information on the Civil Service code on blogging.

I’m hoping that we can make the session quite interactive, and limit to a maximum of 14 people. It will be suitable for you if you want to:

• Help a group of people keep in touch
• Sell something (like me, or subtly Mike from Twynham)
• Make your college look good (ahem, that’s Mike again!)
• Share good practice (like Alex from Great Barr)
• Get something off your chest (like The Angry Technician)
• Want to campaign for something (like Jerry Fishenden)
• Want to make people laugh (like David Salaguinto)
• …or other reasons

I’ve scheduled it during the Easter holidays, as I think that the kind of people who might find this useful wouldn’t be able to get out of college during term time. It’ll be a small group – and I’ll allocate places on a first-come, first-served basis.

The details: 15th April, 8:30-10:30 at the Microsoft offices at 100 Victoria Street, London

If you’d like to come along, then drop me an email.

If I’ve got it wrong, and you could only make it during term-time, then flame me with an email, and if I get enough requests, I’ll add another date.

I’ll buy the coffees and the breakfast – you just bring your ideas to contribute to the conversation

I like “They Work for You”, a website which tracks things which go on in Parliament. I use the RSS feeds of education ministers to keep an eye on news I’ve missed (such as new statistics published, or progress on big programmes), and I’ve also used it personally to contact my local MP about an approaching vote on publishing MPs expenses. It has to be said, a lot of what is published is quite dull, but every now and again there’s a nugget.

Like last Monday, when Jane Kennedy (who is Minister of State for Farming and the Environment at DEFRA) was asked in a written question “What steps the Department is taking to encourage (a) thin computing and (b) environmentally-friendly computing practices in the public sector.”

And the answer is:

“DEFRA carefully considered the promotion of 'thin' clients, which are centrally managed computers with most of the function of the system located in a central server room. However, evidence to date has shown that the increased electricity consumption of these server rooms (e.g. through the air conditioning needed to cool the room) renders this technology less attractive than previously thought from an energy efficiency perspective.

The Government's "Greening ICT Strategy" published last year sets out a strategy for reducing the environmental impact of Government's computer systems. One of their main aims is to make the energy consumption of our ICT systems carbon neutral by 2012. We also mandated a set of minimum environmental standards for commonly-purchased products, including ICT.”

Read it yourself here. Just in case DEFRA is new to you, the “E” stands for “Environment”, so they’ve definitely got credentials!

I have a colleague, Daniel Good, in the US, who runs a blog which exists purely to aggregate information from other Microsoft blogs. With the volume of information we publish regularly, it is sometimes tricky to find the right source of information but often there’s a blog out there, written by the team that are completely focused on the thing you want (like this blog, solely focused on information for UK Universities). So it makes a good starting point to go looking for specialist information.

The blog is called “Blog MS – Official Microsoft Team Blogs”, and as of today indexes 214 Microsoft team blogs (ie written by a team responsible for something, rather than a single individual). Every week Daniel produces a summary of what’s been published on those blogs, so if you have a need for information this Monday morning, then you know where to go.

One of his interesting posts is the “Guide to Free Microsoft Software and Online Services”, which he’s assembled from information provided by colleagues. If you want to find some free Microsoft software, or a free online service, then this post is the place to go. It’s a long, long list, so if you want to find a freebie, make it your starting point.

(Assuming you haven’t found it first on the Microsoft UK Education site’s Free Stuff list)

We’ve got another free event coming up at the end of April – this time it’s about solutions for identity and access management in education, with a smattering of Live@edu thrown in for extra value. It’s with one of our partners, Oxford Computer Group, and will show the technologies and services being used to optimise and support infrastructure services for messaging, collaboration and identity and access management. In the afternoon, the University of the West of England will be talking about their experiences too.

The day will have plenty of acronyms – not just Live@edu, but also ILM and IAG (will they be handing out acronym bingo cards at the beginning?). The point of course is to show how ILM (Microsoft Identity Lifecycle Manager 2007) integrates with your existing infrastructure, and what IAG (Microsoft Intelligent Application Gateway ) can do to help you setup and manage secure remote access for students, staff and partners.

It’s on Wednesday 29^th April 2009 at our offices in Reading, running from 9am to 4pm, and the following sessions:

• Identity and Access for Education – Optimise your current Infrastructure (Microsoft)
• Overview of Live@edu & Outlook Live (Microsoft)
• Connecting Live@edu with existing Platforms and Systems (OCG)
• Identity  Lifecycle Management for Education with ILM “2” (OCG)
• Secure Remote Access with IAG (OCG)
• Customer Case Study - University of the West of England

Grab your place (or find out a little more) by emailing my colleague, Bonami Meredith.  Because there’s a maximum capacity of 20 people, it’ll be quite interactive with plenty of chances to ask your own questions.

“Explore how to make IT more cost-effective in uncertain times. Microsoft and partners invite you to this invitation-only event.”

Dan sent me details of our “Virtualisation and Management Conference” on 10th March. Overall it makes good agenda, but I do take issue with the phrase “…in these uncertain times…” because within education, I don’t think things are as uncertain as implied. Although budgets are currently tight, I think that what is certain is that education budgets will be a lot tighter over the next two to three years. As we head towards next Government financial year, there’ll be some adjustment of belt-loops coming up. It may not feel as if we’re in the budgetary good times, we’ll probably look back to today fondly in a couple of years!

I think what that means is that it is worthwhile investing time in looking at ways that you can reduce your IT budget in the future – making some strategic decisions whilst you’ve still got flexibility in your budget to implement changes. And that’s why I shamelessly say that spending a day in London on 10th March is a good investment of time.

You’ll hear from various Microsoft speakers of course, but the two gems of the agenda for me are:

• Perth and Kinross council will talk about their strategy and how they saved £100,000 by virtualising.
• The afternoon has split streams, where you can choose between sessions from Computacenter, Avanade, Infosys, HP, Unisys and TCS.

This event isn’t just for education, or even just for public sector organisations. So you’ll be able to compare notes with a range of other organisations who’re looking at virtualisation, which might add some more depth to the event.

Anyway, here’s the details:

Explore how to make IT more cost-effective in uncertain times.

Get a fresh view on virtualisation and a head start on planning your next move. See how customers are using Microsoft's virtualisation and management technologies to cut costs, save power and space, reduce carbon emissions and be more flexible and effective.

Understand how the right virtualisation and management tools can deliver these savings and benefits quickly in your organisation without disrupting or undermining your existing IT investments and skills.

If you have already invested heavily in virtualisation, see how Microsoft can bolt on to make that investment work harder and slicker. Then, take that knowledge and see how Microsoft's key partners can help you turn the idea into reality and accelerate your project with their skills, experience and insights.

Exclusively for this event, six key Microsoft Partners — Avanade, Computacenter, HP, Infosys, TCS and Unisys will deliver workshops on their approaches to delivering virtualisation, insights and customer experiences. Choose from a variety of sessions that show you how to accelerate your virtualisation project and move from strategy to execution.

Don't miss out; achieve faster, more cost-effective IT...

The event is at our London offices on 10th March, and runs from 9am to 4pm.

You can register (and see the full agenda) here, for which you’ll also need invitation code 0CB2A8

One of our partners, Parabola Software, asked me to let you know about their free “SharePoint in Further Education” day which we’re hosting at our main offices in Reading on Friday 27th March.

As well as an opportunity understand what Sharepoint can offer and chat with people from Parabola and Microsoft, you’ll be able to see what other colleges are using SharePoint for and to network with them.

Parabola Software has been working in FE for 5 years now, and they’ve built up quite a few customer references – on their website they’ve got case studies from Esher College and Oxford and Cherwell Valley College.

This free event is principally for principals and the IT decision makers in colleges. Later this year they plan a separate technical workshop for IT staff.

Here’s the agenda

9.30-9.45	Introduction - Amanda Bicknell, Microsoft
9.45-10.00	Introduction - Richard Gray (Managing Director, Parabola Software Ltd)
10.00-11.00	Managing SharePoint in FE: Back up, Recovery, Security and Management - Phil Allen, Microsoft
11.00-11.15	Break for refreshments
11.15-12.00	Live Case Study on experiences with SharePoint - David Lloyd (Director of ILT Development, Esher College)
12.00-12:45	Live Case Study on experiences with SharePoint - Chris Miles from Oxford and Cherwell Valley College
12:45-13.15	Lunch and networking
13:15-14:00	Interactive Q & A session on using SharePoint in Further Education
14.00-14:45	Using SharePoint to provide Independent Learning Programmes - Adam McCarthy, Parabola
14.45-15:30	Beyond SharePoint: Business Intelligence, Performance Point Server - Phil Allen, Microsoft

To register, and for venue details etc, email Adam McCarthy with your contact details (including a phone number)