Following on from my earlier post of The Good Blogging Guide, I came across an article about blogging in the corporate environment. Although this isn’t the kind of thing you’re likely to get involved in, I bet at least once a term somebody comes to the IT team and says “We want to start a blog to promote the university more to potential students/researchers/employers etc”.
I’ve just read, and mostly agreed with, a great blog post by Paul Boag on smashingmagazine.com that sets out 10 Harsh Truths About Corporate Blogging – and I think these will just as easily apply to a university thinking about the use of blogs for marketing too.
Paul’s list of 10 Truths are:
I’m not sure if Number 5 is right – I think there’s a role for a different kind of press release (let’s call it a “News Release” instead) which is written to be read by your customers, not by journalists. In these digital days, you may have more chance of your customers reading your News Releases directly from you, than through the media – especially in the UK Education market, where the range of media available has probably shrunk 40% in the last three years.
Of course, I disagree with Number 8 – but that’s just me and my selfishness!
And Number 10 is really, really spot on. Whatever you do, if it is good, your competitors (ie other universities) will know about it. So make things good, and make them jealous/share the good practice! Who knows, it may help find you new students, employers and new employees.
It’s worth reading the detail in 10 Harsh Truths About Corporate Blogging.
I’ve just heard that the first ever Microsoft SQL Server Data Management Conference is being held in London on Tuesday September 29th. Although it is not an education-specific event, there is a good agenda with excellent presenters that could be of use to you if you are running complex databases. It’s obviously useful for IT managers, and information managers, database administrators and architects will find real value to add to their knowledge of how to get the most out of SQL Server.
The agenda focuses on some of the major data management challenges that we know SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition is more than ready to handle: high-performance and scalability, robust security, virtualisation, data warehousing and business intelligence.
The cast of presenters includes: Donald Farmer & Mark Linton from the SQL Server Development team Mark Whitehorn, independent consultant and author on databases and data management An array of Microsoft technical expertise on SQL Server, data management and Business Intelligence The agenda includes specific topics on using SQL Server in heterogeneous data environments (i.e. Oracle) and SQL Server as the data platform of choice for business critical applications such as SAP. It also includes a closer-look at the SQL Server 2008 R2 functionality in a presentation by Donald Farmer from the SQL Server development team.
The cast of presenters includes:
The agenda includes specific topics on using SQL Server in heterogeneous data environments (i.e. Oracle) and SQL Server as the data platform of choice for business critical applications such as SAP. It also includes a closer-look at the SQL Server 2008 R2 functionality in a presentation by Donald Farmer from the SQL Server development team.
The full agenda, which includes a choice of tracks for the afternoon, is available on the website
The event is free, and given that effective database management is top of the list for many organisations, you may want to book your place as soon as you can.
You can book directly on the Microsoft events website, or register by phone on 0870 166 6670 (quoting event reference 4125)
If you’re running the ICT systems in your university, you may recognise that one of the gaps in using technology well (especially for students) is lack of IT skills to help them to make the most of the technology sitting on their lap. So although you may want to forward this onto somebody in the curriculum side, it might equally be something that you see as an opportunity to help deliver a better student experience through your own IT services. Although it’s got ‘IT’ in the title, the IT Academy is actually all about skills development and helping your students/staff (and potentially others in the community) to gain handy technology skills as well as commercially valuable qualifications.
I’ve spent a few hours in the company of the team who promote the Microsoft IT Academy scheme in the UK. Basically the scheme offers universities, colleges and schools the chance to deliver Microsoft’s IT training and qualifications to your students, staff (and your wider community?). The qualifications that you can deliver will help your students raise their skills and give them a kick-start as they head out to employment – either business or technical roles.
The chart on the right (click on it to see the BIG version) shows the routes to the qualifications that students can attain. And because the qualifications are instantly recognisable in the commercial sector – like MCSE qualifications – it is an instant help with preparing for employment, or getting your CV to the top of the pile.
But this isn’t just about student qualifications – it can also be used to provide training and qualifications for the wider community on campus, and this is exactly how some of the current IT Academies use it – to generate a revenue stream and to increase community and business engagement.
Once you’ve signed up to be an IT Academy, the scheme includes:
Currently about two-thirds of UK universities and colleges offer the IT Academy programme. So it could be that your university is already doing it, and you could expand your use of it to meet more needs.
But the key question I asked the IT Academy team was about cost. Because although they describe everything above as ‘free’, I’d assumed that the annual fee would be prohibitive. The actual answer is that it costs from around £1,100 for a university to become an IT Academy. And if you factor in the cost of an MSDNAA & TechNet Plus subscription, this is a great deal.
Although there’s tons of information about IT Academy on our education website, I think there’s probably too much info there, so instead of reading it all I’d recommend giving the Prodigy team a call, or dropping them an email, to get them to explain it to you in plain English. (Just like buying software, IT Academy works the same way – you get access through our partners, rather than directly from us. In this case the partner is Prodigy)
Email the IT Academy team or call them on 0845 3991553.
I’ve got two daughters who think that the best things on TV are reality makeover programmes (our TV at home seems to alternate between Grand Designs and Gok’s Fashion Fix), but they didn’t get as excited as I did about our makeover project – taking the Microsoft UK Education site and adding a pile of new features to it.
This is what the site looked like before Friday:
And since Friday morning, it has looked like this:
Whilst the new look and feel is nice (and has had some good feedback in its first four days) there are some much more important changes to the navigation and design that are important to me.
Go and visit the site – and then let me know what you think – either by adding comments here, or drop me an email, including any thoughts about what you’d like to see, based on how you use the site.
I’ve just heard about our Code7 competition, for students. The European finalist prize is a paid trip to the PDC09 event in Los Angeles in November - plus a snazzy award – and there are a bunch of other prizes. And there’s 6 weeks until the closing date on 10th October.
If you’ve got students in your university that are into software and development, it’s a great way to engage them into thinking about application development, and to get them to turn an idea into a succinct summary – because the entry method is a 3-minute video!
Full details are on the Code7 Contest website, but here’s some of the headline information.
“Take three minutes to video yourself describing and demonstrating your application idea for Windows 7 and you could win big. Your application should support one or more of the following Windows 7 scenarios: Simplify My Life - Develop an application that makes the things customers do every day faster and easier, with fewer clicks, simpler navigation and easier ways to connect. More Media, More Places - Design a great application to help customers create, edit, organize and share media. Gaming - Make it fun and exciting for customers to get their game on. Work from Anywhere - Help make customers more productive at home, at work, or on-the-go. Safeguard Your Work - Help customers protect their data, whether it resides on their PC, USB devices or on a network infrastructure. Applications for a Better Tomorrow - Use the power of your code to help communities prepare and plan for a better future.”
“Take three minutes to video yourself describing and demonstrating your application idea for Windows 7 and you could win big.
Your application should support one or more of the following Windows 7 scenarios:
This is a worldwide competition run from the States, and I noticed there’s some important small print in the rules – or at least, it’s important if you live in any of the countries named – which is: “Void in Cuba; Iran; North Korea; Sudan and the Province of Quebec, Canada.”. I wonder what Canada have done to be lumped into the same list as Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Sudan?
I was in a training session on Friday, when we were joined by the Microsoft IT team – the clever chaps that keep our IT network running right across the business, seemingly in the face of all of the odds.
I believe that the odds really are stacked heavily against keeping the IT system stable, because each user has complete control over their own computer – for example, I can hit F12 and rebuild any machine at any point, self-install software and am encouraged to use everything from Instant Messenger to development tools.
Asif Jinnah who manages the UK IT systems, talked about what they have been doing to reduce our internal IT running costs, and although our challenge is different to yours, I thought you might enjoy hearing some of our story of balancing the need to grow our business whilst managing our IT costs. Asif recorded a presentation for the virtual TechNet conference in June in the IT Management Auditorium section, and you can watch his full presentation, as well as download his slides, which are full of facts and figures:
There’s also an interesting part about the reductions we made when we changed the way we ran our internal IT help desk – which resulted in reduced costs and reduced user satisfaction! (I noted this because of the way that Asif was prepared to be so open about our experiences - even the ones which obviously required more work)
You can find the whole presentation by going to the Virtual TechNet site, and looking for the "Growing the Business and Managing Costs – An Insider’s view” presentation in the IT Management Auditorium
Although it’s a little bit last minute, I’ve grabbed at the chance to get some of our Windows 7 & Windows Server 2008 brains together on Friday 21st August, in our Thames Valley Campus in Reading. It’s August, and I know that it is one of the busiest times for IT teams, however you probably have a bit more control over your diary than a normal month. So here’s your invitation to:
I’d like to invite you to come along to our Windows workshop, where you’ll have the chance to hear about Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 and to explore what they mean for education. The agenda includes James O’Neill from our Developer and Platform Evangelist team, and Richard Lane, one of our Account Technology Specialists, exploring how the new products launched this year can help you to streamline your ICT infrastructure and improve the ICT management and user experience. With Windows 7 available to existing Campus Agreement customers from the end of this week, and Windows Server 2008 R2 available from the 19th August, it seems like the perfect time to take a day out of school to understand how it fits into your future plans (available from 1st September if you’re one of the unlucky ones and you don’t have a Campus Agreement yet).
There are already a number of education institutions planning to implement Windows 7 this summer, and so we hope to make the day as interactive as possible, with plenty of time for discussion with your peers from other schools, to compare notes and experiences (there will be people attending who’ll have implemented Windows 7 by the 21st, so hopefully they’ll have practical advice for us all!)
To allow for those making longer journeys, we’ll start at 10am and finish by 3pm.
If you’d like to attend the free Windows in Education day, then simply drop an email to Sam Mills, who’ll reserve you a place, and send you confirmation details for how to get to our Reading campus.