I keep an eye on the Information Commissioner’s Office press releases on their website (in the hope that we’re not going to see schools appearing too often), where I suspect they have a busy Press Officer producing a constant stream of news (last 2 weeks : Recruitment firms fined; mobile phone customers record sold illegally; Primary Care Trusts break the law; One third of data security breaches result from burglary and theft).
On Thursday I saw that the ICO announced that it’s latest publication “demystifies data protection”.
It even quoted Stephen Alambritis, Head of Public Affairs at the Federation of Small Businesses:
Small businesses do not have time for pages and pages of jargon and gobbledegook, but getting data protection right makes good business sense. Data protection lapses cost reputations and can affect the bottom line. But, many organisations tell us that data protection law is difficult to understand. This new no-nonsense guide will help the business community to understand and comply with the law
It even promised to demystify plainly wrong stories, such as “It is illegal to take photographs of your children in their nativity play at school.” (It points out “The Data Protection Act does not prevent parents taking photographs of their children and friends participating in school events.”)
Well, after all the mystery that has surrounded information security in the public sector, I jumped straight over to the new guide, and downloaded the PDF version, with high hopes.
As a positive, it’s definitely written in plain English. Which is a relief after so many migraine-inducing data protection documents.
And there are many specific examples which are really useful to help understand it all. So if your job gets close to protecting data, then this is a must read.
But it runs to 92 pages. 92 pages for an easy-to-understand guide? One to pass to the Head I think!
Also a great source of facts to shout at the telly/newspaper with next time you see one of those idiotic data protection stories…
Situated in the North East of London as well as Dubai, Middlesex University provides outstanding service to its 33,000 students. It recently adopted live@edu to help enhance the student experience as well as contain costs by providing seamless services across staff and students.
“Using Live@edu has transformed the relationship between our staff and our students….it’s definitely part of their academic experience here at Middlesex” Prof. Margaret House, Deputy Vice Chancellor
“Using Live@edu has transformed the relationship between our staff and our students….it’s definitely part of their academic experience here at Middlesex”
Prof. Margaret House, Deputy Vice Chancellor
For more information please watch Paula Vickers (Pro-VC and CIO), her colleagues and students explain why Microsoft’s Software + Services vision is the right fit for an ambitious and successful university.
http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/resources/Files/4000005155/Middlesex_2500K.wvx
Early this morning, Dominic and I jumped into our respective cars to head to Cambridgeshire, to present a keynote for the third Cambridge and Oxford College IT Conference, held at the Imperial War Museum in Duxford. It’s quite an unusual conference venue, set inside the AirSpace hangar – overlooking a display of planes from the last century. My Dad and brother are both ex-Air Force Armourers, so seeing the Vulcan and Lancaster took me back to my childhood in Scampton, Lincolnshire.
In this historical setting, I was talking about the future, and the opportunities and challenges which exist as IT moves forward.
I used our ‘Productivity Vision’ video, which looks at the workplace of 2019, and then continued by deconstructing the technology behind the video – to look at what exists now – either in research labs or in real life - and how the components might build to get to the vision described for the future.
Unfortunately, I can’t share the whole presentation, but I can share the short video that I used as the introduction, which is the starting point for the story I told.
You can view the video on our Officlabs Envisioning website, and you can also watch a video as Ian Sands, Director of Envisioning, steps through the video scene by scene and describes in greater depth the story behind the people and technology on display.
A number of people asked me afterwards about the interactive tool I’d used for the presentation. And the secret is pptPlex, which is an add-in for PowerPoint 2007. It allows you to build amazingly interactive presentations, and also allows you to move around a storyboard in a completely non-linear way.
Jonathan Noble (MVP) at Newcastle has told me of an event with Microsoft Premier engineer Richard Diver on 25 November aimed at helping IT Pros aiming to get better performance out of Windows systems and software. Details of the event are on his blog:
http://www.jonoble.com/blog/2009/11/11/25th-november-newcastle-sysinternals-tools-presentation.html
The TechNet site has a growing series of Infrastructure Planning and Design Guides for all kinds of areas – virtualisation, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server, Online Services and the Optimised Desktop.
The one that jumped out as me was the IPD Guide for DirectAccess in Windows 7. This is especially useful in colleges, where you have staff who are as likely to need access to your network from home as they are in university (especially if you have a large number of part time staff).
With DirectAccess, your users can have access to your university network without having to use a VPN or Remote Access setup – whenever they have access to the internet from their university laptop, they have access to your network. To get this level of convenience without compromising security means that you need to setup your network carefully, and the IPD guide is designed to help with that.
The Infrastructure Planning and Design series guide for DirectAccess provides actionable guidance for designing a DirectAccess infrastructure. The guide’s easy-to-follow, four-step process gives a straightforward explanation of the infrastructure required for clients to be connected from the Internet to resources on the corporate network, whether or not the organization has begun deploying IPv6.
You can download the Direct Access Guide here
On the same subject, you may find the IPD Guide for Network Access Protection useful too, as it talks you through the ways that you can allow students and staff to connect their own laptops to your network without compromising security. In an environment where students all arrive with their own laptop, it allows you to save money and improve capabilities.
Bookings are now open for our Higher Education Briefing day, which this year falls on 10th December in London.
Microsoft will be holding our annual Higher Education Briefing on 10th December 2009 at our London offices in Victoria. The agenda for the event runs from 10:00 to 4:45 with breaks to catch up with colleagues from other universities.
As well as getting the latest news on Microsoft’s product roadmap, there will be the opportunity to hear from other universities and to hear how they are responding to the economic pressures that all universities are feeling. Of course, this current academic year is full of launches of new Microsoft products, and we’ll be able to use the day to bring all of this into context – explaining the value and relative importance of some of the key new product launches still to come.
9:30 - Registration and coffee 10:00 - Welcome and introduction 10:15 - Challenges faced by Higher Education 10:45 - Contoso University 11:30 – Break 11:45 – University case study 12:15 - Live@edu 13:00 – Lunch 13:45 - Sharepoint in Higher Education 15:00 – Break 15:15 – Virtualisation 15:45 – Office 2010 16:30 – Final Q&A 16:45 - Close
Dominic Watts, the Higher Education Business Manager, will lead the day, introducing experts from Microsoft and our partners and bringing case studies from our customers.
We’ll be holding the briefing at our offices in Victoria, and there will be plenty of Microsoft colleagues available for discussions.
You can book your place online now
Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Project 2010 and Visio 2010 have all reached the Beta milestone and are now available for download.
Remember how sometimes you felt smug when you were running Windows 7 Beta at least 6 months before your colleagues and friends? Well, you can feel it once again!
On Monday 9 November, Microsoft Exchange 2010 became the first product launch in wave of innovation across the Office system. The first half of 2010 will see this wave continue with the release of Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Project 2010 and Visio 2010 .
In addition, with this beta we are unveiling several new features and products:
Happy downloading
The Microsoft UK Education team has a dozen people in it (surprised?) who are focused full-time on education – across schools, colleges and universities. Which means that we’re awfully busy and spread across many, many things all the time. But fortunately we have the help of other similar teams around the world, and a much bigger team in our offices in America. Sometimes we produce work for the rest of the world (like the Innovative Schools case studies, focusing on journeys of innovation and the lessons that innovative schools have learnt on their way), and sometimes the work flows the other way – towards us.
One of the things that has been done as part of the worldwide Partners in Learning programme is The Scaling Framework – an interactive tool that helps analyse how you move an innovation from being something done by 1 or 2 people, to making it widespread.
It made me think of two specific cases where today there is a challenge of scaling innovation. The first is Virtual Learning Environments, where it is proving to be difficult to take good practice from one lecturer/department/university to the whole system. And the other is taking an innovative ICT teaching initiative and spreading it to other departments.
The Scaling Framework is a simple interactive tool that explains the five dimensions of scale, and then digs down into areas such as “Traps to Avoid” and “Next Steps to Explore”.
You can either us this as an individual, or pop it up on your whiteboard next time you’re holding a leadership team meeting, and explore interactively.
Take a look at the interactive Scaling Framework, and see if it can help you
I was interested in the “Spread” dimension – and the trap to avoid: “Developers should realise a somewhat less powerful innovation that reaches much greater numbers of use is a step forward”. We were talking about this at lunchtime today, discussing a new piece of software for teachers which may only appeal to innovators, meaning that the majority of users won’t be affected by it. So is it better to try and promote something a little less innovative, but likely to be used by more people?