The UK Higher Education Blog

Newcastle event next week - Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 networking

Jonathan Noble has also let me know that there are still plenty of spare spaces at the free event at Newcastle University next Wednesday (the 8th), which will be looking at Windows 7 & Windows Server 2008 R2 for education. And the agenda includes DirectAccess, BranchCache and XP Mode – all mentioned earlier in the week.

Find out more on Jonathan’s blog, or just sign up directly at the VBUG site

Congratulations to Jonathan Noble – Powershell MVP

Please join me in congratulating Jonathan at the University of Newcastle on his award as a  Microsoft most Value Professional.  This is great news for both him and the UK Higher Education sector as it demonstrates how much talent exists and how prepared people are to share knowledge.

He explains it all very well on his blog

http://www.jonoble.com/blog/2009/7/2/now-i-have-a-powershell-mvp-award-ho-ho-ho.html

Typing in Arabic on a Qwerty keyboard – a simple free download

In my local library I often pass by the computer section, where people are sitting typing away into Hotmail in languages I don’t understand (I live in rural Oxfordshire, so much of the time I think it’s eastern European languages). And I guess they’ve become fluent in finding the key combinations to create the accents, umlauts etc. But I’d never considered that it would be possible to send an email in Arabic from a qwerty keyboard.

Microsoft Maren looks ideal for any computer where there may be a requirement for Arabic as well as Roman languages. For example, in a community access suite, or open access areas such as libraries.

Lack of access to an Arabic keyboard or lack of familiarity with one are two of the most common problems preventing Arabic users from communicating in their own language.

But the team at the Cairo Microsoft Innovation Lab have, and they’ve created a simple Windows extension that allows users to easily chat, search, blog, email and create documents in Arabic, by converting it on the fly from Roman characters.

It’s available as a free download from the Maren website, and there’s also a funky animation that shows how it works.

Microsoft Maren allows you to type Arabic in Roman characters (Romanized Arabic, Arabizi, Arabish or Franco-Arabic) and have it converted on the fly to Arabic script.

This download isn’t just for education institutions – you can also point students to the site if they want to download it for their home PCs.

Free Windows 7 Release Candidate download will end shortly

This isn’t specific to universities, but as it hasn’t got much coverage worldwide, I thought it worth a mention. If you’re thinking of experimenting with Windows 7 in the summer holidays – eg testing some of your old educational software using the XP compatibility mode – then you may want to know that the free download of the Windows 7 Release Candidate will end on 15th August.

The Release Candidate (RC) is our last public release before Windows 7 is finalised and actually released as a full product. The RC version is free to use until Spring next year, and although the download won’t be available after 15th August, you can run it right up until March 2010 without interruptions.

Visit the download site to get a copy and a licence key

It’s handy if you want to install a copy for:

• Testing software compatibility
• Seeing whether it runs on old cronky hardware (see this if you want an idea)
• Running on one of your non-mission-critical computers whilst waiting for the final release

Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 networking enhancements for education

I’ve just finished reading the whitepaper about networking enhancements that are included within Windows 7, which are especially powerful when combined with Windows Server 2008 R2. Although I’m not the most technical person in the team, it made sense to me, and a couple of key features jumped out at me as being particularly useful in education:

DirectAccess for academic staff to replace VPN connections

The scenario of VPN which the whitepaper describes matches my own use of VPN.

When I’m working from home, I avoid using a VPN connection when I can, because all of my internet traffic is re-routed through it, and slows down downloads and other web access (VOIP is sometimes lower quality too). And if my machine goes into sleep mode temporarily, I have to go through all of the quarantine and security checks again when it wakes up. So I tend to ‘batch up’ the things I need to VPN for, logon, do them, and then logoff VPN again.

But as a user, it means that if I get internal SharePoint links in email, I can’t click straight through. And I can’t quickly update my own SharePoint wiki etc. (And, similarly, the IT support team can’t automatically deploy critical updates or Group Policy changes until I next VPN in). I’m guessing that you have the same situation on campus.

With Windows 7, the inclusion of DirectAccess means that users can have the same experience (and access) when they work at home (or from another remote location, like a wireless hotspot) as they would on campus. So they can access your internal SharePoint, other intranet sites and any internal applications. But it doesn’t re-route their general Internet traffic, so they still have full-speed web access (unless you decide to change that too!).

There’s a lot of technical details (and acronyms like IPv6, IPsec and 56-bit key encryption) on page 5-6 of the whitepaper

Better synchronisation for offline files and slow connections

Windows 7 adds enhanced support for synchronising files between your own PC and a network share – with more sensitivity to bandwidth for broadband and WAN connections, and invisible background synchronisation of offline files. This will be particularly useful where staff keep master files on their local machine (like their curriculum delivery plan) but you want to protect them from losing it all by ensuring it is synchronised to a network connection.

Well, the alternative is to implant the I-must-make-a-backup-every-day chip in your colleagues!

Better support for saving money on electricity

With the wider use of wireless around campus, you’ll be pleased to hear that Wake On Lan has been extended to wireless too – allowing you to use a more aggressive power-saving profile on your laptops and desktops, without compromising your ability to manage them.

Don’t underestimate how much money this could save you. PC Pro put the potential power savings at nearly £50 a computer if you switch from Windows default power settings to the most energy efficient. With an estimated 1/2 million university-owned computers across campuses, that’s a big bundle of money. (I know that you don’t pay the power bills from the IT budget, but perhaps there’s an opportunity to get some contribution from the facilities teams to support the changes!)

Have a read of the whitepaper – there’s a lot of straightforward and clear advice

And bonus materials…

As a bonus, there are more detailed technical documents on DirectAccess which are also useful:

• DirectAccess Technical Overview
  Covers the functional and architectural aspects of DirectAccess, a technology introduced in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 to enable mobile workers to seamlessly connect to enterprise network resources when connected to the Internet.
  
• Next Generation Remote Access with DirectAccess and VPNs
  Compares DirectAccess with VPNs and describes the scenarios that are most appropriate for each.
  
• Using DirectAccess to provide secure access to corporate resources from anywhere
  Case Study: Although broadband services and Wi-Fi have dramatically improved, the connectivity experience for remote corporate users remains largely unchanged. Microsoft Information Technology (Microsoft IT) is adopting the DirectAccess feature in Windows® 7 and in Windows Server® 2008 R2 to enable employees to gain seamless remote access to corporate applications and data. The solution, which only requires Internet connectivity and credentials, significantly improves productivity and can be an important cost-saving mechanism.
  
• DirectAccess Early Adopter’s Guide
  This guide introduces DirectAccess concepts, defines new terms, explains requirements for installation, discusses how to design DirectAccess architecture, and then steps you through installation and deployment.
  
• Direct Access Step-by-Step Guide
  Step By Step Guide: Demonstrate DirectAccess in a Test Lab

live@edu – how much storage is available?

I came across this posting the other day and it shows how much storage is currently on offer with Microsoft’s live@edu programme for education.  They stopped counting when they got to 155GB.  It’s a good concise read:

http://liveatedu.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!C76EAE4D4A509FBD!1292.entry?sa=637101308

Tech Ed – a week of developers and IT support teams in Berlin

This year Tech Ed is moving from Barcelona to Berlin. It’s also been squeezed into a single week – 7,000 developers and IT professionals descending on Berlin to enjoy a packed week full of technology. My first Tech Ed was only a few years ago, and I couldn’t believe the size of the event (and that was when it was two separate events in separate weeks) nor the amount of information that I was trying to take in in such a short period.

We’ve also traditionally been able to offer significantly reduced places to a few university customers, and a general academic discount for many others. This year, we’ll still be offering the Academic discount – details below – but unfortunately no free places. (Sorry). Hopefully, if your job involves making your university’s technology work smoothly and developing it as a strategic asset for the future, then you’ll still find enough in the agenda to justify the cost from the training budget. (Not sure if my wife’s tactic would work for this – don’t tell them the price, simply tell them that you’ve saved €800 on the normal registration price, and it’s less than half price)

ps Just in case you thought you’d missed another budget announcement, don’t panic. The 19% VAT thing is because the event is held in Berlin, and the EU rules stipulate we have to charge the VAT rate of the country where the event is delivered.

Business Intelligence for universities - how Northumbria University turned data into information

With increasing governances and fiscal demands, Northumbria University needed a way for their managers to quickly and easily track critical financial and student data.  After implementing its Microsoft Business Intelligence solution, their stakeholders now have access to near real-time, streaming reports to support effective decision making.  Working with Microsoft Gold Partner, Waterstons, Northumbria has implemented the best BI solution I have seen in Higher Education so far.

“Thanks to our new Microsoft Business Intelligence solution, instead of spending the majority of their time locating and gathering data, our information officers can tackle critical projects that add even more value to our schools, programs and the university.”

David Chesser
Deputy Vice Chancellor and Finance Director
Northumbria University

Benefits include:

• Data Accuracy
  • Providing certainty to all decision makers
• Online Portal increasing transparency
  • Self service allowing everyone to ask their own questions
• ‘Big picture view’
  • Provides holistic, current and reliable information

For more information you can read the full Northumbria University Business Intelligence case study

Using SharePoint for Social Networking in universities

The SharePoint team have created the Social Computing with SharePoint website. Although it is primarily designed to examine the use of social computing within a business context, it is relevant to universities in the UK, and there is an excellent video and written case study of the Washington State University’s use of SharePoint to create an e-portfolio and social collaboration tool for their students.

Nils Peterson, Assistant Director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology is quoted as saying:

Students using Office SharePoint Server 2007 will gain experience with collaboration and intellectual property management tools that will provide a personal foundation for the lifelong learning process.

The university gives each student their own MySite, which gives them an online storage space, as well as a personalisable site that they can use for a combination of document storage, document sharing, collaborative working and a social networking space which can be used for blogs, wikis and podcasting.

You can watch the video, which gives examples of SharePoint in use for Social Networking on the team’s site, and also download a written case study

The use of My Sites created by students support WSU’s objectives of creating global outreach, by enabling students to collaborate with people outside the university and around the world. The university is able to control the limits of what information is shared outside of the university, as well as using the capability to provide effective security within the university with the linked user-management capabilities that are provided through the network.

By adopting SharePoint as a social networking platform, WSU are avoiding the challenges some universities are facing, where their individual members of staff (and students) are creating alternative virtual learning environments by ‘hand-stitching’ web-based systems together. Although this often creates a solution which can be setup outside of the control of the university IT team, that same virtue introduces challenges – for example, where staff export lists of students from their laptop to create user lists on a website. They often don’t understand the obligations that the university is under to protect and control the use of the data.

Doing the same thing through a SharePoint integrated into your IT systems delivers similar flexibility (and end-user control), but with the added safety of knowing that list of users, classes, and individual’s files, are all stored within your infrastructure (and if you delete or suspend a user, that immediately restricts them across all of your connected IT systems).

Last day for the ultimate steal

Friday 26 June is the last day, more info here

(this post is so short it could have been on Twitter – more on that later…………..)

Dealing with university email spam

Over the last few months, there have been a few occasions where universities have been falsely identified as spammers – either because their mail sending services inadvertently set of spam detectors, or because they were genuinely being used to re-route spam mail. This problem is likely to increase rather than decrease, as so much of our daily email is categorised as spam. Yale University found out that 94% of all email that went through their own servers was spam last autumn, which is only slightly higher than the average.

Understandably when a spammer is blocked, the ISP or mail provider doesn’t tell them, otherwise it would turn into a cat-and-mouse game between spammers and email services.

So if your university email is blocked by an ISP or email service, the first you may know about it is when one of your students or staff tells you that an important email they sent didn’t arrive.

JANET have provided some generic advice on avoiding false-positives on spam detection, and my colleague Ben has provided some very specific advice on how to ensure that your university email system isn’t blocked by Hotmail or other Microsoft mail services.

Ben’s is a step by step guide, with a lot of very specific links and instructions that you can follow, including a good deal of background reading to help you to understand why the situation happens, as well as how to avoid it.

Sometimes you can have your mail blocked because recipients report it as spam in their mail client (eg if you have a mailing list which includes potential applicants, and they report your newsletter as spam to their mail service provider), so it is definitely worth following Ben’s guidance, especially if somebody in your university is planning any massive e-mailshots this summer. In those cases, you may feel that it is unfair that you’ve been identified – but spam is measured through the eyes of the reader, and not everybody trusts the “unsubscribe” option, and simply ticks the “this mail is spam” button instead.

Office tools coming to a browser near you soon

Another update on the earlier post today on Office Live Workspace.   Many of you will already know that there are office application editing capability is coming to OLW but here are some screenshots of what they are likely to look like.  Surprisingly similar to the PC tools.

http://workspace.officelive.com/en-GB/FAQ/thumbnails

Personally, I can’t wait for this to launch because it means I can then access my study documents anywhere and from any PC.

This is a good site in general for what’s going on on OLW and some good edu content in there.

Recovering lost USB memory sticks

You must have seen them – plaintive, desperate or just plain panic. It hasn’t taken long for the USB memory stick to turn into something that everybody has (and yet, I can still remember that sense of satisfaction when I was given my first freebie memory stick with 16MB of memory!). Now it’s not uncommon to see students with 2GB memory sticks plugged into whatever computer they are using.

BUT as well as being a solution to portable data storage, they are also a problem. Because one day it might go missing. And it is not uncommon to find desperate pleas around computer suites asking for help in finding a missing USB memory stick.

We’ve been suggesting for a while that students use either SkyDrive or Office Live Workspace to store files online. It also means that they can share files if they choose, and collaborate on work. And in the case of Office Live Workspace, they can Open & Save into their storage on the web, directly from Office. And they are both free.

But, it’s a bit of a boring subject isn’t it? Until you’ve lost your memory stick. (A bit like doing PC backups – boring until it’s too late!)

So the Office Live Workspaces team have created a video that just might appeal to your students.

Ever wondered where student’s lost memory sticks end up?

So now you know.  And you can either encourage students to use their free Office Live Workspace individually, or provide it as a free service to all of your students through the Live@Edu service

Windows 7 Application Compatibility in education

A last week I wrote “Windows 7 is getting closer”, and one of the readers posed the question about Application Compatibility – their point was that they used over 450 applications, so couldn’t we test them all to check they work on Windows 7. Hopefully it’s no surprise to learn that we can’t do all of that, but that there’s been a big focus on overall application compatibility in Windows 7 – back to both Windows Vista and Windows XP.

Later today, Mark Russinovich is hosting a worldwide roundtable on Application Compability that you might want to join in. As it is a single event for the whole world, it is at 7pm our time tonight, but I’ve had a look at the telly schedule and there’s nothing exciting on (thank goodness Britain’s Got Talent has finished – for so many reasons!).

Here’s the blurb:

“Windows 7 is approaching fast and from the application standpoint is very similar to Windows Vista. We’re going to examine Windows 7 application compatibility not only from the perspective of moving from Windows Vista, but also for those coming from Windows XP. Join us to discuss the most common challenges around application compatibility when coming from a legacy operating system, why changes were made along the way, compatibility technologies inside the OS and methods for getting incompatible applications to run on Windows 7. Along the way we share tips and tricks, demonstrate free tools to analyze and fix applications and answer your specific questions about application compatibility live.”

You can attend using this link – just logon a few minutes before 7pm: https://ms.istreamplanet.com/springboard

As part of the “virtual” experience, you may submit your questions about Windows 7 Application Compatibility to the panel live during the event—or submit questions in advance to vrtable@microsoft.com.

Windows 7 and Server 2008 at Newcastle University with VBUG

Thanks to jonoble for posting a link to an event on his blog.  Jonathan has picked out a couple of things which he is interested in and one of those certainly matches with my favourites and that is Direct Access; this is a killer app.

More details of the event at Newcastle University on 8 July 2009 is here