Dear All, I have been invited to a meeting between ICT and the Head of Department. The agenda is pretty broad and is:
Topic - Review of ICT service provision to Dept
Good things about ICT Services
Problems or issues with ICT Services
Requirements (future or existing) which need to be me and which are not being met.
I think that the people on this list are correct people to have input into this meeting. So I would be very interested in any services that you feel are provided well, or, those tat are not provided well enough (if at all). Clearly thi applies to both teaching and research. Talking to a couple of people informally the things that came up were: - a desire to have centralised wikis - communications - especially concerning items like the status of the plan for the rewiring. I hope that we can improve this via this list. - the extent of the wireless coverage. Clearly, it would be very useful to have a list going into this meeting. It would be very easy for people to only send issues or future wishes, but please do send mails outlining what you think ICT do well. I would also encourage people to send to this list rather than directly to me so that others can react if they strongly agree/disagree. All the best, david
- a desire to have centralised wikis - communications - especially concerning items like the status of the plan for the rewiring. I hope that we can improve this via this list. - the extent of the wireless coverage.
Clearly, it would be very useful to have a list going into this meeting. It would be very easy for people to only send issues or future wishes, but please do send mails outlining what you think ICT do well. I would also encourage people to send to this list rather than directly to me so that others can react if they strongly agree/disagree.
(Sending it to list and Dave just to make sure it works...) I've been a bit concerned for a while about the interfaces between the College Exchange system and non-Windows user machines in research groups. The mailing list issue we had is possibly related to that, but there are other problems (inadequate handling of deleted email on the server for Macs, for example, though this *seems* to finally be fixed). Communicating changes in things also seems a bit off. Something was changed in the VPN a while back. I only found out this was the cause of my VPN connections failing (and that it wasn't T-Mobile) when asking a colleague who did have it working and seeing that his settings were different. Documentation of such changes may be buried in the ICT website, but one doesn't know when to check it or, necessarily, where to find such info. A 'news email' like the one the Rector sends out, might be a better way of telling people about such changes. Dave
I would have to agree with the seemingly widespread complaints about lack of information coming out of ICT. There is a lot of information on the ICT web pages but sometimes you really have to dig for it. How many people know about Eduroam wireless access for visitors, for example? I only found out about this by chance from a colleague. You would never suspect its existence from the wireless section of the ICT web pages. It seems you can only find out about Eduroam by using the search box. I didn't manage to find any direct links to the information. Concerning the Exchange server it does seem that it is heavily biased in favour of people who can access it as an Exchange server, i.e. using Outlook on a Windows box inside College (or via VPN). Users who cannot do this, e.g. Linux or MacOS clients or users outside College who cannot reasonably use a VPN connection have to use an IMAP connection. This does not seem to be well supported, particularly since the recent Exchange server upgrade, judging from the number of complaints I get from users about random disconnections and sometimes inability to access their inbox at all for hours at a time. My email is not on the Exchange server so I am only reporting second hand gripes here. One thing that I think ICT could usefully do for the department is to set up some sort of sensible news/bulletin board system (with permanent storage) that could be used for a lot of the deluge of attachments that are routinely emailed to every person in physics by an assortment of admin personnel. A lot of these messages are of interest to a limited number of people, or might only be interesting in 6 months time. As it stands right now, the next time you receive an email bulging with attachments that might be useful to refer to later you have the choice of leaving it to clog up your inbox or deleting it in irritation. Do we really need one copy each? I don't think so. Information like this should go into some sort of central repository. This is kind of thing I would like to see ICT do for the department, along with training the admin staff to use it. (note: Wikis are NOT suitable for storing large documents in case anyone suggests it as a solution.) Ray Beuselinck
Dear All, Thanks for the replies. Does anybody use the ICT HPC service? If so what have your experiences been? What have you used them for high throughput or traditional HPC parallel job? Have you found them well resourced or not so well resourced for the type of computing that you need? What was the process of allocating resources to your work? Anything else you may wish to add. All the best, david David Colling wrote:
Dear All,
I have been invited to a meeting between ICT and the Head of Department. The agenda is pretty broad and is:
Topic - Review of ICT service provision to Dept
Good things about ICT Services
Problems or issues with ICT Services
Requirements (future or existing) which need to be me and which are not being met.
I think that the people on this list are correct people to have input into this meeting. So I would be very interested in any services that you feel are provided well, or, those tat are not provided well enough (if at all). Clearly thi applies to both teaching and research. Talking to a couple of people informally the things that came up were:
- a desire to have centralised wikis - communications - especially concerning items like the status of the plan for the rewiring. I hope that we can improve this via this list. - the extent of the wireless coverage.
Clearly, it would be very useful to have a list going into this meeting. It would be very easy for people to only send issues or future wishes, but please do send mails outlining what you think ICT do well. I would also encourage people to send to this list rather than directly to me so that others can react if they strongly agree/disagree.
All the best, david
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participants (3)
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Dave Clements
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David Colling
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Raymond Beuselinck