Efficiency Using Microsoft
Walsall College, 28th January 2011
Over 80 delegates from across the education sectors came together at Walsall College to hear how the college had successfully combined Capita’s UNIT-e system, Microsoft software and learning technologies such as Moodle to provide highly personalised access to information and services for staff and students.
Walsall College was recently awarded an Association of Colleges Beacon Award for “Efficiency through the Effective use of Technology in Further Education and Skills”. The award intends to highlight how new technology can have a positive impact on both students and the workforce.
Presentations from Walsall College
The day commenced with a presentation from Jayne Holt, director of learning technologies at Walsall College. Jayne discussed the vision the college had developed to work, teach and operate in different ways using technology, and how e-personalisation was key to that vision.
The second presentation by Jayne focused on how Microsoft technology was adopted and the importance of managing a gradual adoption. Technology helped again with this through the use of Microsoft’s Application Virtualisation (App-V) and had the added benefit of reducing licence costs and deployment headaches.
SharePoint 2010
Microsoft’s presentation provided an overview of SharePoint 2010. In addition to an increasingly rich user interface with ribbon controls that are now familiar to all office users, there are some very powerful new features within SharePoint 2010, such as communities’ tools and insight business intelligence components. For education, users there are a number of free, downloadable web parts that allow for integration with Moodle.
After lunch, the Microsoft presentation resumed with a look at some of the cloud-based offerings. Live@Edu offers a great opportunity to offer all students email and storage at no cost, and tools are available to make the creation of accounts from local active directory accounts a straightforward process.
Office 365 provides web-based versions of your favourite office applications with some very smart collaboration tools. Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint can also be hosted, with instant messaging and conferencing options using Lync also part of the package.
UNIT-e tools from Capita
Capita FHE’ presentation from Christophe Landure introduced the delegates to the UNIT-e integration tools. These have been developed to enable the UNIT-e solution to deliver personalised information in a highly effective way. It allows colleges such as Walsall to access student and, staff data, including timetable and attendance information. The presentation also showcased the recently launched UNIT-e Tools for Electronic Document Management (EDM) solution.
JISC’s SharePoint developments
The presentation from the JISC Regional Support Centre in the West Midlands detailed how they have recently moved all electronic files from a shared drive to SharePoint and the advantages this brought. In addition, many of the Excel spreadsheets and Word forms in use have now been converted to SharePoint lists and combined with Workflow to improve efficiency greatly.
