| Despite the severe weather conditions on 2 December, delegates from across the UK gathered at the Microsoft’s headquarters at the Thames Valley Park in Reading for Capita’s annual UNIT-e technical briefing day. |
The event is an opportunity for Capita to share with customers and users technology developments undertaken during the year and to provide an outline of research and development for the coming months. The event offered a varied agenda comprising product demonstrations, customer experiences and service presentations.
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The day commenced with a presentation from Capita’s systems architect, Steve Cain. He outlined some of the many developments carried out during 2010 and how this fitted into the overall direction of the UNIT-e product.
Demonstrations included the new web-based UNIT-e Launch Pad environment, which will host and launch new web-based applications. Steve demonstrated the rich and flexible solutions being built using the new Information Interface web-client, including the UNIT-e Report View builder .NET application that will be used to deliver Microsoft Reporting Services reports for new UNIT-e applications, including the new UNIT-e Resource Manager product due for release in early 2011.
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Alex Richards, director of customer services at Totton College, was next up and provided a comprehensive run through of the recently launched UNIT-e Tools for EDM product set.
Alex has many years’ experience using electronic document management (EDM) solutions, and he’s been very keen to work with Capita from the beginning of the development cycle to produce a solution to met the UNIT-e user’s needs.
Complementing the document management capability already present in Microsoft’s SharePoint product, the EDM tool set provides several methods to scan and index documents against any record held in the UNIT-e database including students, staff, curriculum, rooms and much more.
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Alex discussed with us all how smoothly the implementation of UNIT-e Tools for EDM was, the process going ahead without a glitch: 52,000 documents were transferred from the existing EDM solution with just the touch of a button!
Feedback from the college users has been positive commenting on the ease of use of the product. Alex’s presentation detailed the reasons for Totton College selecting UNIT-e Tools for EDM as well as providing a real-time demonstration of the product in use.
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The day continued with the first of two Microsoft presentations. Keith Burns provided the first presentation, discussing the use of free PowerPivot tool, which can be used with the latest versions of MS Excel and provides some powerful business intelligence tools. It has the ability to connect to several data sources along with the option to securely share and collaborate through SharePoint.
With colleges and universities looking for effective and realistic ways to “deliver more with less”, Richard Green’s presentation of the new Live@edu and Office365 offerings from Microsoft was opportune.
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The free applications will enable institutions to offer students free email services that can be automatically synchronized with their Active Directory accounts as well as providing access to MS Office applications and storage from anywhere and at any time with through Skydrives. Live@Edu provides quick-win cloud services that are available now, offering institutions the opportunity to reduce ICT costs whilst improving the student experience.
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Microsoft Workflow Foundation provides great potential to streamline business processes through the design of fully integrated business processes linking ICT systems together and providing automation.
In order to realise this potential, there is the need to be able to extract data from UNIT-e into these workflows and write back the data. Moreover, the functionality is greatly enhanced through an ease of use drag and drop design interface removing the need for programming knowledge.
Capita consultant Rupert Ireland provided a presentation demonstrating that through the combination of Microsoft workflow, Nintex design tools and Capita’s UNIT-e Tools for Workflow, highly complex business processes can be automated and managed more effectively.
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The day concluded with an in-depth review of how Reporting Services’ reports can be deployed over the internet. The presentation included a demonstration of the new web-based application UNIT-e Report View Builder tool and the methods by which reports can be embedded within Columbus. This provides the ability for rich reporting without the need for wholesale change to the college’s internet reporting approach. Thank you to all those of you who managed to get to the event intact and we’re looking forward to seeing you at the next event.
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