Saturday 31 January 2015

Information Systems - what we do

Building on yesterday's list of technologies use by the Information Systems team here at the University, here are some of the services that we run. Much of this will probably only make sense to people inside the University.
In addition, we contribute to a number of services run by other parts of UIS:
So now you know.

Friday 30 January 2015

An Information Systems colophon

I've followed the work of Government Digital Service (GDS - the people behind GOV.UK) for a while. It seems to me that an organisation dedicated to “leading the digital transformation of government” probably knows a thing or two that's relevant to the digital transformation of a university.

GDS have a blog, and their list of technologies that they use is interesting. Work I've been doing recently means that I've created a similar list of the technologies used within my Information Services team here at the University. For what its worth this what it looks like:

Core servers
Base software products
  • Some services are based on existing software, including phpBB and Mediawiki
  • The Web Search service is provided by Funnelback
Technologies

We rely on, and in some cases also support, a range of technologies:
Applications (incl. Frameworks, etc)
Database and other storage
Monitoring, managing and alerting
Supporting Tools
  • Central RT system for support tickets
  • Trac and Mantis for bug tracking
  • We've been experimenting with LeanKit and Asana for program and project management