Annual Report 2007-08

3.1. University Backbone Network

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/network/

The FroDo project has been successfully completed and we now have a presence in every main University and college building offering a variety of services and connections.

The backbone continues to operate reliably and traffic levels are still rising with no sign of abating. Similarly, the number of registered hosts connected to the network increases each year and now exceeds 76,000 connections.

3.2. Herald Mail System

3.2.2. Usage

The Herald IMAP service handles approximately 900,000 client logins per day during term time (by approximately 26,000 unique users, with some email clients accessing the service multiple times per session). The table below shows the number of unique users using different login methods in a sample term-time period compared with equivalent data from the previous year:

Table 7. Number of unique users using different login methods

Method	Users in 2007	As %	Users in 2008	As %
Only Webmail	14,853	64	15,295	59
Only POP and/or Webmail	910	4	992	4
IMAP and possibly other methods	7,357	32	9,658	37
Total	23,120	100	25,945	100

The following chart shows login activity over one 24-hour period in term-time in 2008:

Figure 1. Login activity over 24 hours

A further indicator of Herald usage is the mailstore usage broken down by division:

Figure 2. Mailstore usage broken down by division (%)

As in previous reports, we are unable to indicate undergraduate usage by division. However, it remains the case that students form the primary constituency of Herald users. Undergraduate email data occupies approximately 32% of the Herald mailstore.

As reported above, in September 2008 we increased every user’s quota to 1 GB. The following chart illustrates the rate of growth of the mailstore. It is clear that the actual usage of the mailstore grew at a more rapid pace from Sept 2008 onwards. It is likely that users are, perhaps inevitably, taking a more relaxed approach to inbox and folder management (e.g. storing attachments with emails, failing to clear out junk-mail or deleted-mail folders, and so on).

Figure 3. Mailstore usage growth

The break in the above graph marks the migration of users to the new Herald.

3.2.3. Mail delivery

On a typical day Herald handles nearly 30 GB of email messages (see following chart).

Figure 4. E-mail delivery by day

Of these the vast majority are delivered to the appropriate mailbox. A significant number are automatically forwarded to other email addresses; others are filtered into a user’s junk-mail folder, based on Herald filter settings applied by the user.

Figure 5. E-mail disposition by day

3.3. Hierarchical File Server

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/hfs/

The Hierarchical File Server (HFS) service provides large-scale central filestore services to the University community. The HFS runs IBM’s Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) software and supports a backup service for both desktops and departmental and college servers, and a long-term data repository service for the University’s digital assets.

As the number and size of local desktop and server machines in and around Oxford grows, so the challenge for the HFS is to meet and absorb this growth. Equally, increasing numbers of research projects, together with various digitisation projects, require that their data are securely archived over the course of the respective projects and beyond.

This increasing demand manifests itself in all indices of the HFS service, as illustrated in the graphs below.

HFS — Total Service Growth 2007-08

The amount of data secured by the HFS has grown from about 290TB to about 400TB in the last year. The number of files has grown accordingly from just over 1 billion to 1.4 billion.

Figure 6. Growth in number of files

Below, the total Backup data held is broken down by division (excludes Archive data).

Figure 7. Total Backup data by division

In a typical week, the HFS takes in somewhere between 40 to 60 million new or changed files amounting to around 20 to 25TB — an increase of 25-50% over the previous year.

The real challenge to the HFS is to meet the inexorable growth in demand for Backup and Archive services both effectively and efficiently. To this end, major activities in the past year have centred around the acquisition of two new disk servers and associated SAN hardware. This has allowed for more client data to be staged to disk in any one 24-hour period and thence to allow the faster movement of this data to secure tape copies. Accordingly, the HFS raised the daily backup limits for clients earlier in 2008 to 100 GB/day for Desktops, 200 GB/day for Servers, and 300 GB/day for Large Servers.

Other activities have focused on managing the amount of old and erroneous Backup data. A more proactive approach to identifying and removing these has resulted in the long-term growth of data held in the service slowing. Total data occupancy is now anticipated to double every 24 months, whereas previously it was doubling every 18 months.

In September 2007 the HFS Team organised and hosted the highly-regarded TSM Symposium at St. Catherine’s College. We have run this 4-day conference every alternate year since 1999 and it continues to attract keynote speakers from IBM Storage together with delegates from all over the world.

Future activities of the HFS Team will focus on several areas, including: replacing two ageing host servers; investigating the next generation of tape drives; piloting new dedicated TSM backup client software for Exchange, MS SQL and other databases; and opening remote client backups over VPN. At the same time we are participating in a beta program looking at enhancements to the management of the extremely large database systems that underpin the HFS Service.

3.4. IT Security

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/network/security/

Over the past year OxCERT have handled around 600 security incidents, ranging from instances of malicious software on single machines to large-scale compromises affecting dozens of machines across several colleges and departments. Several of the most major incidents have resulted in considerable disruption for units for several days while incidents were investigated and critical servers cleaned.

Major new vulnerabilities from the past year include flaws in the HFS client software, in Adobe Flash Player, in SSL libraries used on certain Linux platforms, and the discovery of a major threat affecting the majority of DNS resolver implementations. Such problems have required prompt action from many parties in order to reduce the University’s exposure to the threat, as exploits often appear in the wild within days of the initial announcement, or in some cases before any vulnerability has been announced.

The year has seen a number of new developments, notably a major upgrade to several critical back-end systems, allowing the team to monitor the University’s upgraded JANET connection and to handle the ever-increasing volumes of data collected. Further enhancements are planned over the coming months.

The OxCERT webpages have been redeveloped as part of the OUCS website. A new series of monthly reports and security advisories has been started, each accompanied by an RSS feed provided through OXITEMS. Documentation will be expanded as time permits.

The team interacts with other security groups, vendors, and law enforcement agencies in the UK and around the globe, either on a regular basis or in response to specific incidents, and has been represented at meetings and conferences on a local, national, and international level.

The team assists the ITS3 section with the handling of copyright violation notices, which arrive at an average rate of two per week, although at times the rate is considerably higher. In two recent cases the accuracy of the data in the notices was called into question, while a study at the University of Washington has raised doubts regarding the detection methods used. We await feedback from the rights holders as to what steps are being taken to avoid this problem in future.

The team has also been involved in a a pilot project to enable examination papers in preparation (and other sensitive information) to be distributed securely by electronic means; work on this continues but has encountered numerous technical problems and deficiencies in the software used.

3.5. Help Centre

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/helpcentre/

During the past year the Help Centre has undergone a period of changes and expansion. This started with a merger of the OUCS Shop and Help Centre in August 2007 under the management of the Help Centre co-managers. The Shop was physically moved into the Help Centre at the end of October, improving the interaction between Shop and Help Desk and allowing staff from both services to start assisting each other. Changes continued with a farewell to Peter Higginbotham, who decided to take early retirement in April 2008, and is much missed. He has not been replaced directly: instead, the post of deputy Help Centre Manager was created. The most recent changes stem from the closure of the OUCS Shop counter (see the Shop report for more details) and have resulted in the following services now being included in the Help Centre:

• A help desk which will provide a more consistent service as one of the two staff on duty will come from a pool of 3 full-time Help Centre staff

• An online shop providing software delivered within the UK and a service payment facility

• A hardware repair service with two full-time technicians qualified to work on PCs and Apple Macs

• Creation and management of accounts for central computer-based facilities and administration of University email addresses

3.5.1. Help Desk

We continue to find it very difficult to analyse the data on Help Desk usage because of the high proportion of queries emailed from non-University addresses and a drop in the use of our online help form. We can say with confidence, however, that the number of emailed queries (including those using the help form) has risen by almost 12% and that staff, postgraduates, and members of congregation continue to be the biggest user groups (see table below). The marked drop in the number of appointments booked with specialists has two causes: appointments for hardware problems were replaced in May 2007 by an enquiry form and this data shows the first full year without such appointments. In addition, the skills and experience of the Help Desk staff have increased to the point where they can handle a larger number of issues without having to resort to specialists. This is a very encouraging trend, making IT problem-handling more efficient both for the user and OUCS.

Table 11. Help Desk Usage

	2007-08		2006-07		2005-06		2004-05		2002-03
	Email	App.	Email	App.	Email	App.	Email	App.	Email	App.
Staff	1,661	21	1,068	46	1,200	46	987	55	1,178	42
Senior Members	759	9	494	28	699	27	590	44	572	24
Postgraduates	1,029	68	584	158	1,028	212	896	146	849	204
Undergraduates	511	11	279	92	559	105	575	72	384	39
Visitors	132	6	64	8	67	7	62	13	52	12
Retired Staff	90	8	44	1	68	11	81	4	41	6
Other	2,295	32	3,269	74	2,185	47	2,466	159	1,978	91
TOTAL	6,477	155	5,802	407	5,806	455	5,657	493	5,054	418

The data from queries channelled through the help form shows that the colleges and divisions account for the highest use of the Help Desk, generating over 85% of the queries (see table below). The Department of Continuing Education leads the field of other affiliations, having overtaken Academic Services from last year.

Table 12. Usage of the Help Form by division

	2007-08		2006-07		2005-06		2004-05
	Total	Rank	Total	Rank	Total	Rank	Total	Rank
Medical Sciences	412	2	601	2	391	2	151	3
Social Sciences	465	1	546	3	363	3	197	2
Maths, Physical and Life Sciences	247	5	413	4	231	5	121	4
Humanities	260	4	319	5	245	4	109	5
Continuing Education	99	6	101	7	51	7	34	6
Colleges	371	3	656	1	502	1	230	1
Academic Service	72	8	127	6	71	6	33	7
Central Administration	87	7	69	8	38	8	17	8
Council	5	10	7	10	8	9	2	10
Health and Safety	0		2	12	0		0
Other Related Bodies	4	11	11	9	4	10	4	9
Paying Individuals	13	9	6	10	0		0
TOTAL	2,035		2,858		1,904		898

The most noticeable change in the type of queries handled by the Help Desk is a growth in the percentage of both general software and VPN-related questions. VPN queries have chiefly increased due to difficulties with the early versions of VPN for Vista. Vista questions also partly account for the software query increase because operating system problems are included in this category. The other main contributor is Mac OS X, as the help desk is increasingly called on to help with start-up and configuration problems of Apple Macs. For next year we plan to break down our logging by operating system.

Figure 8. Helpcentre queries by type

3.6. Hardware Repairs and Upgrading

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/maintenance/

Both the hardware repairs and upgrades, and data recovery/installation services, have experienced an increased demand this year. A total of 306 machines were handled, which is an increase of 13% over last year. Of these, 78% were PCs and 18% were Apple Macs. The remainder were peripheral devices and machine examinations for the preparation of reports for use by insurance companies. Perhaps the most unusual work undertaken was to remove a large number of African ants from inside a laptop, many of which were still alive. Remarkably, the machine remained in a working condition throughout the period of infestation.

Many student owned machines are laptops where their portability is appreciated. Indeed, only 7% of the total number were desktops. Judging by the increasing numbers of external hard drives encountered, there seems to be a greater awareness of the advantages of backing up data to safeguard against hard drive failure. Recent trends towards the use of solid state drives, which would lessen this risk because of their increased reliability, are still being held back by high prices.

Conversely, the falling prices of laptops have tended to limit the scope for extensive repairs of these machines. There is a critical cost where it is economically preferable to discard the existing machine in favour of purchasing a new one. Increasingly demanding software and hardware obsolescence hastens this decision. We have noticed that more owners accept the need to balance the cost of repairing a machine against the price of purchasing a new one, particularly as it can be a straightforward matter to convert data between differing file formats, even when using different hardware platforms.

In cases where software corruption has been responsible for the machine’s malfunction, our data recovery and install service has become popular, accounting for 22% of our caseload. Where the laptop or desktop is beyond economical repair and the hard drive has been unaffected by the malfunction, data can be retrieved for the owner. Software corruption or a severely infected operating system can be cured by replacing the operating system and reinstating personal data.

We continue to provide a multifaceted approach in the provision of hardware and software remedies for distressed machines and hope to widen our remit as the needs of our customers present themselves.

3.7. Registration Services

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/registration/

It has again been a busy year for registration. We continue to look for ways of reducing the manual operations needed by the front desk by automating more processes and devolving management to the user and to ITSS for managing usernames, email addresses, remote access accounts, TSM registration, software downloads.

We are aiming to reduce the number of queries we get year-on-year and have again made significant progress in this over the last 12 months.

The decline in RT tickets received by registration is set against a background of high account use over all divisions.

3.8. Information Services

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/oucsweb/

Information Services manages the OUCS website and a number of related sites (e.g. WelcomeToIT and ICT). The OUCS site caters for staff, students, and IT support staff in the University. The most popular pages remain, apart from the homepage, the course booking system pages. These course pages were replaced in Michaelmas 2007 with a new presentation and content. The streamlined presentation makes heavy use of Javascript to guide people through the selection and booking phases. The supporting scripts were rewritten to remove dependency upon Apache AxKit, and the administration pages were enhanced. The presentation of the WelcomeToIT pages was renewed for Michaelmas 2007, and the content heavily revised.

Over the past year we have been investigating provision of a new Content Management System for OUCS websites. An internal survey, analysis of systems used elsewhere in the University, and evaluation of shortlisted systems have led to a much better understanding of our needs. In preparation for changes, we have gradually replaced all web forms which depend on our current AxKit delivery system with a more generic system.

Support for the University webmaster community has been an important activity this year, with termly meetings organised, and management of the webmaster mailing lists.

We have also been:

• advising departments on use of the Google Search Appliance, which was upgraded to a capacity of 1 million documents during the year;
• enhancing and promoting the OXITEMS system, notably for use with the iTunes U podcasting system;
• assisting other groups within OUCS, on:
  • iTunes U setup and management;
  • Groupware procurement;
  • rewriting the Oxford Text Archive interface to texts.

We have also continued to support web calendaring, wikis, and other dynamic systems.

3.9. Research Technologies Service

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/rts/

The Research Technologies Service provides a service for Oxford University staff and students which consists of a centre of expertise in a range of services: research facilities, support services and information, advice and support for research projects. The RTS service has a remit which covers Oxford University and the following areas:

• advice and promotion of e-infrastructure;

• advice and support for research projects;

• provision of specific research services such as Intute and OSS Watch;

• contacts within the research community.

During this year the RTS has developed an integrated research project advice and assistance facility. This has been set up under four research categories which follow the usual research project progression:

• Pre-project: assistance with writing and IT requirements for inclusion in funding bids, initial contacts, and dealing with research funders;

• Project start up: setting up the project, requirements analysis, selecting hardware and software, web site creation;

• Project running: ongoing support, dissemination, hardware and software problems, changes in needs, annual reports, archiving, storage, website maintenance;

• Project end: dissemination, backup, archiving and publication, as well as sustainability issues for IT projects.

The RTS has continued to provide specific research services through the provision of the Intute Arts and Humanities services and with OSS Watch — the Open Source advisory service.

During the year the Oxford Text Archive has had reduced funding; this has meant that the service provided has been restricted to the depositing of specific, funded, or pre-arranged resources. A research award enabled the purchase of equipment which allowed the continuation of a limited service and for further storage facilities.

Projects which have continued from last year include eIUS Infrastructure Use Cases and Service Usage Models and the Bridging the Interoperability Divide (BID); the latter was completed during the year. Work is also continuing on the British National Corpus and the TEI initiative. Ongoing research projects across OUCS include the Low Carbon ICT project, the Groupware project, Modelling4All, Phoebe, Thema and the SACODEYL project; all of these are detailed in the report section.

Several European projects are being undertaken by OUCS with a range of European partners. These include CLARIN, DARIAH, and ENRICH; and others are under consideration by the European Commission.

Projects have been funded by a number of research organisations including the AHRC, JISC, and Eduserve. Staff contributions to other projects within the University include: Low Carbon ICT; Scoping digital repository services for research data management (with OeRC); and Virtual Research Environments. Research links with the Oxford e-Research Centre (OeRC) have continued with joint research funding applications, liaison and director posts, and collaborative projects such as Shibboleth deployment, digital repositories, and e-infrastructure usage. Several departments and the Oxford Internet Institute have also been involved with joint bid submissions.

Staff changes over the year include Alan Morrison and Greg Simpson leaving, and Sue Fenley (Research Facilitator) joining RTS.

3.10. WebLearn (Virtual Learning Environment) Service

http://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/site/

Michaelmas 2007 saw the WebLearn migration project get into gear with awareness-raising activities and the launch of pre-pilots. This has inevitably affected usage of WebLearn, with some Units choosing to hold back to some extent in using the present service and try new areas in the Beta service.

Even so the past year has seen usage fairly well sustained for the existing service; consideration of usage in Week 1 of Trinity 2007 has seen dips in the number of visitors and visits in terms of accesses counterbalanced by increases in the pages accessed.

Growth in resource creation has been substantial, and now well over half of the Colleges have a presence in the VLE.

The distribution of traffic has become more even between 3 out 4 of the academic divisions, though the Social Sciences Division’s usage is marginally down.

The table shows that accesses from within Oxford are c. 75% of the total, so the majority of users are still the staff and students of the University. However, the number of distinct search queries resulting in WebLearn accesses indicates the continued widening of resources.

3.11. The IT Learning Programme (ITLP) 2007-08

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/itlp/

The IT Learning Programme (ITLP) is part of the Learning Technologies Group (LTG). Led by a team of experienced teachers, the ITLP offers a wide range of IT courses and ensures that the course programme reflects the needs of the University and meets the requirements of staff and students. The ITLP programme is run with both technological and pedagogical proficiency. The academic year 2007-08 has been another record year for the provision of IT courses to students and staff. The ITLP team delivered over 150 modules per term to over 12,000 course participants.

The figures above are based on a combination of bookings via the online booking system and manually collected figures.

Our courses are open to all University members and other affiliated groups. The following charts show bookings by status and by affiliation.

Figure 9. ITLP bookings by status

Figure 10. ITLP bookings by affiliation

The figures above come from the ITLP online booking system.

3.12. Learning Technology Group Services

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/

Learning Technology Group (LTG) Services provides the backbone to many LTG activities, offering advice on and expertise in the use of technology for learning and teaching to departments around the University. We have particular expertise in multimedia, learning design, systems interoperability, and gathering user requirements. Key work has included preparing the transition for departments to move to the next generation of the institutional learning environment WebLearn Beta. This pilot work has involved the selection of early adopters, and running training sessions and outreach activities to pilot all the new features of this institutional software. There has also been a regular training series to help relieve the administrative burden of staff through the use of ICT.

LTG Services is involved in several national ICT projects funded by JISC. Funding was received for the section staff to work on Thema (http://thema.oucs.ox.ac.uk/) — a longitudinal study exploring the experiences of students in technology rich environments at Oxford. We are also collaborating with TALL at Continuing Education on a number of projects, including looking at user-owned social technologies and the Design 4 Learning Pedagogic Planner project. This project work (described more fully in separate entries) has informed OUCS’s work on good practice in the effective use of IT in teaching and learning.

A major initiative in this period has been preparing the technical architecture for providing a University-wide podcasting service. By providing advice, audio/video encoding engines and an RSS podcasting framework this has allowed departments to adopt a standard workflow for releasing audio and video content into a new web portal: http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/. The core of the work has been made possible through additions to the RSS service OXITEMS by the OUCS Information Services Team. This initiative has created a unique portfolio of teaching and outreach material and for the first time allowed access to key audio and video material through a single institutional standards-based web portal.

LTG Services also plays a role in disseminating best practice in learning and teaching. Activities include: running a weekly series of IT seminars (Digital Projects in Oxford); occasional workshops; the annual ‘Show and Tell’ OxTALENT event; and a series of Digital Video workshops. The section also runs two annual conferences. This year’s Shock of the Old conference focused on Web 2.0 social technologies, and the Beyond Digital Natives conference looked at developments in the student experience of ICT. Finally, LTG Services lent its expertise to teach on and help support the Master’s degree course in e-Learning at the Department of Educational Studies.

3.13. Academic Computing Development Team

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/acdt/

Following a review of ACDT in the middle of the year the divisions felt that the services offered by the ACDT were no longer needed (or should be pay-per-use), and that the resources used for such a service could be better employed. When the ACDT was formed ten years ago there was no access to generalised services as now offered by systems such as WebLearn, but times have changed. The resources have been reallocated within OUCS.

ACDT’s final year saw the following projects being completed and handed to the sponsoring departments:

WebLearn usability study

This looked at usability aspects of Sakai and made recommendations as to the needed improvements for accessibility.

Poetic Miscellanies database

This project provided a database structure for capture of information of the extensive poetic miscellanies in the Library.

Zoology distribution of infectious diseases modelling study

This project investigated the way that the current model for disease prediction operated and produced a detailed schema to allow it to be ported to the web.

Online Language teaching

This was a multimedia project which allowed for Chinese language teaching. It is currently being quality assured for release as open source.

Design of Museums booking system

In collaboration with the Pitt Rivers Museum and Museum of Natural History a design was produced to allow capture of all the requisite information for bookings, reporting etc. No off-the-shelf package was found that could meet all requirements.

Bodleian Integrated Documentation System scoping

After the initial consultations this project was closed.

Western Manuscripts at Christchurch: an online catalogue

This project was scoped, and a quote was produced, but it was shelved pending raising of funding.

OxCORT (Oxford Colleges Online Reports for Tutorials) was finally rolled out across the University, and responsibility for the production service was passed to Central Administration.

3.14. Computing Services Shop

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/shop/

The 2007-08 year has been one of numerous changes for the Computing Services Shop. The reporting year opened with new management, the shop having moved in OUCS’s internal structure to merge with the Help Centre. This change followed on from last year’s ‘front of house’ services review, with the aim of making more effective use of the shop counter staff and full-time help desk personnel. A physical move followed at the end of October, making the Shop more visible in a new location within the Help Centre. This brought the two staff groups closer together and improved the interaction between the two services and also the Poster Printing Service.

Unfortunately shop counter sales of IT accessories have been decreasing over the past few years, largely due to the convenience and competitive pricing of online alternatives. Although the new location showed a slight increase in sales, they no longer justify the 2+ shop counter posts necessary to run the service. A decision was made in Hilary term to restructure the way in which the OUCS Shop services are offered. The changes agreed were as follows:

• The OUCS Shop counter would cease trading on 31 July, 2008.

• A vending machine capable of dispensing delicate items such as hard drives would be installed in the Help Centre in mid-September. Laptops can be ordered via the machine and then delivered to the address specified. The vending machine will provide the top-selling shop counter items without the man-power requirement.

• Improvements would be undertaken in the online Shop so that:

  • all software ordered would be delivered to any address within the UK;

  • the front page would be much simpler to navigate;

  • all prices would be listed with and without VAT;

  • departments could supply purchase order numbers when ordering software or paying for services, and would no longer need to post or fax a form.

The shop counter staff have been redeployed either wholly or partially to the Hardware Repair Service and the IT Support Staff Services.

3.15. Software Licensing

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/sls/

OUCS administers a number of software agreements for commonly requested software packages for personal computers. The University is thus able to make considerable savings against the individual purchase cost. A total of 29,159 software licenses were issued this year.

A Campus agreement enables us to rent the most popular Microsoft products, for example, Windows upgrades and Office Professional. Work-at-home rights are also included in this agreement. 5,683 licenses were added during the year; the rental charge was £295,048.

A Microsoft Select agreement, operated via the Computing Services Shop, allows for the purchase of other Microsoft products. 2,050 licenses were added during the year.

The budget for site-licensed software used throughout the University currently stands at £98,345. Products include SPSS, EndNote, Exceed, and Sophos for which 3,237 licenses (in total) were added this year.

OUCS also administers various software contracts on behalf of groups of departments to assist in gaining more favourable pricing; this year £51,744 worth of software was purchased and subsequently paid for by contributing departments.

3.16. Computer Hardware Breakdown Service

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/breakdown/

The Computer Hardware Breakdown Service offers a very economically priced breakdown service for personal computers and their peripherals such as printers. It is available to University institutions, colleges and associated institutions. It is also available to University members, including students, on a personal basis for their privately owned equipment. In essence, for a modest fixed fee, the service provides for an engineer to visit on-site, anywhere in the mainland UK, by the next business day after a fault being reported; the fault should be fixed within a further 8 working hours, or an equivalent item of equipment will be offered as a loan until the repair is completed.

OUCS monitors call-outs and reports of unsatisfactory service, and the service (offered by an external company) has been extremely good. The number of items registered continues to fall, caused by a general trend in the industry of providing at least three year warranties as standard; in the case of equipment purchased by the ICT Support Team, a four year warranty is purchased. However, there is scope for encouraging a greater student and staff uptake for their personally owned machines as there is evidence that this group is less likely to have alternative breakdown cover and is often critically inconvenienced by hardware failure. The marketing and incentive program that has been running over the last year to encourage student uptake is continuing.

The table below shows the numbers of different types of equipment registered, and their ownership.

3.17. Printing Services

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/printing/

OUCS offered a number of different types of printing service during the year:

• self-service A3 and A4 colour and black and white printing, available via the Help Centre;

• high quality A0 and A1 posters for display purposes;

• high precision phototypesetting / imagesetting service. The service uses a Monotype Panther Pro Imagesetter. It outputs on film and, as well as its traditional use for high quality typesetting, it is suitable for generating precision masks and circuit diagrams for physics and engineering applications;

• high quality offset-litho printing service, including full colour printing.

The Ryobi 512H two colour printing press which was purchased last year has proved to be an excellent device, allowing the service to take on more work from other departments and colleges.

The printing jobs range from leaflets, forms and stationery up to books, in single and full colour. A total of 840,215 impressions were made during the year.

3.18. OUCS Data Centre and Operations

The OUCS includes the Data Centre (formerly known as the Machine Room or Computer Room), housing servers, network equipment, and storage systems that enable the provision of all OUCS’s online services. A small, dedicated team monitors the mechanical and electrical infrastructure; handles manual backup rotation (including at our offsite tape store); and operates the large-format printing services.

During 2007-08 OUCS contributed to a feasibility study for a new, shared University data centre. Towards the end of the year, PRAC approved the allocation of funding to a Central Machine Room project (http://www.ict.ox.ac.uk/odit/projects/CentralMachineRoom/), under the aegis of ODIT and the Estates Directorate. The project includes, in the first instance, a project design phase for the refurbishment of the OUCS Data Centre. The refurbishment project is likely to start in 09/10 and will allow the existing facilities to meet the standards for a modern data centre, including better resilience and energy efficiency. In the meantime, OUCS continues to work with OUED and its contractors to ensure the continued maintenance of power and cooling systems.

The OxPrint poster printing service continued to prove a popular service, especially amongst those members of the research community presenting posters at conferences.

3.19. NSMS

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/nsms/

NSMS activities have continued to expand steadily over the last year. This has required expansion of the team to 11 FTE. Approximately .7 FTE of the team is allocated to OUCS projects, including involvement with the Podcast Producer project. The continued growth in scale and complexity of activities led to the decision to take on a full time administrator who is responsible for day-to-day financial management and budgeting, customer relations, and assistance with team work management.

There has been significant expansion in the requirement for Apple Mac workstation and server support within the University and NSMS has expanded its staff resources and training to meet this demand.

At the end of the last year, a ‘VM for rent’ service was introduced; demand for this prototype service has now reached the capacity of the initial resource, so plans for its expansion and further development are now being considered. Towards the end of this year a prototype Request Tracker service was developed with a view to launching it for general use later in the year. The Request Tracker system is already familiar to many IT support staff, who are using their own implementation. However, there is interest in a fully managed and secure centrally provided service for those without the resources to do it for themselves. Furthermore, we are providing information about the service to non-IT staff as the facilities are relevant to many service providers that need to track interactions with their customer base.

For some years now, NSMS has been making a major commitment to the use of virtualisation and has developed the leading expertise within the University in VMware ESX technology. The availability of this expertise has lead to NSMS involvement in a major virtualisation project with BSP and ICT ST. They have over 200 physical servers for which hardware replacement plans had to be made and they decided to transfer the services to a virtual infrastructure. That in itself was fundamentally a straightforward project, but NSMS also suggested investigating extending the scope of the project to encompass a high availability option by incorporating a dual site design. The result of this was a very exciting and innovative project involving the provision of two server farms and their SAN infrastructure, at two sites, one of which is at OUCS, with dedicated, dual, independently routed fibre links between the sites, running at 10 Gb/s. The network connectivity between the sites permitted synchronous storage replication between the sites. The communications infrastructure required for this design was available at little capital cost to the project because of the fibre optic infrastructure that the University has developed throughout the city; it was a very simple matter to exploit available dark fibre to provide the high performance inter-site connections. Without this existing infrastructure, it would have required a considerable expense to provide the links and this aspect of the design would almost certainly not have been achievable. The installation of the system was carried out by the NSMS team and it was completed on time in July 08. The NSMS team is managing the virtual, storage and network infrastructure of the production system. This leaves BSP and ICT staff free to concentrate on the transfer of their services to this new, highly resilient virtual environment.

A number of colleges and departments have started to virtualise their infrastructure and the NSMS team has been involved in a number of these projects, advising on system design, implementation and trouble shooting. A VMware emergency support service, designed to support these environments, will be launched later in the year.

The table below shows the distribution of NSMS income by University division, college and other groupings. The Central Administration group includes the following departments: Careers Service, Counselling Service, Development Office, Examination Schools, Occupational Health, Oxford Learning Institute, PRAS, Public Affairs Directorate, Safety Office, Sheldonian, Sports, University Club.

3.20. IT Support Staff Services (ITS3)

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/its3/

ITS3 has had another busy and productive year. In the period covered by this report ITS3 ran three new IT Staff induction seminars and one pre-Michaelmas term roundup of news and plans from key OUCS service providers. ITS3 now has a service level description available, linked from its website.

The principal events organised during the year were the IT Suppliers’ Exhibition in December 2007 and the 2008 ICT Forum conference in July. This was the largest event of its type ever with 330 attendees. Social events continue to gain in popularity and it is pleasing to see them being arranged by ITSS outside of OUCS as well as by ITS3. The ITSS Summer Barbecue in August, held at the Institute of Anthropology, was a huge success again and the rain held off for most of the evening.

ITS3 ran the elections for the ICT Forum Steering Committee in July 2008; the Committee is now in place and operating as a steering group for ITS3 as well as for ICTF.

ITS3 continues to provide a large number of seminars, with six ‘lunch & learn’ sessions happening in the last year, providing 110 person-hours of training. Bought-in courses have increased greatly in number, with the following having been run in the last year:

• TCPIP Networking +
• Altiris SVS hands-on
• SQL 2005 administration
• Supporting Vista Desktop (x2)
• Active Directory Design and Implementation
• Linux Administration
• Security +
• Windows 2003 administration
• Tailored Network +
• Ethical Hacking

A VMWARE fast-track course was successfully provided at the end of this report’s period. Running these courses in Oxford saves the collegiate University significant amounts of money in travel and accommodation expenses and adds considerable value to the experience as it enables Oxford IT Staff to train together and build rapport so they can continue to benefit from the training after the end of the course.

Several one-off seminars have been given including the pre-term roundup in September 2007, and several briefings from OUCS/ICTST staff including Sophos and MacOS 10.5 (Leopard). ITSS induction has taken place 3 times and 40 new IT staff have been inducted. Some ITSS events were organised outside of OUCS including a session about Oxford Supercomputing at Begbroke and one about Subversion SVN at the department of Statistics.

ITS3 now handles copyright infringement notices on behalf of the University and acts as a broker for the UKERNA SSL server certificate service. To date around 400 certificates have been issued saving Oxford in the order of £100,000 at average prices. ITS3 is extremely grateful for the help provided by ITSS in dealing promptly with copyright infringements and the reduction in risk to the University this represents.

The Head of ITS3 continues to serve on the UCISA Staff Development Group (SDG) and its subgroup for distributed IT Support Staff. ITS3 acts as the contact point for the OUCS British Computer Society Group and plans to expand this group to the wider University in late 2008.

The ITS3 administrator has been working approximately half-time since October 2007 and this has had some impact on ITS3 services. This situation will be resolved soon after the end of this reporting period thus allowing ITS3 to continue to develop and expand.

3.21. ICT Support Team (ICTST)

http://www.ict.ox.ac.uk/team

During 2007-08 the ICT Support Team (ICTST) did a major update of the documentation for the Sophos (http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/viruses/) and the Active Directory (http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/windows/active/) services. The ICTST also made available new products from Sophos that were included in the recent software licence negotiation conducted by the OUCS software licensing team. The Sophos licence has now been extended until September 2013 and includes the following additional products: NAC Manager (endpoint security tool); Mobile Security for Windows 5/6; and Puremessage (anti-virus and anti-spyware tool for Microsoft Exchange).

The Enhanced Computing Environment (ECE) project continued to deliver improvements for the three central departments of the University. The Virtual Infrastructure project delivered a new enterprise standard server and data storage infrastructure which was built in collaboration with OUCS and NSMS. This is a redundant system split across two geographically distinct sites in order to provide resilience and to facilitate maintenance during normal working hours. The hardware runs VMware software which allows existing physical servers to be consolidated and will allow more efficient use of hardware. The Virtual Infrastructure also includes a Storage Area Network (SAN) which is expected to improve the efficiency and reliability of data storage for our users. The key advantages of the new virtual infrastructure are improved reliability, more efficient use of resources, reduced disruption to users, and ease of provisioning servers for new services.

Further improvements have been made in the systems and procedures used to manage desktop computers. The Altiris Helpdesk has now been rolled out to all three central departments, i.e. OULS, UAS (formerly Central Administration), and OUCS. An Altiris team was formed to develop training and to deliver small projects that will contribute to a managed desktop service for the three central departments.

3.22. Marketing

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/publicity/

The OUCS Marketing section has been hard at work ensuring that OUCS promotes and advertises its existing, new, and upgraded services to all members of the University, whilst recognising the excellent service provided by distributed IT Support Staff.

A number of projects have run throughout the year including a prize draw to promote the relocation of the OUCS shop to within the Help Centre, and rebranding of the OUCS web pages to provide a clearer, more consistent look to the different sections. A number of posters advertising OUCS services and sections have been put up in the Reception area and a project to improve the content and design of the display screens in Reception and the Refreshment Area is under way. This should improve the visibility, clarity, timeliness, and relevance of the information displayed.

OUCS regularly provides reports to University committees and groups, such as the ICT Forum. Work has been done on ‘Introduction to OUCS’ presentations: OUCS can supply a person to give an illustrated talk or others can use our Powerpoint slides in their own presentation. ‘Breakfast at OUCS’ events give new staff an overview of the department, and we have worked with the Public Affairs Directorate on IT-related content for the new Staff Gateway.

Regular adverts in Blueprint in the last year have promoted: the shop prize draw; the new Web Design Consultancy service; The Great War Archive project’s call for contributions; NSMS IT consultancy and server management services; how to access Herald email on mobile devices; the Groupware project and request for participation; Intute’s expert-evaluated web resources; and international conferences run by OUCS.

A new venture was using the online social networking site Facebook to advertise to members of the Oxford network (i.e. people with ox.ac.uk email addresses). Also new was the use of laptops to gather data on students’ IT use and experience electronically at Freshers’ Fair. Both of these were successful and will be developed and extended in the future.

OUCS News continues to be produced once a term and distributed to all colleges and departments. Free pens and pencils are available and help people to keep the address of the OUCS home page to hand.

3.23. Human Resources and Administration

OUCS has gone through many changes this year with the reorganisation of the Shop and Help Centre, funding being withdrawn from some projects and new money being found for others.

In OUCS the total number of staff has remained similar to last year, going from 97 to 95 FTE in the Academic-related grades 6–10, and from 33 to 34.5 FTE in the Support staff grades 1–5.

We carried out 16 recruitment exercises during the period, which resulted in new job opportunities for three existing staff; and we welcomed eight new members. Some posts had to be advertised twice before being successfully filled, and there are others where the chosen candidate has not joined us yet. We said goodbye to nine members of staff, four of whom retired.

The ICT Support Team has increased in number from 27 to 29. One person left and they advertised posts on five occasions. Like OUCS they found it hard to recruit new members of staff through advertising during this year and resorted to using agencies.

3.24. Report on open source involvement at OUCS

OUCS staff make extensive use of open source software to deliver services, and take advantage of the freedom to examine the source code, fix it, and enhance it. The department recognizes that participation in community open source development is valuable for both staff development and enhancement of the University’s reputation, as well as improving the software itself for the benefit of all. However, the copyright in code created during this process by University staff typically belongs to the University, and is not distributed outside the institution without due permission.

Staff who wish to contribute to open source projects seek the permission of the Director before doing so. Requests are normally approved if the software is relevant to departmental work, and the Director is satisfied that the University is free to contribute the software in question. A catalogue of open source involvement approved in 2006-2007 is listed below.