We had two major pieces of work that took place yesterday to upgrade the services we supply to students at the University.

The first was a major upgrade to Blackboard moving from Service Pack 6 to Service Pack 11, which also allowed us to upgrade Java. This work was completed successfully and ahead of schedule, late afternoon.

The other major upgrade was to the largest readingLive (Student Email) tenancy, which was migrated to Microsoft Office 365 yesterday evening. Following months of preparation, the process started at 6pm and was a major change to the email service for just under 20,000 students. One benefit of the work is that this has included federation of accounts, which will make the service much easier to access for students, particularly when they are logged into a University PC. This work was also completed ahead of schedule at midnight last night.

Thanks to everyone involved in these two pieces of work, which have been challenging at times and thanks to those who stayed late last night helping to provide continuous service improvements to the University.

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One Reply to “Summer upgrades 9 July 2013”

  1. Great to see we are on Office 365! Looking forward to going to Wave 15 soon as well!

    Two questions going forward….
    1) With ADFS, what other applications have we been federated with?
    2) Is there a plan to roll out SharePoint to students so they can take advantage of SkyDrive Pro with 25GB of free on-line storage?

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