Dear Colleagues,

As part of IT’s programme of operational improvements, I am pleased to inform you that from 11 April a new system for the creation, management and control of staff user accounts will be implemented.  This new initiative means that your experience of user account creation will be significantly improved:

• Accounts will be created quicker than before (under one day).
• Accounts will be automatically created and any changes, such as Line Manager changes, will be applied automatically.
• Password resets (where passwords have been forgotten or locked out) can now be managed by the user.

The user accounts that will be included in this phase are:

• Network Access
• Email
• Blackboard
• TOPDesk
• Trent

Approvals for new accounts will be carried out by the budget holder (either Head of School or Head of Department). When approved, they will then be sent to the Line Manager, who will make the account details available to the new starter on their start day.

This is the first phase of a significant operational improvement which will see similar improvements for student account creation and also for Malaysia staff and students in later stages of development. In addition, as other systems are upgraded, their account management will be included, with the ultimate goal being that all accounts will be created and changed automatically and immediately.

Please click here to access our information hub on UAM for further information, or contact Anton Lawrence, Assistant IT Director (Applications Development & Support).

Once the new service is operational, routine enquiries or issues should be reported via the IT Service Desk as normal. (ext 6262).

Kind Regards,

IT

We have received reports of a new spam email being delivered to staff and student University email accounts. This is not an official email and could damage your computer and put your files at risk.

It looks like this:

This is not sent from our Service Desk nor was it approved by them. Do not click the link in this email.

Always check your emails thoroughly before opening media or links contained within them;

• Do you recognise the sender?
• Are you expecting to receive this email?
• Does it look official?

If in doubt, do not open the email and consult the Service Desk on 0118 378 6262 or extension 6262 and they will be happy to advise you.

IT

UPDATE (09:20 04/03/16) The peak in traffic has now subsided and service should be back to normal.

We are receiving some reports that the RISIS portal is running slowly due to increased traffic.  This is resulting in people not being able to login to the site.

The increase in traffic is possibly related to exam timetables being released to students today.

This is affecting these services:

• RISIS portal
• Access to the Student Helpdesk
• Access to the UPP accommodation system

If you are having problems logging onto the site, please try again later when the traffic will likely be lower.

IT

We are currently experiencing a number of technical issues with the Meteorology web server which is causing disruption to many sites hosted on that server.

We are conscious of the inconvenience this is causing and we are treating it as a priority. A dedicated team is in place to resolve the incident as soon as possible.

IT are working closely with senior management in the department to prioritise affected services to minimise impact.

We apologise for the disruption this is causing.

IT

Dear Colleagues,

As you will be aware there have been regular interruptions to the Agresso service over the last few months. These have been caused by issues within the overall database infrastructure, which is used by Agresso as well as other systems.

Following substantial investment, IT are addressing the issues by upgrades to this infrastructure. This will take between four to six weeks to complete. We will only move Agresso onto this new infrastructure when we are confident it is stable. We are intending this to take place towards the end of May 2016, but the timing is dependent on the success of the infrastructure work.

While this work is taking place we may continue to experience intermittent problems with the Agresso service, but both IT and Finance will endeavour to keep downtime to a minimum.

If you have any questions, please contact IT (it@reading.ac.uk) or the Financial Systems Team (finance-help@reading.ac.uk).

IT and Finance