Monthly Archives: April 2009

OU Admin Day 2009: Slides and Handouts

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After a slight delay here are downloadable Slides and Handouts from OU Admin Day 2009.

The files are all included in a single ZIP file.

The Sixth Annual “OU Admin Day” took place this year on 8th April 2009

Programme of talks

  • 09:30 – Registration and coffee
  • 10:00 – Introduction to the day
  • 10:05 – ISS Strategy
  • 10:30 – Green Computing and Procurement Guidelines
  • 11:00 – Coffee Break
  • 11:15 – Hosted Infrastructure and Research Storage
  • 12:00 – Lunch
  • 13:00 – ISS Services Roadmap
  • 14:00 – Coffee Break
  • 14:15 – ISS Desktop Roadmap
  • 14:45 – ISS Demonstrations
  • 15:15 – Questions to ISS
  • 16:30 – Close of Day

Thanks to all who attended.

OWA 2007 Document Access

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As discussed at our OU Admin Day event, OWA 2007 has the ability to offer read-only access to campus Windows file-servers from a web browser. This is a handy alternative to Webfolders, FTP and RAS and of course is accessible from anywhere.

This feature is only available with OWA 2007 Premium and subsequently Internet Explorer is the only supported browser. Hopefully Microsoft will remedy this with the next version of Exchange Server.

We need to enable any file-servers in an ‘allow list’ on the Exchange Client Access servers before users can access them. We can add school file-servers within reason. Please speak to your School Computing Officer and get them to contact helpline with a request.

At present the following servers are enabled:

All Tower servers
All Turret servers
crag.ncl.ac.uk
campus.ncl.ac.uk – This is a DFS name space allowing access to towers/turrets/software and high availability servers.

To access:

Log on to OWA 2007 as normal

From the left hand menu buttons, Select ‘Documents’:

Select ‘Open Location’ from the left hand menu:

A Box will appear where you can enter a path to a file server. As an example I have included the correct format for access to your home directory. Replace the ‘X’ with whichever tower and home share that your home directory resides.

Example: \\tower3.ncl.ac.uk\home17\njwd

It is important that the location you want to open is prefixed with the two forward slashes in standard UNC format and the server name is fully qualified with .ncl.ac.uk

If you have the appropriate permissions to open that location, you should be presented with the contents of that file-share in the right hand pane:

Item 1: ‘Open in Windows Explorer’ will only work whilst on campus, but will open a Windows Explorer window to the directory that you currently have selected.
Item 2: Lets you go up the directory structure, if you have permission to do so.
Item 3: Adds the current location to the ‘Favorites Menu’ as depicted in item 5.
Item 4: Is a breadcrumb style link to your current location. Click on any of the parts separated by slashes to go to that level, if you have permission to do so.
Item 5: Lists ‘favorite” places that you have added.

Double clicking on a folder will take you to the contents of that folder.

Double clicking on a file will try to open that file natively on your computer, should you have the application that can open it.

If you right click a file a context sensitive menu will appear:

Selecting ‘Open’ will try and open the file as if you have double clicked it.

If you select ‘Open as Web Page’, OWA will try and interpret the contents of that file and display it in a web-page. This is particularly handy if you are on a computer without Microsoft Office, but need to read an Office Document. The supported file types include (doc, pdf, pps, ppt, rtf and xls).

Selecting ‘Send by E-Mail’ opens a new mail message in OWA and automatically includes the file as an attachment.

‘Copy Shortcut’, copies the UNC path of the file to the computer clipboard.

IT Pro Event 14th May: Unified Communications with Eileen Brown

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For the second VBUG Newcastle IT Pro event, we’re fortunate to have a great speaker. Eileen Brown is the manager of Microsoft’s TechNet UK IT Professional Evangelist Team, and writes a hugely popular blog on Management, Messaging, Mobility and Real Time Collaboration.

Here’s the overview of Eileen’s talk:

“If the PCs on our desks do much more than they did 10 years ago, why don’t our phones ?

On a Mobile phone calls are dialled from your phone book – UC allows your PC contacts to be used to place calls rather than re-keying the number into a desk, and identifies your contacts by name when they call you and routes your calls to the best phone. Unified communications is bringing together Voice, Fax, Video, Email and Instant messaging, into one system. So Voice mail which arrives in your mailbox And e-mail which can be read to you over the phone. With UC you can see if someone is around to take a call or answer a message before you contact them – and choose the best medium. And a conversation can move seamlessly from email, to instant message, to data sharing and video conference. Harnessing UC can mean less travel, less frustration and greater productivity.”

This presentation is particularly timely in the University, since this year we’ll be looking at adding some unified messaging features to our existing Exchange infrastructure. This is a great opportunity to hear about what the future might look like, from a real expert in this area.

The presentation will take place in Room 118 of Claremont Tower on Thursday 14th May, 18:30 (for a 19:00 start). If you plan to attend, please could you sign up at the VBUG site (just so we have numbers for refreshments, etc): http://www.vbug.co.uk/Events/May-2009/VBUG-Newcastle-Unified-Communications-with-Eileen-Brown.aspx

You don’t have to be a VBUG member and the event is free to attend.

If you’re on Twitter, you might like to follow Eileen.