Monday 8 September 2008

Mystery of the out of order PCs

We're in the middle of another internal audit at the minute, this time it's looking at Green IT, and is hopefully going to help us focus on those areas where we can make a difference. We've gone a long way with desktop PCs, but there's much more we can do at the server end, especially in power consumption and cooling of the data centres. Printing is another area where we can probably make some changes, especially by looking at where people print to - it's not always the most cost effective printer.

Executive team had a look at progress on a number of projects just about to come to fruition - on-line registration, webmail upgrade and the Office 2007 upgrade. Some going better than others, but all should be completed if not by the start of term, not long after.

We also had another look at our recent student satisfaction survey, as we've now got the full results, including the verbatim comments. They are always the most interesting bit, as often they explain where some of the scores came from. Sometimes they throw up things we can't explain, and we have to go and talk to them some more. This year for example there are a lot of comments about PCs being out of order, when we know they're not - are students carrying round out of order notices to reserve PCs? Unplugging them? I hope they haven't reverted to what they did a few years ago, unplugging the mouse and carrying it round with them until they get back to the PC. Full analysis still being done - further report to follow!

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