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Working from home, 27 March 2020

Posted: Fri 27 Mar 2020, 4:58pm.

Please check out today’s short update video for staff

Here is the transcript from today’s staff video:

Hello, this is IT Services with some news for staff on Friday, 27th March. The first thing is that the two major projects that we hope to have released very, very soon, which are Zoom and the Staff VPN, are both going very well. The final stages are being worked through in ITS and we hope to have those out early next week. We'll have more news for you on Monday.

The second thing is that we are continuing to develop the ITS homepage so that it has more and more useful information for you to be able to work from home. And we've moved away from simply telling you about the different platforms (Skype for Business, Office, the new email system and Microsoft teams) and we're beginning to start to introduce some guides about how to work effectively. And we know that we're going to be working in these extraordinary circumstances for a while now. This isn't a short term thing. So when you're at home, we really care about helping you to make your home office, your new working environment, as pleasant as possible to work in. So we've started publishing some guides about how to avoid too much distraction while you're at home and how to stay in touch with your team. How do you make your work set up as as comfortable as possible? And we're just beginning to put some tips and tricks up there that we've learnt about how to work effectively now that you're doing it from home. So please go and check out the ITS homepage. There's now a growing amount of information there about working from home. And we'll continue to add links in there as well to other parts of the university who are doing the same work and also offering similar information, so go check that out.

The next piece of news is for anyone who has a device that's been issued by IT services like a laptop, or who has chosen to install a program called CrashPlan. It used to be called CrashPlan Pro. It's now called Code 42 CrashPlan - same application. And what it does is it's always been a traditional backup process for any laptops that we have issued and staff have been able to install it on other devices. If you've been using it, then it's important to start storing your files elsewhere. So obviously we recommend the two cloud platforms that are available to you. That's Box and OneDrive and you should make sure that you've moved your files in there by the summer. At the end of June CrashPlan will cease to operate. It's simply not a necessary service now that we have these two cloud platforms for storing your files. So if you've been using CrashPlan and if you dependent on CrashPlan to keep your device backed up, and please make sure you've moved your files into one of the cloud storage providers. Thank you.

And all that remains for us to say at the end of this extraordinary week is thank you so much for all of your feedback, for all of your support. We've had a flood of e-mails and calls just thanking us and congratulating us on being able to keep everything working. We're all working in bizarre circumstances and I think we're all doing our best just to get through. I hope you have a great weekend and we'll see you next week. Thanks very much.

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