Scanning

Had a very good presentation last week on the way our Estates Department has approached the scanning of all the various document connected with University buildings, including drawings, floor plans, manuals and deeds. Previously over 100m2 of space was needed to store it, but over the last few months it has all been digitised, and is now available through a web browser to anyone who needs it, including engineers, architects, and planners. Very good project, and uses some very nice software to view the information - at the moment it is stand alone, but we need to work with them now to integrate it with our LDAP directory.

We've just begun a scanning project to look at the best solution for the rest of the University which will integrate with our corporate finance, HR and student systems and our document management system.

We also had a couple of meetings of our executive team last week. The first with our section heads where we spent a considerable amount of time discussing the results of an employee satisfaction survey carried out across the whole of the University last year, trying to interpret the results and come up with an action plan to address some areas of concern.

Our other meeting was mainly concerned with discussing our capital budget spending plans, and how we were going to do everything we wanted to this year, but without enough money to do it. Fairly common discussion that one! So, a few projects put on hold until we have detailed costings for the others to see how much we can do. Current priorities for the spend are general replacements (student PCs, servers etc), resilience (including replacing all of the air-conditioning in our data centre), and a replacement for our current managed desktop.

I'm off for a few days now - anyone really interested in what I'm doing can keep up with me on Twitter but don't expect anything riveting!