Introduction

I’m Alain Forrester, an Information Systems student at Napier University. As part of my course, I’m doing a years’ Work Based Learning at the University of Edinburgh. I’m working in Service Management, part of the Applications Division. This division of the university is responsible for running several of the University's core systems.

As part of the assesment for this Work Based Learning Module I’m required to keep a log of my day to day tasks, interesting events and how they relate to the learning objectives I have set for myself. I will be using this blog to record this information. I will keep daily records which I will use to update this on a weekly basis, where possible.

To view posts in my log you can use the calendar to the right to navigate to a date and click on the date to view the post for that day. You can also click on a learing objective to view posts which relate to that objective, for more information on the learning objectives have a look at my Learning Objectives - Explained page.

Any constructive comments may be helpful to me when writing my reprort towards the end of my year at UoE. So, please feel free to comment on any of my posts.

My Work based learning agreement is now available, see documents links to the right or Click Here

Progress Update

"Results: I got 67% (Merit) for the module!"

Contact Me

Drop me an email at alain@alainforrester.com if you have any questions. I'll get back to you ASAP.

Log

Today was my last day officially on placement and was spent doing much the same as the previous day. Most time I spent working on calls and carrying out the odd occasional task to help prepare for Andy starting tomorrow. The afternoon on the call rota was very quiet and I was able to use the half day per week which I was permitted to use for working on my report.

Today was the first day back from a week of annual leave and was also my second last day of my placement. During my leave, Liza had put a few appointments in my diary for setting up access to our systems for Andy, who would be starting on Wednesday. I arranged that required levels of access for his account before having to dash off to a doctors appointment. I then came back to work on the calls which had been assigned or returned to me during my leave.

This morning Jay and I looked at the call for which he had asked me to set up a meeting. The call was regarding a change that had been made to the location of the students home folder. The folder had been moved and the customer had updated the reference to home path inthe Identity Management System. The change had gone through and the data had been updated but the necessary downstream systems were not picking up the change. Jay explained that the way to force the change through was to reset the status of that particular service. He then walked me through the steps for doing this.

in the afternoon I had my regular update meeting with Stephen in which we discussed the work I had been doing during the week.

Today was another quiet day of working on calls. I Picked up a call regarding some changes which had been made in the IDMS not going through as they should. I asked Jay if he could have a look and tell me what the issue was and how it could be resolved. He apologised and said he was too busy to take me though it today but asked me to scedule a meeting for tomorrow when he would be able to explain the cause of the problem and show me how to resolve it.

Today was a very interesting day. The new placement student, Andy, who would be taking over from me arrived for his placement visit. I was asked to give him a tour of our offices and introduce him to my colleagues. I then set about working on some calls while Stephen took Andy to see the other Applications Division teams at Old College. When he returned we all headed out to lunch. Ashit was on the rota in the afternoon and asked me to have a look a a few issues he was stuck with.

Today was quiet again with very little calls coming in. I worked through these, then moved on to work through some of the others in my queue.

Today was another very quiet day with only a few calls coming into the queues. I worked through these and had a short meetingwith Jay to have a look at some more challenging calls which were in my queue.

Today was the day of my meeting with a representative from the International Office with regards to displaying VISA application information to international students on MyEd. As Stephen had a good knowledge of what we would be able to do for the customer, he explained the options to the customer while I offered my opinion and some supporting information when required. The meeting went well and we each had some work to do before Stephen would be meeting them again in a few weeks time.

Today was another quiet day on the call queues. In the morning Anne-Marie asked me to send a communication email to all the front line support teams to inform then of the temporary fix I had put in place for the recent issue with student/applicant layouts in MyEd. This meant that any further occurences of the same issue would not be passed to our team as the support teams would hold the calls.

Today I began to recieve some calls about a new issue with MyEd. Students were losing access to their eLeanring resources such as WebCT, Course details and Student mail channels. After some investigation, I realised that these students had all applied for a new course for the next academic year. When MyEd was upgraded to allow applicants to access thir appliaction information in the portal, the project team overlooked the possibility that a current student could also be an applicant. Therefore when they were flagged as an applicant in the Identity Management system, MyEd would interpret them as being an applicant and reset their tab layout to that of an applicant. I raised this with Anne-Marie, who instructed me to put a temporary fix in place while she raised the issue with the project team.