Hilary 2011 - IT Services - University of Oxford

Nexus
The Next Nexus
The Oxford Nexus Exchange service, with its 46,000
accounts, has a sister service, based on SharePoint.
SharePoint should be available to all members of the
University by Trinity Term of this year and should have
already moved through some major improvements and
upgrades by that time.
Collaborating on documents with Nexus
Oxford Nexus is largely known for its Microsoft Exchange
mailboxes, including calendars, tasks, contacts, and
much shared and devolved functionality. However, for
much of 2010, we have been piloting a service to early
adopters that arose from the need for collaborative work
on documents. That collaborative work could encompass
the drafting of research papers, committee activities and
that for clubs and societies. The new service is about to
be opened up, beyond its early adopters, to the whole of
the University, and may include external collaborators.
The platform for early adopters was based on SharePoint
2007, but we have opted for an early upgrade to
SharePoint 2010. Current users will be migrated to the
2010 service by the end of January. If all goes well, we
anticipate that the SharePoint service will be available
to any member of the University by Trinity Term 2011.
SharePoint poses a real challenge to OUCS as it is not
only a completely novel service, but it is a service that
can be used so differently by different people that the
model for supporting the application may call for far more
of a ‘community-based’ approach.
Successful major migrations
Meanwhile the Nexus Team has been establishing the
Microsoft Exchange service as the central ‘nexus’ of
the University in terms of communication and working
together. Two large migrations, one complete, one
nearing completion, have been carried out recently.
Former Lotus Notes users in University Administration
Services and the ex-Groupwise users in Medical
Sciences now find themselves with Nexus accounts and
with the ability to schedule a meeting with nearly anyone
across the University at the click of a mouse.
Oxford Nexus seems never to stand still.
Updates, additional functionality and resilience
We are also working hard on moving our Microsoft
Exchange infrastructure from Exchange 2007 to
Exchange 2010. You should notice a far more equitable
experience across the major web browsers, especially
Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. Unfortunately for
us, upgrading to Exchange 2010 brings with it a major
move in terms of data storage. You may know that we
have a two-site system whereby – in theory – a complete
outage of OUCS should result in the service running from
the second site at Begbroke (and vice versa of course).
We are using two powerful Storage Area Networks to
manage this. However, with Exchange 2010, we may
need to move the 25 Terabytes or so of data to a different
kind of storage, (wholly or partly, rapidly or gradually)
and/or reconfigure our current storage. This could be
somewhat of a headache as we shall aim – as always –
for little or no interruption to your service.
Positive growth
Email seems to be ever more popular, leading to eyewatering
growth in disk consumption. At the moment we
are seeing our disk usage increase at a rate of 900 GB
per month. We have also seen a 62% increase in size of
the average mailbox since March 2010. Just over a half
percent of Oxford Nexus users pay a premium charge for
a larger mailbox yet, as in all things consumer, it would
seem 70% of the data is owned by 20% of the users.
The Nexus Team, as well as many in OUCS – particularly
the Help Centre – is working tirelessly in order to cope
with the enormous growth in demand. We also hope that
our new service is found to be another invaluable tool in
the electronic work environment at Oxford.
Grand Giveaway of USB Pens
and Laptop Locks
OUCS produce a number of publications,
including OUCS News, the Impact Guide,
Annual reports, etc. and we need photos to
enhance these. Following an office clearout,
we also have lots of 1GB USB pens and
laptop locks to give away.
Simply submit your photo of an IT device
(laptop, router, phone, etc.) in an Oxford
setting and the best each month will win a
prize.
Photos can include people, or not. If the
screen is visible, it should be showing an
OUCS web or Mobile Oxford page. Nothing
rude please. Apart from that, its up to you.
Address for submissions is marketing@
oucs.ox.ac.uk or to the Oxford University
Computing Services Facebook page. The
competition will run until July 2011 to give
you a chance to take some sunshine shots!
By submitting a photo, you give OUCS
permission to use it in OUCS publications.
We’ll give you credit, of course.
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