CiCS News 30th November 2010

Welcome to the latest monthly email newsletter from CiCS which aims to keep staff informed of developments within CiCS, whilst reducing the total number of emails sent.

Google Email Service for Staff

CiCS is very pleased to announce that the email service for University staff will be moved to a service based on Google Mail in the new year. The move of student email to Google took place last year and has proven to be extremely popular, reliable and secure and as a result, many staff expressed an interest in having a similar email service for staff. The new email service will offer the following benefits:

you will keep your current email address
you can use the modern, fast web-based interface
you can continue to use your existing mail client (for example Thunderbird, Outlook, Mac Mail etc)
if you prefer you can use Outlook, which integrates very well with Google Mail
you will have over 7 gigabytes of secure email storage

Once email has been moved we will then start work on moving staff calendars to Google Apps, this will also produce several benefits, including closer integration with the email client and better synchronisation with mobile devices (for example smartphones, ipads etc) - more on this in a future newsletter.

More information about the new email service, including the process by which staff are to be moved over, will be released as the project progresses. Details on using the new email service are available on the CiCS website at

New Email Service

Directory of Teaching Space

The directory of teaching space has recently been updated.This user friendly guide provides information about every pool teaching space including equipment, location and capacity.The guide now also contains links embedded within it such as; interactive campus map, room and equipment user guides, information regarding connecting to the wireless network and Room and Parking booking system. The guide is available as a pdf download below and from the CiCS Learning and Teaching web page:

Directory of Pool Teaching Space

Pool Teaching Space User Guides

Every pool teaching space (excluding computer rooms) now contains a user friendly guide. These guides will hopefully provide users with the relevant knowledge of how to use the technology within each teaching space, including the Sympodium (interactive monitors) where appropriate. PDF versions are available in the right-hand downloads box on the following web page:

Teaching Space User Guides

Ramnit Virus Outbreak

CiCS is currently seeing a number of computers infected by the ramnit virus, which effectively destroys Windows XP computers. If you think you have been infected by ramnit bring your computer, along with your original manufacturer's recovery discs to the Computing Centre. We will attempt to back up your data, format your hard drive, then reinstall your system and data. If you do not have your original recovery discs we may still be able to help. Ramnit can also infect Windows Vista and Windows 7 computers but the damage is less severe and the virus can be effectively removed by staff in the Computing Centre.

Current Virus Threats

Telephony and the Darwin group Project

CiCS and the Department of Computer Science are currently working together for this year's Darwin Project, a piece of research undertaken by fourth year students, co-ordinated with Peter Wallis and Mark Hepple. The aim is to develop and evaluate an automated appointment booking program using the Speech Recognition services available to CiCS. We hope that this will mark the beginning of further collaborative development, benefiting both students and the University as a whole.

Advanced Video-Conferencing: Access Grid Roadshow

Thursday 27th January 2011, 10:00 - 12:30
Collaboratory 2, Information Commons

We are pleased to announce that the Access Grid Support Centre will be holding their first Access Grid Roadshow event here at the University of Sheffield. Access Grid is an advanced video conferencing technology that allows people from different universities around the UK to meet in a pre-arranged 'virtual venues'.

Come along to find out how easy it is to:

Set up a virtual meeting with multiple sites
Instantly share documents with other meeting participants
Share presentations within the session
Use the technology for collaborative teaching
....and much, much more

For more information and to book a place, download the following flyer;

Access Grid Roadshow

CiCS Helpdesk - Continual Service Improvement

CiCS strives to offer a consistently high level of service to all customers and to help us do this we have introduced two new methods of collecting information for use in training and service development.

CALL RECORDING – we have recently started recording all calls made to the Helpdesk. We have done this so we can use real examples to train our analysts to offer a consistent and professional service. All callers to the Helpdesk now hear a message informing them that calls may be recorded for training purposes.

WEEKLY CUSTOMER SURVEY – we now send out a weekly email to all customers who have contacted us in the preceding seven days, asking them to give feedback on their experience of using the IT support services. We use this information to help us develop and improve our services as well as identifying training needs that may arise.

CiCS Help and Support