Overview

Background

This project is a part of the Enhancing Student Support (ESS) Project. The ESS Project aims to ensure that, over the next decade and beyond, students have access to a framework of guidance and support that builds on the best of current practices, meets contemporary needs, and is of a quality and consistency appropriate to a university of high global standing.

The ESS Project was initiated in 12/13, the Initial ESS IT Tools Project was initiated to support the first year of the ESS Project. The timescales were tight, with new functionality needed for all students and relevant staff before the start of Semester 1. This, combined with the emerging requirements of the Personal Tutors, Senior Tutors and Student Support Officers as their roles were established, meant that only basic initial functions were able to be deployed in the timescales needed.

The Initial ESS IT Tools Project identified 3 follow-on projects that should be implemented during the academic year, ideally before the start of the second semester:

• Small Group Functions
• Photos for Students
• Meetings in Calendar

Scope, Objectives and Deliverables

This project is the ESS Meetings in Calendar Project. When a meeting is scheduled using the existing functions it is stored and visible only within the Personal Tutor notes/comments/meetings area; there is no way to see this in an electronic diary without manually setting this up.

The objectives are:

• When a meeting is set up, enable the participants to add the meeting to their electronic diary
• Enable students to add a meeting to Office365 as their electronic diary of choice

The scope of this project is to:

• Where relevant include an electronic copy of the appointment which when opened (or automatically handled by email client/server) will put a slot in the users electronic calendar.
• This will be in the form of ICS/Ical attachments added to emails already sent by the system

The following areas are out of scope for this project:

• Limiting Personal Tutors and Student Support Offices to only be able to schedule meetings when there is no clash with a student's timetable (this is dependent on the Timetabling project delivery of individual students' timetables, and subsequent integration)
• Automatically adding a meeting to the staff or student electronic calendar
• Enabling deletion of a meeting that is scheduled
• Specific OUTLOOK or other calendaring integration
• Encouraging staff to use their electronic calendar

Benefits

The benefit will be that Students, Personal Tutors and Student Support Officers will easily be able to see their meetings in relation to the Personal Tutor System in their electronic diary.

Success Criteria

This project will be successful if:

1. Students can add the scheduled meetings to their calendar (Office365).
2. Staff can add the scheduled meetings to their electronic calendar of choice.