Overview
Executive Summary
The overall objective of the project is to enhance the student experience by providing personalised timetables via Office 365, enabling students to view their University appointments alongside their personal commitments, and providing capability for improved access via mobile devices.
Timetables are provided by the tool, Syllabus Plus, provided by Scientia. The project will deliver capability to pass messages from Syllabus Plus to Office 365 calendars.
Timetables will be read only; the ability to edit timetables will be out of scope of the project.
The project will aim to deliver to users in a phased approach; working with a pilot group initially, before rolling out to all students.
The project will aim to deliver to all students from January 2014.
The total cost of the project is estimated at 205 days, which includes 10 days for Service Management, plus an additional £5,000 for VM servers.
Business Objectives and Project Deliverables
The overall objective of the project is to enhance the student experience by providing personalised timetables (the timetabling tool, Syllabus Plus, is provided by Scientia) via Office 365, enabling students to view their University appointments alongside their personal commitments, and providing capability for improved access via mobile devices.
The sub objectives to deliver the overall objective are collated in the following table:
No | Description | New or Changed (Y/N) |
O1 | Develop a robust infrastructure to support integration of Office 365 with Sylllabus Plus, including appropriate synchronisation of data between the applications. |
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D1 | Define and document the business requirements and associated test plan. |
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D2 | Deliver an integrated system that enables Syllabus Plus to be viewed in Office 365. |
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D3 | Deliver data synchronisation capability to enable data changes in Syllabus Plus to be reflected in Office 365, at an appropriate frequency. | |
O2 | Test the integrated infrastucture to confirm it is robust and fit for purpose. |
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D1 | Agree a Test Tenancy agreement with Office 365. |
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D2 | Develop Test environment which will enable functional and non functional testing (performance testing) to complete, including set up of test accounts. |
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D3 | Complete testing of the integrated system and data synchronisation to confirm testing is completed. | |
O3 | Deploy the supported application to Users | |
D1 | Ensure support infrastructure is in place for launch. | |
D2 | Ensure key stakeholders (IS Helpdesk, Users, etc.) have been appropriately trained. | |
D3 | Ensure key stakeholders receive communication of new facility and how to access. |
Scope
The integrated service will be offered to both Undergraduate and Postgraduate Students. The service will not be offered to Postgraduate Research Students or Staff at this stage.
All Schools except Medicine, Veterinary Sciences, and OLL will receive personalised timetables and VLE events in the 2013/14 academic year. Medicine, Veterinary Sciences and OLL will be able to use the service for VLE events only in 2013/14.
A limited build has been completed as a proof of concept. The build has informed a proposed high level design which split into five phases which cover the proposed integration and synchronisation of data (phase 1), improvements to the logging of database messages to enable improved support (phase 2), and future enhancements to the technical architecture/ incorporation of Staff events (phases 3-5). The project proposal currently covers phases 1, 2 and 4 (enables VLE applications to also use the service to post events). For further information see the high level proof of concept design document: https://www.projects.ed.ac.uk/project/stu231/page.
It has been agreed that the integration with Office 365 will be direct (rather than via a generic iCal feed which could, in future, be used by a range of Calendar services). Therefore, timetables will be published on a read only basis directly into the Student's Office 365 Calendar. The service will not require the student to accept appointments. The ability for the student to edit the data is out of scope of this project.
As personalised timetables will be offered via MyEd in time for the start of the academic year, there is no hard delivery date for this enhancement. However, the aim is to complete this enhancement as early as possible in the academic year 2013/14.
Category
The project is Funded. It is a Priority 2 project.
Funding is still to be approved at the Project Board on 23rd August 2013.