ICT Weekly Update

19th February 2007

User Account Management
The backlog in creating or modifying ntschools user accounts have now been cleared and all requests for new moves, adds and changes should be completed within 24 hours. The service desk has processed over 5000 requests since the end of January and hopefully we will not face this issue again as ePass is nearing completion and we are looking at a rollout during the first weekend of March. We will provide notes for ICT Coordinators and end users in the week leading up to the rollout.

A number of schools have asked for the accounts of teachers and students who have left the school to be deleted. In the new global identity management regime user accounts will be deactivated rather than deleted and we will establish a policy of removing personal files from P: drives after a set period (perhaps 3 months). This will allow time for users who are moving to another school to reactivate their account and retrieve their personal files.

Changes are being implemented to provide staff in the ICTC group with read and delete access to student P: drives so you can manage the space on your server more
effectively. This feature should be available by the end of the week

Internet Filtering and Blocking
As noted in our newsletter the school based black and white list features that existed in the LATIS environment are not currently available in the ntschools network. We still have the system wide filtering and blocking services and schools can request black or white list entries however these will apply across all schools. Editure are finalising a school based black-list (Block) service and we hope to have this operating this week.

Internet usage logs are also being maintained for all users and schools can request details of the individual Internet usage from the school service desk.

Launch of the new NT Schools Portal
You may have noticed from the press coverage that the new schools portal was launched in 10 pilot schools last week. The portal has been built using the Microsoft Sharepoint software and provides all the services of the old LATIS portal and a host of new collaboration features that integrate with the windows network environment. We intend to let the pilots run for about 6 weeks to identify any faults and new features required before extending to all schools.

Later releases of the portal will include a moderated portfolio for student work and parental access to their children's enrolment, attendance and achievement
records.

DEET Corporate email Addresses
The email addresses for DEET corporate staff have been loaded into the NT Schools email address book so you can now search and use addresses for corporate staff and you do not need to manually enter the @nt.gov.au suffix. These addresses can be identified with the qualifier (DEET) in the name of the user.

Access to myHR
We have experienced problems with the approval process for leave requests generated in myHR. When a staff member submits a leave request the system generates an email to the Principal with a link to the leave request.

Unfortunately this email link did not translate to the correct web link so electronic approvals have not been possible. This problem has now been fixed and principals should be able to approve leave request. If they are still having problems with approvals it will probable be due to the old settings being saved in the Internet cache. If your users have this problem please try clearing the Internet cache in the browser before calling the DCIS myHR support team.

SAMS System Performance
We have received a number of reports of slow performance in the SAMS system. These problems are occurring because the data base needs to be segmented periodically as the data volumes grow. This is an automatic process however it appears that performance is impacted just before the SAMS files reach the size that triggers a new segment. Once the new segment is created performance returns to normal. We are currently looking at ways to change the data management process to avoid these "slow downs".

Teacher Laptop Allocations
We have now received the final staffing allocations for schools based on the week 2 enrolment data and will be contacting schools to advise on the number of eligible teaching positions to which laptops are allocated. As in previous years there is movement of staff in line with enrolment trends and some schools will have a reduced allocation while others will need increased numbers. We will be looking to manage the exchange of laptops between schools over the next 2 weeks.

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