tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-90541461726836646022012-02-16T12:44:42.066ZDeborahFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13609911132232430859noreply@blogger.comBlogger141100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9054146172683664602.post-1742786117360104332010-11-18T21:47:00.000Z2010-11-18T21:47:34.552Z

What will a university web team look like in future? Normally I would never write a blog post stating my views on the future of anything as I've found them to be usually inaccurate, and after some time has passed, often humorously so. However, in this case I'm going to give it a go because in this case I would be love to be proved completely wrong. So what do I think the future holds? Well

DeborahFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13609911132232430859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9054146172683664602.post-85515205107223262292010-11-17T23:41:00.004Z2010-11-17T23:45:04.537Z

What skills do you really need in-house to support your website? When I first got involved in the web industry (more than a decade ago), websites were definitely the domain of a developer or web master practising the dark art of coding. Soon web skills became a spectrum stretching from design to development and at the time my own skills placed me somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. Of

DeborahFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13609911132232430859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9054146172683664602.post-19670833445718922372010-11-15T11:08:00.001Z2010-11-15T11:12:08.717Z

Does a University need its own technical developers? This is probably the most controversial post as it is probably suggesting redundancy for people reading this and I'm an optimist so I don't normally like spreading doom and gloom for the sake of it. However, the accountants in your University, College or other organisation may well be asking the same question. The core business of a

DeborahFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13609911132232430859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9054146172683664602.post-22395174365940445442010-11-15T10:32:00.000Z2010-11-15T10:32:48.273Z

Does a University need its own CMS? So as I see it now there are lots of Universities and Colleges in the UK each with their own content management systems (CMS) running similar content and similar functionality (often using the same CMS). If I look at this with my 'business head' on it seems to show a lot of duplication. Yes I know, Universities and Colleges are competing against one another -

DeborahFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13609911132232430859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9054146172683664602.post-14713937262390688132010-11-15T10:31:00.001Z2011-03-12T14:02:15.521Z

Does a University need to host its own web servers on site? In my last blog post I suggested that this is one change that may be on the way for a University web team and here is why. From my limited experience, server rooms seem expensive to build and maintain. In the time I've worked at the University the number of servers seemed to grow exponentially. There wasn't a service or piece of

DeborahFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13609911132232430859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9054146172683664602.post-51995937789467058582010-11-15T10:16:00.003Z2010-11-18T10:20:02.904Z

I've been reading with interest many discussions on what the future of the University web team will be over the coming years of austerity. In response I wrote this blog post a few months back and have now been prompted by Brian Kelly and Mark Greenfield's blog post (The Axeman Cometh Preview) to look at these again and finally post them. ------------------------- I suppose at the moment I have

DeborahFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13609911132232430859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9054146172683664602.post-46076647042684337172010-10-22T20:40:00.001+01:002010-11-19T19:31:31.233Z

So that's it - the cuts have been announced and we all have an idea how bad it is going to be. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), I've had a head start on finding out what that means for employees made redundant from the higher education sector and so far I can report that its not particularly easy finding alternative work. With the public sector likely to be shedding jobs left, right and

DeborahFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13609911132232430859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9054146172683664602.post-32227874382389405512010-07-27T22:14:00.001+01:002010-07-27T22:18:26.807+01:00

After the doom and gloom start to the IWMW event and the later encouragement that this could be a great time to innovate and to do things differently I returned to work engaged and enthused until Thursday last week. I received an appointment through from HR called "update" - well I thought it must be an update on the restructure and it can't be bad news as its only 30 minutes long. Oh how wrong

DeborahFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13609911132232430859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9054146172683664602.post-79690429331709031302010-07-16T10:45:00.028+01:002010-07-16T19:06:35.716+01:00

It's Thursday evening and its the end of my first day back in the office after #iwmw10 and my second night of insomnia - so I thought I'd put my scarily high levels of alertness at 3:15am to good use and write something for this blog (although it will probably be posted at a more sensible time as I'll check it makes sense first). There will be blogs from other delegates who will make a more

DeborahFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13609911132232430859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9054146172683664602.post-7137512677627430892010-03-19T17:04:00.009Z2010-03-19T17:12:05.427Z

It's been absolutely ages since I've written anything in this blog. To be honest I'm not a great writer or someone who loves to share everything and every opinion I ever have in public. I've nothing against those who do, it's just not me. I'm more active on Twitter than here, but somehow the 'micro' nature of micro blogging suits me better. Perhaps its because its more akin to a comedy one-liner

DeborahFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13609911132232430859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9054146172683664602.post-62218554466185762742009-04-05T22:00:00.018+01:002009-06-29T15:44:27.332+01:00

Forgetting yet another username and password for a site, I started thinking about all the times I enter my personal information into websites across the world. I have more accounts than I can count; some I use for work; some are personal; some are used so infrequently I'm not sure I can remember what my usernames or passwords are; some accounts I've probably forgotten I ever created.So how as a

DeborahFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13609911132232430859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9054146172683664602.post-64627883336396580312009-03-16T12:49:00.013Z2009-06-29T15:47:56.647+01:00

There have been a number of conversations around the organisation where I work, as to the issues around using Web 2.0 sites, specifically in relation to intellectual property rights (IPR), privacy and the Data Protection Act (DPA). We are keen to encourage innovative ways in which these technologies can be used, but have the responsibility to point out how this makes people liable for ensuring

DeborahFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13609911132232430859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9054146172683664602.post-24207584621771859892009-03-16T00:07:00.012Z2009-06-29T15:46:43.866+01:00

Well, it appeared that my ramblings on Joomla and Drupal helped but raised a number of follow up questions. Again these are listed in case they are useful to anyone else.Q: If the existing skillset of the development team is HTML/ASP with SQL databases, would it be a disadvantage to choosing an open source product that uses PHP and MySQL?A: When I started as manager of my team, we were in exactly

DeborahFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13609911132232430859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9054146172683664602.post-91592409043841108982009-03-15T23:11:00.026Z2009-03-16T12:37:52.438Z

Now I'm no expert on Drupal or Joomla, so these are just my thoughts on a number of questions I was asked via a contact at the Public Sector Forums. They were looking for a content management system for a project and were considering open source systems to keep the cost down - it seems a common reason for turning to the open source community. They contacted me as I'd contributed to a post on the

DeborahFhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13609911132232430859noreply@blogger.com0