Looking for something that will help me achieve this...

[danIT]

Were looking to develop our own support web where we can publish documents, training material and general terms of reference. We like the look of the site below:

 

http://supportweb.cs.bham.ac.uk/

 

Does anyone know of anything which may produce this kind of thing....

[OutToLunch]

A wiki, CMS or specifically designed IT helpdesk program - take your pick

 

There's plenty out there - if you want specific recommendations, a little info about what you want to run it on (Apache/IIS PHP/ASP shiny new server/toaster) will help... Do you want to make it accessible externally or keep it only available in school etc.

 

Searching here for some of the threads on helpdesk tools will give you some idea of what other people use already.

[Geoff]

MediaWiki? Of course with anonymous editing disabled.

[webman]

You could install a basic Wiki script like DokuWiki or MediaWiki.

[danIT]

ideally it would be asp based IIS6, but could well be PHP based?

[Geoff]

I was going to suggest OpenWiki but it appears to of been hacked again :S

 

http://www.openwiki.com

[pete]

++ to Dokuwiki

We've used it for nearly 2 years here.

 

One caveat - guesstimate how much your users will actually read the docs / how you'll get them to do so before you write a lot of content.

[GrumbleDook]

Windows Sharepoint Services and Moodle are two options.

[GrumbleDook]

Actually ... that sound like another project. A design a Moodle course that uses wiki, forums and other modules / components to create a helpdesk environment.

[MkII]

Great Idea - and nicely volunteered Tony!

[GrumbleDook]

D'oh!

 

Ok folks ... sandpit time

 

Give me a few days to get all the modules on and set up a basic structure to it, but please use the forum to make requests for modules and activities to be added.

[CyberNerd]

Give me a few days to get all the modules on and set up a basic structure to it, but please use the forum to make requests for modules and activities to be added.

 

SIMS integration

 

sry

[GrumbleDook]

Why would you want to integrate it with my school's installation of SIMS?

 

Only kidding ... it is something that I am interested in looking at ... trying to automate the pulltig of member of classes into particular courses.

 

I do know of some institutes that run queries to pull out staff, students and other info and stick it into Moodle ... we don't yet, but that is because we use FirstClass as our VLE, and are likely to move to M$ LG as an addition or replacement.

[CyberNerd]

Only kidding ... it is something that I am interested in looking at ... trying to automate the pulltig of member of classes into particular courses.

 

We already have this integration with CMIS - Which doesn't have the restrictive licensing terms that goes with SIMS. Courses are pulled from CMIS, atudents are automatically registered to their courses in CMIS and authentication is AD

IIRC its done through the Moodle database module - not my doing since we hired commercial support for it.

[Ric_]

I know that the Lancs Web Team/CLEO are working with Capita on SIMS integration too.

[MkII]

Everyone's at it!

[Ric_]

Everyone's at it!

 

Which begs the question "why hasn't it been achieved?"

 

If I was a major player in the MIS market, I would make it as easy as possible for VLEs to hook in to my MIS... it's only going to help sell my MIS in the long run.

 

I'm sure that if CMIS turned around today and said that they had full integration with Moodle, Lancashire and Cumbria would start to have a good think about changing their choice of MIS.

[Norphy]

Probably because Capita have have their own VLE which they want to push :|

[GrumbleDook]

Without sounding as if I am defending Capita too much ....

 

It hasn't been achieved because:

 

a) the rules about how Learning Platforms work are still being argued about ... and no company wants to invest silly amounts of time and/or money only to be told they have done it wrong and will not get the rubber stamping that allows them to sell more software.

 

b) Ensuring that MIS talk to VLEs mean that that the MIS have to jump through hoops to ensure *all* VLEs work. It is easier to say "this is the standard format of the information to be transferred and then we will build something to generate it" than to ask VLEs how to plug into them ... it also puts the emphasis on the VLE producers to do their share of the work.

 

c) Pressure ... There is a certain amount of pressure to ensure that other ways of getting MIS to be more integrated are done. Production of Web parts for Sharepoint based sites is going strong in CMIS and SIMS dev teams ... and this is seperate to the main chunk of integration ...

 

All in all I think that the new stuff coming from Capita and Serco for BETT will be very interesting ... and will mean a fairly large chunk of work for techies to ensure it is setup and used properly.