srochford

I don't know how many computers you have or how much you can spend but there are many systems available which will do what you want. At the big end of the market is Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (often referred to by its older name of SCCM) which does pretty much everything apart from making the tea. Cheaper but very useful is PDQ Deploy. Finally, Manage Engine have a free version of Desktop Central; it can manage up to 25 PCs. I've never used it but it looks good. Google for Windows software deployment to find other systems. Steve

Sounds a bit like this https://myhappyforce.com/en/ which will allow you to "Impulse your organisation through feedback" I wasn't impressed by it but I'm sure it has value (if only to the company selling it!)

Timescale is probably "yesterday" but realistically I'd guess it's a month or so away (we have about 8,000 staff in total. The plan is to bring back on site those who need to be there ASAP and bring back others more slowly. Most of ICT probably won't come back for a long time). Budget's much harder to quantify. Our policy is "buy not build" so we definitely could pay for it but I have no budget control (and may not have a job much longer - I'm one of the people targeted for redundancy https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/imperial-covid-19-researchers-criticise-plans-cut-75-ict-jobs#)

I work in ICT at Imperial College London. Currently we're all working from home but we're looking towards the time when people can come back on site. ICT is based in an open plan office with about 300 desks; no-one has an allocated desk although the floor is zoned and people generally sit in their own zone. I'm trying to find a way of allowing staff to book a desk so that people will only come on site when they're sure that there's a "safe" desk available and I've been looking at ClassroomBookings from @webman So far, it's looking promising; I can use "room" to mean "desk" and I've set up the day to give bookable periods (I've gone for 1 hour slots for the moment but will probably change that later) The one thing which I'm not too keen on is that I end up with a long list of my 300 desks; is there any way I can split this up? In a school I imagine you might split classrooms into buildings (certainly the schools I've worked in had more than 1 building and it would have been good to show rooms split by building rather than one long list) I'd like to be able to show the zone and then the desks or split in some other way. I tried adding a custom field but although that gets shown you don't seem to be able to group on that. Also, I know that it doesn't currently support LDAP login but has anyone added this for themselves? CodeIgniter supports it and I think I could probably add in the necessary code but I'd rather not reinvent the wheel if it's already been done! Thanks to @webman for all his work on this. Steve

Not sure that Alexander Dennis would accept that Wrightbus was the last UK bus manufacturer! Unlike Wrightbus they make rather good buses - if they'd got the London contract I suspect they'd have changed the design to something which works (and perhaps didn't cost about 40% more than a standard bus) Steve

If you're interested in working in a very large network then Imperial has a vacancy which may interest you. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs/description/FOG00110/network-services-analyst Imperial's network is quite big; a quick count shows over 100,000 hosts registered on the network, wired and wireless provision in over 200 buildings fed from nearly 700 network cabinets. At any one time we can see over 20,000 wireless devices in use. In common with most universities we provide public IP addresses to devices which means we have 4 x class B IPv4 networks in use as well as an IPv6 range that is bigger than I can count. We have some pretty demanding users for example, our High Energy Physics department can download a Petabyte of data per day from the Large Hadron Collider. If you have the skills outlined in the job description then please apply. Note that I don't work in the networks team so know very little about the job (a direct contact is given in the advert) but I can tell you generallly about working at Imperial - [email protected] Closing date 20 July 2018

We're recruiting 2 new people to join our service desk team: Service Desk Specialist x2 | Jobs | Imperial College London Service Desk is the first point of call for our users - they can contact it either by phone, email, web form or personal visit. It's quite a busy team so this isn't a job for someone who likes to spend their day just drinking tea :-) If you're interested in working in IT support in a major university then this may be for you and it will be a chance to develop your skills, providing first line support for our 20,000+ users. I'm not involved in this recruitment process but I can answer general questions about the post or about working at Imperial College - feel free to email [email protected] The closing date for this is 25 February 2018

We're recruiting for a new person to join our remote support team. https://www4.ad.ic.ac.uk/OA_HTML/OA.jsp?page=/oracle/apps/irc/candidateSelfService/webui/VisVacDispPG&akRegionApplicationId=821&transactionid=864683384&retainAM=Y&addBreadCrumb=S&p_svid=51912&p_spid=1836499&oapc=7&oas=RuNVkeVo5WXXJ_zOx3WZgw.. Imperial College is growing. We've doubled our intake of undergraduate students on several courses in the past few years and the White City campus (White City Campus | Imperial College London) more than doubles the size of College. All of this means we need to make sure we can support people quickly and efficiently so earlier this year we established a second line remote support team who can quickly respond to service requests and fix incidents. Although many of our systems run on Windows, we have very large numbers of Mac and Linux users so you will need to be familiar with at least 2 operating systems. We use Bomgar as a remote support tool but many requests need changes making to back end systems rather than to a user's device and you will also deal with these. Many jobs say that good communication skills are essential but this is especially true in this post; you will rarely meet users face to face so you must be able to get your message across clearly either on the phone or via email or Skype for Business. If you want a job which involves setting up and managing the infrastructure then this is not the job for you; if you're interested in providing second line IT support in a major university then this may be for you and it will be a chance to develop your skills, providing second line support for our 20,000+ users. I'm happy to answer general questions about the post or about working at Imperial College - feel free to email [email protected] or post here. Closing date is 29 June 2017.

Imperial College London - Service Desk Specialist - £26,650 - £29,410 We're recruiting for a new person to join our service desk team and I'm just going to copy what I put last time we advertised :-) https://www4.ad.ic.ac.uk/OA_HTML/OA.jsp?page=/oracle/apps/irc/candidateSelfService/webui/VisVacDispPG&akRegionApplicationId=821&transactionid=1275765308&retainAM=Y&addBreadCrumb=S&p_svid=50923&p_spid=1822502&oapc=7&oas=st-fqfgddg5owEHBpE9YWQ.. Service Desk is the first point of call for our users - they can contact it either by phone, email, web form or personal visit. It's quite a busy team so this isn't a job for someone who likes to spend their day just drinking tea :-) If you're interested in working in IT support in a major university then this may be for you and it will be a chance to develop your skills, providing first line support for our 20,000+ users. I'm not involved in this recruitment process but I can answer general questions about the post or about working at Imperial College - feel free to email [email protected] Closing date is 23rd February 2017.

We're recruiting a Service Desk Manager: https://www4.ad.ic.ac.uk/OA_HTML/OA.jsp?page=/oracle/apps/irc/candidateSelfService/webui/VisVacDispPG&akRegionApplicationId=821&transactionid=975069671&retainAM=Y&addBreadCrumb=S&p_svid=50700&p_spid=1820429&oapc=7&oas=bzMbfo6M-tata-khviM-aQ.. Service Desk is the front line team which deals with phone calls, emails and in person visits to the desk and the manager ideally will have a solid customer services background as well as a good working knowledge of IT. You're not expected to know everything but you do need to know when something needs escalating and make sure that it gets escalated in a timely manner. I can answer general queries about ICT at Imperial College but I'm not involved in this recruitment (I manage one of the second line teams to which you would escalate some jobs!) If you want specific information or to apply then please contact Tom West Robinson – From the ONE Group, recruitment company at [email protected] or contact via phone on 01733 234 000 or 01223 237 888 The closing date is 26 January 2017.

We're recruiting for a new person to join our service desk team: https://www4.ad.ic.ac.uk/OA_HTML/OA.jsp?page=/oracle/apps/irc/candidateSelfService/webui/VisVacDispPG&OAHP=IRC_EXT_SITE_VISITOR_APPL&OASF=IRC_VIS_VAC_DISPLAY&akRegionApplicationId=821&transactionid=1217997386&retainAM=Y&addBreadCrumb=RP&p_svid=49872&p_spid=1801317&oapc=10&oas=W4UIX4IsiXjg-oDazDem1Q.. Service Desk is the first point of call for our users - they can contact it either by phone, email, web form or personal visit. It's quite a busy team - I've just looked at the stats for the last 3 months (basically the summer holiday) and they've closed about 12,000 jobs in that period. If you're interested in working in IT support in a major university then this may be for you and it will be a chance to develop your skills, providing first line support for our 20,000+ users. I'm not involved in this recruitment process but I can answer general questions about the post or about working at Imperial College - feel free to email [email protected] Closing date is 26 September 2016.

This job involves managing a team of about 5 people who will provide desktop support for a "site" (typically that is all the staff and students in 2-3 buildings) There are a total of 10 site managers (I'm one of them!) and this vacancy has arisen because of an internal promotion. Details are on the website: https://www4.ad.ic.ac.uk/OA_HTML/OA.jsp?page=/oracle/apps/irc/candidateSelfService/webui/VisVacDispPG&akRegionApplicationId=821&transactionid=781921189&retainAM=Y&addBreadCrumb=S&p_svid=49159&p_spid=1785271&oapc=7&oas=UEQY_80lC33UX9Gp_9n1Vw.. If you want to apply then you must fill in the form on the website; closing date is 28 June. This job is not about managing back end networks and servers etc, it's about making sure that our users get the best out of their IT - fixing things if they're broken, setting up new things, making sure the teaching computers are working and so on so a real desire to provide high quality customer service is key. Imperial is a great place to work; if you've been working in an IT team and would like to get management experience (or you've been a manager in a small organisation and want to move to a bigger team) then this is a good post. There is a job description and person spec on the website but if you want any general information about the job or the environment then feel free to ask either here or by email - [email protected] Please don't send me your CV - I can't do anything with it; you have to fill in the form.

We're recruiting again for desktop support staff. https://www4.ad.ic.ac.uk/OA_HTML/OA.jsp?page=/oracle/apps/irc/candidateSelfService/webui/VisVacDispPG&akRegionApplicationId=821&transactionid=508313114&retainAM=Y&addBreadCrumb=S&p_svid=48458&p_spid=1768210&oapc=7&oas=YRK6A3xHzmHMshRyHVDAYA.. We're looking for 3 people; one of the jobs is permanent (subject to passing a 6 month probation period) and the other 2 are on 6 month contracts. There is no guarantee that these will be extended but they'll certainly give you experience of working in a large establishment (we have about 300 people working in ICT, roughly 70 of whom are in desktop support; in total we support over 20,000 users) Imperial College is ranked as one of the best universities in the world so this is your chance to work with world leaders in engineering, science and medicine. We're mostly Windows based but we do have a huge number of Mac and Linux users (including those who do stuff like write their own kernels) so ideally you will have experience of at least 2 operating systems. The person spec in the advert above will tell you what we're looking for but a key requirement is that you must be focussed on customer service; this is not a role where you're locked in a cupboard looking after servers. This is a role where you go out and work with end users. I can answer general questions about ICT at Imperial College and this role in particular (I manage one of the desktop teams) but if you want to apply then you must fill in the form on the website. Note that the closing date is 31 March.

There's an update here - Lincolnshire County Council 'will not pay cyber ransom' - BBC News - it says that they were hit by a zero-day atttack. No idea if that's true but it's certainly plausible.

We're recruiting for someone to work in the e-learning technical team to support the software used - mainly Panopto for lecture recording and Blackboard Learn VLE https://www4.ad.ic.ac.uk/OA_HTML/OA.jsp?page=/oracle/apps/irc/candidateSelfService/webui/VisVacDispPG&akRegionApplicationId=821&transactionid=2133606595&retainAM=Y&addBreadCrumb=S&p_svid=48087&p_spid=1760223&oapc=7&oas=bKIMXKtud_8dInwFWgDPsA.. The e-learning team are crucial to the success of teaching at Imperial - in the past few years we've gone from almost no-one using a VLE (because lecturers just wrote their own websites) to it being used in almost every course and form no lecture recording facilities to it being used in about half of all lectures (and growing). I'm not involved in this recruitment but I can tell you general stuff about ICT at Imperial (team of nearly 300 people, mostly based in South Kensington, supporting over 20,000 users, several hundred lecture theatres etc) Note that we have 2 groups of people involved in e-learning; people called learning technologists who work directly with lecturers to enable them to make better use of the technology we have and then the technical team (where this post belongs) who make sure that the VLE works and the lecture recordings can be watched.

The scale of everything changes - you move from a place with perhaps 2-3 people doing everything to working as a part of a much bigger team (Outlook tells me that the "ICT Staff" DL contains about 280 recipients). You don't have a few servers; you have hundreds of racks of servers (and in the case of a place like Imperial, a good few of them will be off-site for disaster recovery). You don't have to worry about getting access to internal stuff from outside and complex port forwarding setups - everything has a public IP so as long as the firewall allows it then you can connect to it. In schools, you're often thinking about "how can we make sure people don't do X"; in a university it's much more about "I need to do X; please can you help". Obviously, you still need to make sure that people can't break things (we use Deep Freeze of our main teaching computers, for example). You're probably going to have to provide a 24/7 service - that doesn't necessarily mean shift work (although quite a few universities now do provide IT support for all but a few hours overnight) but you can't just say "everyone's gone home by 5 so that's when I can shut down all the servers) You can very, very rarely shut down all the servers - you need to make sure you have failover pairs etc so that when one server is being patched (for example) its partner can take over. You're likely to be working in a much more focussed way - the people who run the backups only do backups; the people who manage the database servers only do that and so on - but desktop support (the area where I work) gets to deal with all the interesting people who do fascinating stuff. Things are generally more controlled - there's likely to be a proper change management process - so you don't just decide "yes, we'll start pushing out Office 2016 today". You need to set up a proper evaluation process - will all the bits of software which link into Office still work (hint: if they're made by Oracle then the answer will probably be no). What else changes? Can you upgrade users? Can you roll back if it goes wrong? How will you know if it's worked? Hope that helps to give some idea of how things differ :-)

Over the years I've interviewed a lot of people. Saying "I don't know" when asked a question gets an extra mark compared to waffling randomly and hoping some of the words might be the right ones. Saying "I don't know, but I know how to find out and keep track of what I've found out" gets lots of bonus points! As others have said, no-one knows everything (nor can they know everything) but everyone should have the skill to find out information. Educational establishments should relish having people who want to learn new things - that's a pretty big part of what they do!

You do know that Gatwick is nowhere near London?? It's outside the M25 which basically means it's in the Badlands :-)

We're using widi in a few places. Windows 8/10 makes it easy; Windows 7 means you need to get the software installed (and you also need the right Intel chipset for any OS) It's really straightforward to use. the real nightmare comes with trying to support everything - Apple don't do WiDi and Apple TV doesn't really work on anything other than a single WAP (it's great at home but no good when you have a more complex setup)

We're mostly Windows 7 here but there's a smattering of everything else (all these machines have logged on in the past month)! Most of the older stuff is connected to equipment but there will be a few machines where people have got specialist software that won't run on a more modern OS. Windows 10 Education 33 Windows 10 Enterprise 19 Windows 10 Enterprise 2015 LTSB 1 Windows 10 Enterprise Insider Preview 1 Windows 10 Enterprise N 2015 LTSB 1 Windows 10 Pro 14 Windows 10 Pro Insider Preview 2 Windows 2000 Professional 2 Windows 7 Enterprise 14654 Windows 7 Professional 128 Windows 7 Professional N 1 Windows 7 Ultimate 8 Windows 8 Enterprise 5 Windows 8 Pro 8 Windows 8.1 Enterprise 110 Windows 8.1 Pro 45 Windows Embedded Standard 5 Windows Vista™ Business 3 Windows Vista™ Enterprise 13 Windows XP Professional 288 Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 1

It's probably not too long but you must make sure that you're addressing all the points in the person spec. I don't know who will be shortlisting for this but the process is always the same - we take the list from the person spec and for each form we look for evidence that you satisfy the spec. It's scored on a scale of 0 to 2; 0 means we can't find any evidence, 1 means there's evidence of some work in the field and 2 means that we think you've shown good evidence of extensive familiarity. The marks get added up and the top people get called for interview. Last time I was involved we got about 120 applications which meant that we didn't spend long reading each form. That might seem unfair but one of the skills we need is good communication. if you can't do that on an application form then you probably can't do it at all.

You almost never need to travel between sites. Currently, 7 of the 10 Faculty Support teams are based at the South Kensington campus and 3 are based at hospitals but the only time in a normal day you'd have to move between your base location and another site is for things like staff meetings (we have a meeting open to all ICT staff once a month; there are over 250 staff and not all attend but all the meetings are live-streamed and available as Panopto recordings for people who can't make the meeting). You might also want to travel to another site for social reasons - the best bars are in South Ken :-) You will occasionally be asked to work at another site to cover leave or sickness absence but each team is typically 5-6 people so generally we cover within teams. If you started working in (say) the Engineering East support team you might spend 6 months to a year there and after that you would probably move to another team which is likely to be your base for another year or so. We try to move people between teams because that way you get a better mix of skills (for example, the central admin departments use Windows almost exclusively so you won't learn much about Linux; some of the engineering groups are heavily into Linux and use Windows much less)

We're recruiting again for desktop support staff following 2 internal promotions. https://www4.ad.ic.ac.uk/OA_HTML/OA.jsp?page=/oracle/apps/irc/candidateSelfService/webui/VisVacDispPG&akRegionApplicationId=821&transactionid=2059201763&retainAM=Y&addBreadCrumb=S&p_svid=47091&p_spid=1736218&oapc=7&oas=rkGHuTRRcXts4swLbrACcQ.. If you'd like to come and work in one of the best universities in the world then this is your chance! The role is a desktop support role, not a backend servers and networks role, but it gives you a chance to deal with an amazing range of people with a wide range of hardware and software. We're mostly Windows based but we do have a huge number of Mac and Linux users (including those who do stuff like write their own kernels!) so ideally you will have experience of at least 2 operating systems. ICT went through a reorganisation at the start of this year and moved customer services to be a key part of what we do; if you have good customer service skills and know how to make computers work then you might want to apply for this post. I can answer general questions about ICT at Imperial College but if you want to apply then you must fill in the form on the website. Note that the closing date is 14 September so don't spend too long thinking about it.

This job involves managing a team of about 5 people who will provide desktop support for a "site" (typically that is all the staff and students in 2-3 buildings) There are a total of 10 site managers (I'm one of them!) and this vacancy has arisen because of an internal promotion. Details are on the website: https://www4.ad.ic.ac.uk/OA_HTML/OA.jsp?OAFunc=IRC_VIS_VAC_DISPLAY&OAMC=R&p_svid=46471&p_spid=1728205&p_lang_code=US If you want to apply then you must fill in the form on the website; closing date is 29 June. This job is not about managing back end networks and servers etc, it's about making sure that our users get the best out of their IT - fixing things if they're broken, setting up new things, making sure the teaching computers are working and so on so a real desire to provide high quality customer service is key. As I've said before, Imperial is a great place to work; if you've been working in an IT team and would like to get management experience (or you've been a manager in a small organisation and want to move to a bigger team) then this is a good post. Things are changing at the moment as we try to improve our customer focus (it's pretty good now but things can always get better). If you want any general information about the job or the environment then feel free to ask either here or by email - [email protected]

Details here: IT jobs in Central London with Imperial College | Latest jobs | Hays UK The Service Desk is the first point of contact for all ICT queries - they answer the phone, deal with emails and web form requests and process twitter enquiries. Currently they tend to deal with"simple" problems - forgotten passwords, how do I configure my email, how can I connect to the VPN etc and pass other jobs to the second line teams. We're looking to improve the first-time fix rate and to this end are recruiting a person (or possibly more than one) to work with the service desk team so that more complex queries can be dealt with quickly. This is absolutely not suitable for you if you like being locked in cupboards, fixing servers and network switches; this is a job where you will constantly be dealing with end-users. They're almost all extremely intelligent but they may not know very much about computers (they might know an awful lot about how you use a computer to control a surgical robot but nothing at all about how you connect to a shared printer!) If you want more details about working at Imperial College then please get in touch - [email protected] - but to apply you need to follow the process on the website (and to the person who always sends me his extremely badly laid out CV every time I post an advert, please don't bother because I can't do anything with it but do please take advice on how to apply for jobs!)