Review of the Enterprise SIG Meeting (04.04.2008)

Finally managed to organise the 17th Enterprise sig meeting. The notes and the presentations are available on the wiki page. A very good opportunity to meet and interact with the Enterprise SIG people .

The COVA project by Balbir Barn from Thames valley University. It mainly focussed on BPMN (Business Process Modelling Notation).From BPMN, the COVA Project switched over to use Intalio toolset. The comparison of both answered to the questions why and the reasons they prefer to use BPMN although it makes life easier it does not allow shared data across pools.

The enterprise sig is familiar with Phosphorix and presentations by Selwyn Lloyd.This session focussed on open source statement with respect to two lively demos on ionetworknode and course exchanges. Phosphorix is currently working on software related to JISC projects. They figured out the best policy for the open source statement when they finished the SHELL project. The main mission and strategy works out to be ˜any organisation can take their software and develop it with reduced cost and increased profit˜.The phosphorix website had changed over the last 12 months. They are working on projects based on ionetworknode and found Wikipedia a comfortable place to get hold of it. The live demo of both the ionetworknode and courseexchanges did inspire and we did have a good discussion for future expansion.

The PADDLE (Piloting A DecentraliseD Learning Environment) Project by Henry Blackman is exploring the uses of personal learning environments/user owned technology, and how this can pull technology delivery from IT departments into the hands of the user. The University of Chester has its own in-house VLE. This project is funded by the NHS and involves non “It students with a health informatics degree. The course modules are prepared well in advance and released. The PADDLE Project allows content to be created, sequenced, time released and then sent as an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed to the student’s home page.The personal home page uses netvibes.The project is currently in its first year and lets wait for the end result.

 

The last session that involved active participation was the Timetabling and resource scheduling in the university of Bolton by Andy dale followed by a discussion led by Sarah Davis. Currently JISC has released a tender to conduct a study on this aspect. Scheduling is the allocation of resources over time to perform a single or a collection of tasks. University of Bolton uses CELCAT software. The university at the moment does the very basic work of creating a timetable and importing to the database. The university hopes to introduce the Notifier, Autocal and the room booker in Sep 2008.

Many thanks to University of Bolton for hosting us, to the speakers and Sharon Perry-the Assessment SIG coordinator for helping me through out and making this event a successful one.

Small opportunities are often the beginning of great Enterprises.Carry on Enterprise as all future success depends on it.