What's working like for you?
Thursday, 30 April 2020
The coronavirus lockdown has changed the way we work individually, with our own teams and with other teams at the University. Whether we are working from home or are working on the campus, each of us is adapting in our own way to these changed circumstances. Every Tuesday and Thursday, we will share the experience of some of our colleagues.
Steve Gough is Deputy Director of Digital Technology Services, responsible for Service Delivery and Operations. His department has been providing the services to enable those colleagues who have to work remotely at the moment.
We asked Steve how the lockdown had affected his work:
“A month since the UK moved into lockdown, DTS has been working hard to provide colleagues and students connecting from home with the resources that they need. This has included the rapid roll out of a new virtual private network (VPN) service which could support a much large number of connections than the old one. The daily use of approximately 800 users, is more than three times the capability of the previous VPN.
“Not everyone needs to use the VPN for their day to day work and you can check if you need to on the remote working website but we recommend that all colleagues connect once per week for at least an hour to ensure that the University laptops are getting the necessary updates to keep them secure.
“One of the things you will need VPN to access is your home drives (N:) for personal storage. We’d recommend that, once connected, colleagues move their files to their OneDrive personal storage instead. Each person has 5 TB of storage space, which is enough to store about 500 hours of standard HD film footage.
“Many of us will be spending more time at our computers, collaborating and meeting through the use of Teams. It’s particularly important that we have our work stations correctly set up and Health & Safety have provided a useful guide on how to do this at home.
“Lastly, I’d just like to take this opportunity to thank all my DTS colleagues for their hard work in making all of this happen.”
Our Service Desk staff are set up and working remotely and are able to use our remote tools to access your devices at home to provide you with support. Our phone lines remain busy and we would ask if your request isn't urgent, please log it via the IT Self Service Portal. For quick updates and information from DTS, as well as hints and tips, please consider following DTS on Twitter - @UniRdg_IT.
To enable as many people as possible to share their experience the Internal Communications team has developed a storyboard, so if you’d like to take part, contact the Internal Communications team and a member of the team will guide you through the process. These will form a series of articles on what new ways of working have been like for colleagues as well as offering practical advice, hints and tips on how to manage this.