Case Studies

“The ESC UK team provide a great professional service, always willing to help with any issue no matter how large or small. In addition to this, the fact that they have the ability to get problems escalated to Microsoft as and when needed, provides us with an excellent support contract.” Neil Englefield, Systems Manager

The University is based across four sites and, in addition to its students, also provides a base for more than 800 academic staff who are supported by 800 visiting lecturers. This means that the IS department has a real challenge on its hands, supporting such a large number of users in a geographically dispersed environment.

The need for reliable information systems is increasing day by day which has driven universities towards providing digital versions of resources for students. Given this change, IS departments are relied on to ensure that resources are available around the clock.

An issue arose at the University of Westminster when a planned re-boot was implemented. The ICON finance database which contained personnel details and credit card information became corrupted. These details were vital for the University as such information was required for transactions, records, storing and referencing. A call was placed to the ESC, the reported problem being that a simple query would not execute against the database.

Due to the nature and severity of the problem the issue was escalated to Microsoft. The ESC was created by and is associated with Microsoft, allowing for quick responses to problems ranging from low to high-impact. An escalation engineer was assigned to the case who worked closely with the team at the ESC to diagnose the problem and look through the SQL MPS reports. Maintaining constant and regular contact is essential when diagnosing a problem and communication throughout the ESC to the customer and back again to the Escalation engineer was regular and thorough.

The corrupt indexes did not affect the tables or database, so the data was secure and fully recoverable and all that was required was that the corrupt indexes be rebuilt. The data involved had to be secure and precise and in knowing this the ESC and the escalation engineer provided the finance department within Westminster a notice of integration assuring them that their data was fully accurate and protected.

This was very important to the Finance department and was a key part of the service from the ESCuk. Delivering this also helped all parties to understand the problem so that if an error with similar symptoms appeared again, it could be easily diagnosed and solved.

The ESC provides insurance against you having issues with your Microsoft environment that you are unable to resolve quickly and access to our dedicated engineers could help you to be back up and running faster than you may otherwise achieve

A problem was reported to the ESC whereby a customer’s end-user kept receiving postmaster warnings at 00:00 each morning telling them their mailbox was over its size limit, even though there was plenty of space left in their mailbox. The ESC requested more detail and initial troubleshooting steps were provided. It was identified that the postmaster error was not coming from the user in questions domain. This enabled the ESCs triage and investigation to be focused on a specific area which in turn led to the identification of the source of the problem. A user account in another domain with the same name as the user in question was over limit and a forwarding rule was sending the postmaster messages to the user. The rule was changed and the problem was resolved.

Lewisham College is a large and very successful further education college in South East London. Its mission is creating successful futures. Lewisham College are a large vocational college. From its two sites, we work with many diverse partners, including: schools, universities, trade unions, businesses and a range of public sector organisations.

ESCuk is a 3rd line escalation support service for Microsoft products deployed in the Education Sector. The ESC only deals with the Education sector and therefore has an understanding of issues that are unique to that environment. This focus enables the ESC to understand the ramifications of specific system failures that are not necessarily understood by the Business Sector – Scenarios would include the importance of all systems being available through clearing and registration; print servers on essay deadline days; security aspects of a network, both internal and external (the responsibility to protect). The ESC is a service where subscribing institutions can escalate issues they are having with Microsoft Products. The ESC supports all products covered by Campus and Select agreements and work with your staff to resolve problems in the shortest possible timeframe. ESC also supports, on a best effort basis, products no longer within the Microsoft support cycle. The ESC provides insurance against you having issues with your Microsoft environment that you are unable to resolve quickly and access to our dedicated engineers could help you to be back up and running faster than you may otherwise achieve.

Digest : City of Wolverhampton College - Exchange hit by Trojan

The City of Wolverhampton College were hit by a Trojan virus which meant that their Exchange was disabled. Email flow to the college was severely disrupted, additionally the IT team at the college was unable to log-on to the server to investigate. There was no mail flow and a number of exchange services were down affecting all users across the whole environment. The ESC approached this a two-fold issue and initially concentrated their efforts on getting the Exchange box back up and running while assisting the customer in dealing with the virus incident. The call was escalated by the ESC, at no extra cost, in order to get the Exchange environment restored as safely and quickly as possible. The ESC was then able to liaise with the customer and the escalation team to successfully recover and restore the environment to a fully working state. The ESC additionally provided best practise security advice in order to prevent future attacks.

The ESC is a 3rd line escalation support service for Microsoft products deployed in the Education Sector. The ESC only deals with the Education sector and therefore has an understanding of issues that are unique to that environment.

This focus enables the ESC to understand the ramifications of specific system failures that are not necessarily understood by the Business sector – Scenarios would include the importance of all systems being available through clearing and registration; print servers on essay deadline days; security aspects of a network, both internal and external (the responsibility to protect). The ESC provides insurance against you having issues with your Microsoft environment that you are unable to resolve quickly and access to our dedicated engineers could help you to be back up and running faster than you may otherwise achieve.

Case Study : Royal Academy of Music - Supported by the ESC

In late 2004, identifying the need to update their systems to improve performance and stability, the institution underwent a major technology overhaul, supported by the Education Support Centre (ESC). The Information Systems infrastructure at the Academy had evolved over the years in an informal way which had resulted in a patchwork of systems, many of which could not be supported by the internal IT teams. This, alongside disaster recovery concerns, prompted the institution to review their IS systems with the aim of centralising and standardising their facilities. Around this time a new IS manager was brought on board to manage the process. In addition to improving the current environment, the new IS manager was tasked with improving the e-learning facilities in the institution to fit in with the new way in which students wanted to learn and staff to teach.

In 2004 the Academy began a massive technology refresh programme, beginning the process of moving their desktops to a common platform, the aim of this was to allow the internal support teams to more efficiently support their user base. They also planned to have a series of common applications, such as Microsoft Office 2003. One of the overarching aims of the process was to allow better access to e-learning facilities for the students. Behind everything that the Academy were doing were the ESC, providing support when it was needed.

The Royal Academy of Music has now been a customer of the ESC for over a year. In that time they have raised a variety of issues with our engineers ranging from informational 'how to' requests to critical support with server issues. The Royal Academy of Music IS team supports just over 900 users.

One example case raised by the Academy was a question regarding allowing access to a specific application. They wanted a group of users to have access to the specific application from CMS Server. The application turned out to be a third party application. After research, the ESC engineer handling the call contacted the third party organisation and established the requirements for user privileges needed to run the application.

In another incident, staff at the Academy were reporting errors with the SMS Management Points. The engineers at the Academy had tried removing and recreating the management points however this did not correct this issue. After brief analysis by the ESC, a known issue with SMS was identified as the cause, for which their was a hotfix available. The ESC obtained the hotfix on behalf of the Academy, which they subsequently installed, correcting the issue.

Institutions like the Academy who are pushing the boundaries of their technology often contact the ESC with challenging cases to help them improve their environment, or do something innovative with their software which most users do not do.

The Academy has now moved completely to a Microsoft environment. They have a common desktop for their users and has seen a large reduction in the number of failures they experience. Behind everything they do are the ESC, always ready to help.

Support from the ESC provides your institution with access to a reactive support team who can assist you in rapidly bringing your environment on-line again in the event of failure. Proactive assistance from the ESC helps prevent failures from occurring in the first place and helps you configure and use your software to get the most from it. Many customers use support from the ESC as a risk management measure, when budgeting their IT provision. What ever your requirement and support need, the ESC is here to help.

Case Study : University of Lincoln - Sharepoint; Building Foundations

"The ESCuk provide us with a very prompt and professional service, thank you for all your hard work"

The University of Lincoln is a new institution whose progress since it was created in 2001 has been rapid but solidly grounded. Its vision is to be a 21st Century expression of the old University ideal, where student focus is paramount. Lincoln believes their students deserve the most modern methods of teaching and learning, and up-to-date facilities.

To facilitate this vision the University of Lincoln have been working with Sharepoint for some time to develop a portal system for their staff and students.

Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server is a powerful portal solution that provides a single point of access to people, teams, knowledge, and applications.

The University has been pushing Sharepoint to its design limits in order to give their users access to applications and documents via an accessible and comprehensive portal.

With the aid of the Education Support Centre (ESC) they have been able to implement some of the more complex and innovative solutions required.

Examples of how the University extended the use of Sharepoint include the ability to change background colour for Dyscalculic and Dyslexic users in the University, Font sizing and the implementation of custom templates.

The ESC has assisted with issues of software incompatibility, for example with Antigen. Lincoln has also used Sharepoint to ensure compliance with Data Protection and in streamlining their audit process.

The University of Lincoln received feedback from Dyscalculic and Dyslexic users requesting the ability to change the background colour within the portal to make it easier to read. Dyscalculic and Dyslexic users often find the contrast of black writing on white background hard to read.

The Issue: The University was trying to improve the Sharepoint site for Dyscalculic and Dyslexic members. The University wanted to have a system in Sharepoint which enabled background colours to be changed with ease.

The Situation: Users were finding the information they required but needed it presented in a style that was easy to read.

The Solution: Lincoln researched the issue but had been unable to find any useful practical information. The ESC was able to provide a piece of code that allowed a background colour to be easily changed. It created a drop down box that allowed a user to select a colour from a palette which would alter the background. The ESC deployed the code in a test environment to ensure that no functionality was lost when used in Sharepoint. The code was issued to Lincoln which enabled them to adapt it and develop their own solution. Users will soon have the option of changing the background colour by selecting a colour from a palette in Sharepoint.

The University of Lincoln received feedback from users requesting the ability to change the size of the font in order to make it easier to read.

The Issue: The University wanted users to be able to change the text size in Sharepoint.

The Situation: Some users needed to have the option to change the font size in order to maximise their use of the information provided through the portal.

The Solution: The ESC identified several methods available. After weighing up the options, Lincoln decided to go with internet explorer's built in accessibility features to increase the text size in Sharepoint, however due to some issues with the style sheets used by Sharepoint the University is still investigating a more complete solution to this issue.

Email is the number one vehicle for the spread of viruses, worms, Trojans, and other malicious code that can corrupt valuable data and networks. Lincoln uses the Sybari Antigen to prevent security breaches.

The Issue: After installing Antigen on the same machine with Sharepoint, Lincoln started to see memory leakage.

The Situation: The memory leakage was slowing performance levels on the server considerably but removing Antigen would have compromised their security.

The Solution: The ESC contacted Antigen and discovered the memory leakage was a known problem. Antigen quickly provided the ESC with the fix which was forwarded to and implemented by the University of Lincoln. Although the ESC helped to obtain a fix to this particular issue the University has stopped using Antigen as it proved unstable in their environment.

The University of Lincoln wanted to institute a customised template within Sharepoint to ensure that all materials generated by the University conformed to corporate identity rules.

The Issue: Lincoln was trying to create a custom template for their organisation.

The Situation: Lincoln wished to increase the usability of the site by instituting a uniform look and structure in order to assist users; a site can be difficult to negotiate when the page layout changes from area to area.

The Solution: The ESC was able to provide the University with further knowledge and a link to a site which gave more in-depth programming knowledge which would enable the required custom templates.

As a public institution, the University of Lincoln has to abide by data protection laws. Sharepoint shows status usage for all users to all users by default. The identification of regular users allowed a dialogue between the implementers and end-users. The dialogue provided a valuable forum for discussion which enabled the University to respond to user requests and suggestions in order to deliver a site tailored to their needs. This, however, breaks data protection laws as these statistics give out user information. The University put a call into the ESC to overcome this problem.

The ESC was able to provide information to stop the statistics from being shown to every user.

The ESC also provided Microsoft documentation and best practices to help the University comply with data protection laws.

The Issue: Usage statistics built into Sharepoint that can be viewed by all users.

The Situation: Until the problem was resolved, users were able to see usage statistics which contravened data protection laws.

The Solution: The ESC provided the University with Microsoft-recommended practices to stop users being able to see usage patterns. The University could control the access to the usage stats via permissions. They were able to prevent universal access to user statistics.

Many of the document areas in Sharepoint need to be catalogued by auditors, which is normally quite a laborious process.

The Issue: The University wanted to have access to all the document libraries in Sharepoint. This would allow them to give auditors access to all the information rather than having to go to each document library and download the information.

The Situation: Potentially there would be a substantial increase in demand for administrators' time during the period of the audit which would divert them from day to day issues.

The Solution: The University set-up mapped drives to each of the document libraries in Sharepoint on to a single PC that would only be used by the auditors. Once this resolution was in place, auditors were able to access up-to-date documents with minimal disruption to staff.

The University of Lincoln, with the assistance of the ESC, continues to develop their use of Sharepoint delivering a comprehensive portal that is accessible, intuitive and can be tailored to the needs to both the institution and the individual.

Case Study : Upper Bann Institute - Domain Controller Updates

Increased network usage due to prevention of high cpu usage for the domain controllers.

Stable network and servers, which allowed users to regain full efficiency and reduced the number of complaints to the helpdesk.

A rapid response to the problem by the ESC, and access for the UBI to resources not available to the general public.

Case Study : Leeds University – Cross Platform Conflicts

UNIX users were able to access the shared data on the server, enabling them to get back to work in a familiar environment.

Case Study : North East Institute – Software Conflicts

When this did not return the systems to optimum performance the ESC continued to analyse the problem until the root cause was identified.

Proof was supplied so that the third party could see where the fault lay and develop a solution for the Institute.

The Institute was very happy with the speed of the resolution and with the degree of support provided by the ESC.

Case Study : Ruskin Mill College - Benefiting from Support

"One of the Problems turned out to be with 3rd party software which the ESC was not familiar with. I was impressed they were able to deduce this"

Website: www.ruskin-mill.org.uk Students: 90+

Ruskin Mill College is a vibrant place of learning with over 90 students providing an innovative and experiential education for young people with special learning needs aged between 16-24 years.

The college is based in 100 acres of beautiful wooded valley, fishery and farmland in the Gloucestershire countryside. Each student takes part in an individual programme designed to enable them to make the most of their own potential.

The college is spread across different sites and staff and students frequently work remotely on a range of outdoor activities. To ensure operational efficiency when in this environment, Ruskin Mill works with the very cutting edge of technology and this experience and skill allows the college to design and implement complex solutions.

Ruskin Mill has a support contract with the Education Support Centre (ESC) and makes full use of this. The ESC provides Ruskin Mill with technical support when things go wrong as well as help, information and best practice advice at other times. Thanks to this expertise and links to Microsoft, the ESC is able to offer Ruskin Mill advice and support at the design stage, proactively helping prevent problems from occurring in the first place.

There are a great many challenges with remote working, especially where staff at the college require access to information stored on their network. Ruskin Mill has implemented a series of innovative solutions to ensure that they are never too far from their data.

As a college that often sends staff and students out into the wilderness, there is a great need for reliable communication. Ruskin Mill achieves this by use of satellite phones, one of a list of mobile devices they use on a day to day basis. To allow them access to their data when away from the college, they use SPV Smart Phones built on Windows Mobile technology alongside IPAQs. They also use Microsoft Exchange, ISA Server and Active Sync to ensure that they not only have access to their data, but that they can also update it any time, anywhere. In the college they have achieved the same level of flexibility through use of wireless laptop computers with wireless networking.

All of these systems require support and Ruskin Mill has been able to implement confidently, knowing that the ESC is ready and able to help should the need arise.

Ruskin Mill has been an ESC customer for 13 months and during that time the ESC has provided a range of technical support from break fix assistance, to consultancy and advice on best practice.

Case Study : Newark & Sherwood College - Service Pack Upgrades

“Good understanding of the requirements of an FE institution, very useful service, very education focused”

Newark and Sherwood College offers a range of courses to learners across Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire. The College has introduced the most recent technology in order to provide students with a variety of course materials and a rich learning experience at different locations. By adopting Microsoft Windows 2003, the College has been able to offer distinctive and personalised learning support programmes to students who require remote access via the Internet, while simultaneously reducing time and cost constraints.

The College uses Windows Server 2003 to manage its resources, student data, group policies and security over the network.

Windows Server 2003 group policies enable administrators to control the whole environment, giving them the ability to dictate what administrators and network users can do. Using group policies, the administrator securely controls the desktop environment. In a desktop environment, only certain specific folders, drivers and resources will be accessible, depending on an individual's user rights.

A problem was created when the College upgraded workstations from Service Pack 1 to Service Pack 2 (SP2).

The networked workstations were unaffected by the upgrade, with a single exception. The workstation affected (workstation A) was the administrator's.

When workstation A was updated with Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) and XP - SP2 the workstation updated the server .adm files. This caused workstation A to be unable to administer Group Policies due to a conflict between versions in the .adm files. This meant that the administrators were not confident that the changes they were implementing were being rolled out across the network.

The ESC was quickly able to ascertain that the server side group policy was stable and had not been corrupted. This restored administrators confidence in their infrastructure.

When the administrator logged on to workstation A to try to modify or view the GPO, errors occurred.

After initial diagnostics the ESC determined that the situation could be resolved by a recently issued hotfix. This would allow the administrators’ workstation to view the updated .adm files without the error occurring.

The ESC provided the hotfix for the client with detailed instructions which had to be considered before installing it.

The ESC was able to quickly confirm that the College had a stable infrastructure.

As early adopters of the technology Newark & Sherwood College identified an issue which was resolved with the ESC’s assistance.

The ESC was able to use the solution developed to assist other Colleges when they developed a similar problem.

Case Studies & Digests