Within CiCS at the University of Sheffield we currently maintain a service status web page to let all our users know if any of our IT services are unavailable, at risk or back available following an incident. We have manually populated this information covering core hours between 8am and 6pm Monday to Friday.
Over the last few months we have been working on automating the web page to be populated from our helpdesk software, and following successful testing this is set to go live in the next few weeks.
As part of trying to improve the service and provide information on issues with key services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week we started looking at technology to allow easy population of our service status page during out of hours periods without needing a member of staff to have access to the helpdesk software or content management system and hopefully without the need to have access to a computer.
It was felt that a great way to update the information would be something similar to Twitter, accessible via a mobile phone, and so we started to investigate what opportunities were available to us.
We now have created and are testing a system where an incident manager can access a password protected webpage via a mobile phone and populate the fields relating to an incident with our services. This information is then submitted direct to our helpdesk software and the correct fields are populated and in turn the service status web page is also updated.
Following on from this however was our investigations into Twitter itself, we have now created a Twitter account for CiCS that is automatically populated by our helpdesk software in the same way that our service status webpage is. Along with this information we have also started to Twitter out our CiCS news which is also currently a web page detailing all the developments and achievements of the department which will impact on our services.
As yet we haven’t promoted CiCS Twitter as we want to test the process out thoroughly first, however we already have a number of University staff who have found the twitter and are following it.
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2 comments:
Robert, this looks very interesting. Can I ask what Help Desk software is being used and how difficult it was to set up the link between the Help Desk and Twitter? And is it difficult working with the 140 character limit?
Robert, how many people do you think will be following your Twitter feed? Do you think it is fairly widely used, or is it a narrow subset of users? If it is quick and easy to use, I guess it doesn't really matter.
Jeni - on our NewsFlash web page we have to include a summary at the top, which must be less than 200 characters. So far, we've not had any problems with this, and most of the summaries are less than 150. The only difficult is when we have something like a network problem that affects say 3 or 4 places on campus - you can't really list the places in 200 characters.
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