Microsoft UK - Higher Education
First and foremost this article is by way of a thank you to Dominic Watts, business manager with Microsoft UK Higher Education who has done a huge amount over the last few years in taking forward the implementation of Microsoft business solutions into the Universities of the UK.
The use of Microsoft in UK Education has been close to my heart for many years and I believe, critical for the progression of the students who learn at our Universities and colleges. I was Head of IT Technical Services at a UK University a few years ago after coming in from the commercial sector and without Dominic’s prowess, support and tenacity we may never have got things moving, especially in the world of SharePoint. I remember personally walking into an education environment and encountering Office 97 and Windows 95 – it was 2003!
Dominic supported my efforts in selecting the correct partners to work with, assisting us in providing the correct Microsoft solutions and supporting us whilst we developed best practices for SPS 2003. Be in no doubt that without the work and support of Microsoft UK, many Universities would have struggled to establish early adoption of SharePoint in their institutions.
Today, SharePoint is taking a firm hold in our British Universities as it should be, providing effective collaborative and information management solutions for the workers and students of out establishments. Just to show you how far we went back in 2004, we delivered SPS 2003 to 23,000 users, with full integration with Exchange and Office 2003. We were the first people to deliver a Microsoft MOSS 2007 blog in higher education under RDP, we were very early adopters of SharePoint workflow and InfoPath, We assisted in the development of SharePoint archive solutions, used Live Communication Server very early in the cycle to look at presence awareness and real time collaboration and communication.
What we also learned was that there is a professional process for deploying Microsoft solutions in Higher Education and that the budgeting for and selection of the right Microsoft Gold Partner is absolutely critical. It makes me sad that some institutions still struggle on taking a DIY approach as if it is something that can be learned from a book internally. It cannot. We learned how to deliver large enterprise solutions using Microsoft technologies to time and to budget and to the satisfaction of our users.
Some Universities still struggle with the eternal quandary as to whether they are purely an academic institution or should they take a more business-like approach. For sure this is a difficult issue because the two don’t always sit ideally together. The truth is that the business of a University or college needs to be separated from the academia of an institution. However there needs to be a businesslike approach to University central services and as such, Microsoft solutions are ideally placed to provide this service. Let us not forget that however much open source is a completely viable academic subject matter, the business performance within an institution is critical to future success, from paying staff, process student applications, to communicating effectively both internally and externally and providing efficiency gains.
In some institutions, large numbers of manual administrative processes (and staff) appear to present no issues to the institutions themselves, but what we must remember is that the primary importance for every institution is still the education of its students. Facilities and services have never been more important to fee-paying students and UK industry (especially in times of recession) is literally begging on its knees for well educated and capable graduates with well-rounded business skills. To do this, students must have access to business-level software during their years of study and this is where Microsoft is the perfect solution because, after all, once a student enters employment they are going to be required to use Microsoft business solutions.
I would encourage every education institution to build a full and close relationship with Dominic and the UK Higher Education team and start to map institutional strategy to the Microsoft roadmap. Each institution owes professionalism to its students and in doing so they should be considering their partner relationships and taking a partner approach. This is not to decry the excellence in IT knowledge within any UK institution but to acknowledge instead that new technologies at an enterprise level require very careful planning and strategy. Partners bring that level of expertise readily to Higher Education and allow a greater return on investment through smooth delivery to what is a large user base.
One thing is for sure, the students of the British Isles, I feel, owe a great deal to Dominic Watts and his work, and of course that of the UK Education team. Without Microsoft Higher Education working with us in the early years of this decade, the education of students, their access to and knowledge of leading edge professional Microsoft business tools would be all the poorer and may never have happened at all. We owe you a very great debt.
Keep up to date with the Microsoft HE team at their excellent blog:
