Winter 2020 News Archive

Latest News

Welcome to this final edition of our newsletter for 2020. What a year it has been!
We now all have a reliance on technology that none of us would have anticipated back in February and we know the important part that UniDesk has played in this. The pace that we have all moved to home working, whilst supporting our University communities and our students, with remote-learning, has been truly impressive. The UniDesk Service Team have been on that journey with you and we have really appreciated all your kind words of support during this period.

In this issue: 

  • the UniDesk Board bring us up to date with the progress achieved on the project to migrate the UniDesk Service to TOPdesk SaaS
  • we celebrate a very important anniversary for our shared service with a special logo and a feature on our celebrations so far

We hope that you, your families and all your colleagues are well and have a relaxing festive season.

Dawn Dodd and Catherine Hetherington
Service Owners of UniDesk

Board Update
Our primary focus throughout 2020 has been to oversee the project to migrate the UniDesk Service to TOPdesk SaaS. The commitment from Board Members, Procurement User Group (PUG), Legal Services and the project team helped us navigate through a particularly complex procurement process. With the final sign off of the new contract in July, we were then able to plan migrations to the new environments.

SaaS Migrations
This has been a major project for the UniDesk Team and its membership. We had a total of 23 TEST and LIVE environments to migrate and update which has been no mean feat! We are pleased to say that we have delivered the majority of the TEST environments. We are also over the half way mark with the LIVE environment migrations. Our remaining members are being scheduled in January with a view to completing this project in February.
As we move into 2021 we will be looking at the future developments which will take our service forward.

Thank You
The Board would like to thank the exceptional efforts made by the UniDesk team, especially Willie Mitchell, the technical teams at UoE, Colin Watt project manager for the procurement and migrations and the commitment from our members for ensuring the success of this highest priority project.

Mark Ritchie, Chair UniDesk Board

Happy 10th Anniversary

For those of you that know your UniDesk Service history you may be aware that 2020 has been a special year for our shared service. On the 18th of November, 2010 UniDesk officially launched as an innovative shared service management solution ‘for Education by Education’ at Abertay, Edinburgh and St. Andrews Universities.  In the 10 years since our service has grown from strength to strength and as a result we celebrate our 10th anniversary with an extended UniDesk family of eleven members both here in the UK and internationally.

The  National  Service  would  not  have  been  possible  without  the  hard  work  and  dedication  from everyone involved with supporting the service here at Edinburgh over the years. We would like to say a big thank you to all our members, the extended UniDesk Team, our colleagues at TOPdesk and everyone who has been associated with the UniDesk Service past and present for their continued support and enthusiasm.

We thought it would be fun to look back at the last 10 years of UniDesk and so if any of you have any fond memories, funny stories or UniDesk photographs that you would be willing to share with our community please get in touch.

To find out more about our 10th Anniversary please click here

UniDesk 10th Anniversary Logo
UniDesk Share Logo

UniDesk Share – Feedback

We surveyed our Share members earlier this year to gather views on how successful this resource was for our community and the results are in. 
We received some great suggestions on how this resource can support the community moving forward including widening to include key service stakeholders and UniDesk champions from member institutions. We still see the primary purpose of UniDesk Share is for our community to support each other and share resources.
We would like to encourage everyone to get involved so please let your local UniDesk Process Manager know if you’d like to share anything with your wider UniDesk family.


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