Overview

Background

Elsevier,  the company  responsible for producing the University’s Current Research Information System - Pure, releases 3 major versions of their software each year.  Planning to the known release schedule for the period 2019/2020 would mean:

There is a requirement to work with the most current version of the software whenever possible so that the University is able to take full advantage of the functionality that relates to key university  business processes e.g.:

• The Research Excellence Framework (REF) 
• Open access requirements and legislative changes (GDPR)
• Demand from those funding research as well as University researchers. 

Pure and the service that it offers needs to be kept up to date, especially in the run up to the Research Excellence Framework  in 2021. 

Pure will only support redundant features for one year following their deprecation. It is therefore vital that the University’s installation of Pure is kept up to date to avoid major step changes.

Pure is a supported service drawn from resource working in IS Applications Production Management and also, the Research Information Systems team.

This project, RIS011 has been initiated to continue the upgrade of Pure from versions 5.16 through to 5.18.

Scope

The scope of this project is to upgrade the University's installation of Pure to ensure that the software is fully supported by the 3rd party and continues to meet academic need:

• Upgrade three versions of the University’s installation of Pure to DEV, TEST and LIVE from v5.16 through to v5.18
• Testing of the Pure processes adopted by the University
• Testing of the Interfaces presenting data to Pure from Finance, HR, IDM and Student Systems
• Testing of the outgoing interfaces to the downstream Web Services and Pure widget
• The provision of a new Elsevier cloud (Pure) portal necessitating portal interface tailoring to University standards, i.e. Look and Feel with appropriate branding.

Out of Scope

• Upgrades to Tomcat and Java (to be reviewed with each release).
• Load testing will not be carried out for point releases.

Objectives

Benefits

• All system upgrades will keep the University on track for the REF2021 submission
• Additional functionality within each release will provide benefits to the business in addition to resolving bug fixes
• Pure support communication of the University’s current research to a global audience, underpins open access compliance and our REF return and contributes to continued research income
• Continued support of the Pure application by Elsevier.

Success Criteria

• Upgrades are undertaken with minimal impact to the production service
• No impact to the current performance of the application following upgrade
• Web services will continue to work as expected once the redundant services are decommissioned. 

Project Milestones

Notes:

• The milestones relating to 'Upgraded' follow business check-out after deployment.
• Deployment dates are earlier and can be seen in the Work Breakdown Structure.