Overview

Background

The use of a central notifications service will transform task-related communication at the University.  It will ensure that the full benefits of the changes introduced by Service Excellence, are made easily available to students and staff through an efficient and personalised notifications interface.    It will improve the end-user experience, increase efficiency and effectiveness of internal communication,  and standardise and simplify key communication processes. 

The study completed by Headscape, "Transforming students digital lives at the University of Edinburgh", highlighted the "lack of notifications for current students" as one example of the "you'll bright, you'll cope" approach to digital service, and questioned if this was an appropriate quality of digital service for one of the world's top universities. We aim to realise Headscape’s “picture of the future” for notifications:

• Notifications are delivered how and when students want them
• Notifications need not be by email.
• Notifications would arrive at the student’s device.
• Users choose how they want to be notified and when they want to be notified – aggregation service

Two previous IS Applications projects (WEB007 and WEB010) have already been addressing this challenge, by building a production-ready Notifications Backbone, which:

• Securely imports, stores and distribute personalised notifications 
• Supports initial integrations with the following publishers of notifications
  • EUCLID
  • Learn
  • Administration Support
  • Emergency Notifications
• Providing a user interfaces for schools or other groups to create notifications, targeted at groups

The overall project will now roll-out a Notifications Service incrementally over a period of three years, including:

• Integrating it with more sources of notifications for students and staff
• Enabling users choose their preferred mediums for certain notification types
• Delivering native device notifications * Enable tracking and auditing use of notification-based communications
• Providing a solution for any user-authenticated web platform in the University to display the notification feed
• Actively engaging with the open source community, preferably through an existing organisation, such as Apereo, to build a community of adopters, supporters and developers. 

Scope

The scope of this Phase 1 project will cover :

Staged roll out of notifications service for all student users including: 

• Consult-on and draft, policy and guidelines, including
  • Choice of communication channel
  • Use of notifications versus email
  • Integration with Digital Experience Standard (being managed via DTI010)
• Define SLA, and agree OLA, support plan and budget with Production
• Business-process and technical documentation for integration partners

Integration with further publishers of notifications for students including:

• Library Management Platform
• eFinance
• Card systems
• Accommodation systems
• Unidesk self-service

Integration of priority subscribing channels

• Email - Office 365, Timetable on My Phone
• SMS

Research and Review Learn APIs integration (Cloud)

Consult students about their priorities for integrations for delivery in Year 2

• External subscribing applications, such as WhatsApp or Facebook 
• Internal or external publishing sources

Out of scope

WP6 Notifications from USG systems (Include specific applications ): It is expected that integrations with USG systems will be owned and implemented by the SSP, using the existing email integration facility, but a USG activity thread is included for completeness, and the project to be ready to support any additional integration features required by the SSP being delivered via SAS002 Student Centred Portal Pilot.

Year 2

• Integration additional priority subscribing and publishing applications for students
• Integration with priority publishers of notifications for staff, including
  • EUCLID admin operations
  • Unidesk
  • HR systems
  • Finance systems
• Roll out notifications for staff users  
• Consult staff about further priorities for integrations for delivery in Year 3
  • External subscribing applications
  • Internal or external publishing sources

Year 3 

• Integration additional priority subscribing and publishing applications for staff
• Solutions for tracking and auditing use of notification-based communications o Integrating existing analytics and data-warehouse solutions where relevant
• Enable users to choose their preferred receiving medium(s) for a defined subset of notification topics or publishers
• Increased support for “Push” notifications

Objectives, Deliverables,

Benefits

Success Criteria

• Engaged stakeholder groups (IS and Corporate Services) that will contribute to requirements gathering and committed to assisting with the delivery of the new Service
• Engaged stakeholder groups (Students, Colleges and Schools) that will contribute to the Pilot Rollout of the Service and provide feedback to be incorporated into the Full Rollout of the Service, committed to assisting with the delivery of the new service and will seek to engage with continuous improvement post-implementation.
• Engaged stakeholder groups (Service Excellence, Digital transformation, Core Systems programmes) that will contribute to requirements gathering and committed to assisting with the delivery of the new Service and continuous improvements post implementation
• For Admin Support, users are able to access the Notifications UI to create, submit and support types of notifications within the Service
• For the Pilot rollout, users are able to access the Notifications UI to create, submit types of notifications
  • Learn
  • EUCLID
  • Emergency
• For the Full rollout, users are able to access the Notifications UI to create, submit types of notifications
  • Learn
  • EUCLID
  • Emergency
  • Other notifications as per agreed Work packages
• For Pilot Rollout, Students are able to receive notifications from relevant sources via MyED, E-mail, SMS
• For Full Rollout, Students are able to receive notifications from relevant sources via MyED, E-mail, SMS
• All publisher users of the Notifications User Interface are adequately trained in the functions of the system to perform their roles at rollout of the Service and introduction of new notifications.
• Clear guides for the use of the new system available on go-live.
• Training available for new users of the system, provided across all user groups.
• Agreed support via SLA and OLA with IS Applications

Project Milestones