Overview

Background

Part of the merger with Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) included moving staff into relevant posts and services into relevant support areas with the University. The ECA eportal server was one of those services, the eportal server provides the ECA Portal and Learning Management System (LMS) along with other ECA specific web services.

The original integration project STU200 hooked up the ECA Portal and LMS to University corporate systems such as IDM and EUCLID. This project is the next step of integration which is to move the LMS application and Portal onto University infrastructure. Other services running on the eportal server are now the responsibility of the ECA IT team (headed up by Geoff Lee).

Scope, Objectives and Deliverables

The scope of this project is limited to services ECA Portal and Learning Management System (LMS).

The objectives for this project are:

• To provide essential support documentation including Technical Architecture Document (TAD), System Description Document (SDD) and a Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plan. These will all assist in ensuring that Applications Support have all the knowledge to fully support the system.
• Migrate to a IS Applications Supported Infrastructure, with inherent backup and redundancy in place, without jeopardising performance of the service
• To Seggregate Dev, Test and Live Services
• To complete the task identified as part of the STU200 closure review

The deliverables for this project are:

• Creation of a Dev, Test and Live Environment
• link Dev and Test into Dev and Test EASE respectively, satisfying ITI Unix team requirements to segregate Live, Test and Dev systems (see unidesk call I110801-0605)
• Convert the applications to use Oracle database rather than the existing SQL Server database structure
• Upgrade the application to use Cold Fusion 9 (currently running Cold Fusion 8)
• Change student interface to use another method of transfer (i.e. not the CSV upload) - Optional
• Produce the outcomes from the task identified as part of the STU200 closure review:
  • Load / Performance testing of the ECA Portal and LMS
  • Review access rights for Support staff
  • Move Portal to use SSL
  • Confirm / Arrange backup and patching for servers
  • Complete browser compatibility testing

Benefits

No financial benefits have been claimed for this project. The nature of the changes are to ensure that the existing processes can continue within the University and that students can continue to progress with minimal disruption.

Success Criteria

Success of this project will be deemed by replicating the existing service within the UoE infrastructure and there being no noticeable change to the ECA user base. Success will also be deemed by this service being fully handed over to Applications Support and Technology Management.