Overview

Background

Worktribe, the company responsible for producing the University’s pre-award/post-award research administration management system, releases 2 major versions of the application per year.

There is a requirement to keep within touching distance of the latest version in order that the University is able to take advantage of functionality which relates to key University business processes, e.g. leveraging performance and functional improvements, legislative changes, and increasing demand from research funders and our own researchers.

It is envisaged that the University will never be any more than one major release behind Worktribe’s schedule.

The scope of this project is to upgrade the University’s installation of Worktribe to v3.1 ensuring that it continues to operate as expected including:

• Testing of processes adopted by the University
• Testing of the interfaces presenting data to Worktribe from Finance, HR, and IDM
• Testing of the outgoing interfaces between Finance and Worktribe
• Testing of the external reporting solution (and the Worktribe BI Extract)
• Testing of additional and/or enhanced functionality to the system
• Modifying the single sign-on mechanism to use Shibboleth instead of Cosign
• Upgrading WIKI pages and/or User Guidance

Once this upgrade has completed the supplier will commence auto patching on a monthly basis.

Scope

The scope of this project includes the following:

• Upgrading all three environments (DEV, TEST and LIVE) to version 3.1 of Worktribe
• Testing of processes adopted by the University
• Testing of the interfaces presenting data to Worktribe from Finance, HR, and IDM
• Testing of the outgoing interfaces between Finance and Worktribe
• Testing of the external reporting solution (and the Worktribe BI Extract)
• Testing of additional and/or enhanced functionality to the system - including the new automated patching functionality
• Modifying the single sign-on mechanism to use Shibboleth instead of Cosign
• Upgrading WIKI pages and/or User Guidance
• Upgrading service test plans to encompass the changes engendered by the introduction of the automated patching functionality

Objectives & Deliverables

Benefits

• Worktribe is updated to the latest version, ensuring that supplier support is maintained
• Security is improved by changing to Shibboleth
• The business community will benefit for the resolution of bug fixes and additional functionality provided in the latest version

Success Criteria

• Bug fixes resolved by upgrading to version 3.1
• The upgrade of the Worktribe application is completed successfully in line with the software road map lifecycle

Project Milestones