Back in December, we gave you a taster of the IT Services Dubai team’s experience in the United Arab Emirates, in pictures. We are now able to give you a more detailed update on how the Dubai project is progressing.
Phase one
The first phase of the University’s new campus in Dubai sees us opening a small centre in Dubai International Academic City, with a capacity of 310 students; this centre will open in September 2018.
A key requirement of the IT work is flexibility. This is our first overseas campus, so there is still an element of the unknown to contend with! We’re putting an efficient feedback process in place, to ensure that any issues identified are resolved quickly – so we can make sure that IT Services (ITS) are delivering a quality Dubai Campus experience.
ITS are involved in both the IT infrastructure and systems needed to operate successfully overseas. Let’s take a more detailed look at how we’re progressing in these areas.
IT systems – tailored for Dubai users
This year is critical for Dubai campus systems developments. A number of University systems need to be tailored to the meet the expectations of the Dubai staff and student experience.
- Online Registration has already been adapted to support Dubai – the development work is complete, and tested is under way earlier than expected.
- The Dubai IT Services Desk has been an interesting challenge! We’ve now got the processes in place to provide the required level of support over there. We have also scoped out how many local team members will be required to support this first phase. This is a moving target, as we don’t currently know the size of the student population for year one!
- We will soon be commencing development work in ServiceNow to set up workflows, Service Level Agreements (SLAs), Knowledge Base (KB) and Service Catalogues for Dubai.
IT infrastructure – coming into service June 2018
The Dubai IT infrastructure includes data centre, networks, telephony, servers, storage and end user devices.
- The fabric of the building is now complete, and wiring has been installed.
- Active network equipment is now on site, ready to be configured to IT Services standards.
- We’ve agreed contracts with local suppliers for internet connectivity and PC equipment.
- We have a test network in Birmingham, to replicate the set-up in Dubai – enabling IT Services to work out exactly what equipment is required prior to shipping to Dubai. This is also enabling us to complete a large portion of testing in the UK, saving time later in the project.
The IT infrastructure is on target to come into service in June 2018.
Phase Two
The second phase of the Dubai project will see a full campus, with a capacity of 4,500 students, opening in 2020/21. IT Services is currently working with Estates to ensure requirements are captured and designed appropriately.
Questions?
If you’d like to find out more, please contact our lead on the Dubai project, Anthony Ford, College IT Manager for Social Sciences.