Tuesday 1 November saw nearly 50 delegates from across the UK further education sector gather at the Microsoft’s headquarters in Thames Valley Park, Reading for Capita’s annual
UNIT-e Technology Day.
This event is an opportunity for Capita to share technology developments undertaken during the year. It also provides UNIT-e users with an outline of research and development, and what they can expect from the coming months.
2011’s event comprised of new product demonstrations, customer experiences and service presentations focused on two main areas: development of the Information Interface Web Edition and SQL Server 2012 (Denali). Information Interface is scheduled to be made available to UNIT-e users in early 2012 and offers a rapid development environment not only for web, but for mobile applications too. SQL Server 2012 will also offer UNIT-e users many new features when it is released in the New Year.
Rob Elliott, Products Manager at Capita,
kicked the day off with some interesting results from the pre-event survey, indicating an increase in take-up of SQL Server as the relational database of choice: 58% of delegates already use the platform and 23% are considering a move. When focusing on plans for colleges to provide mobile access for student and staff, results from the survey were even more stunning: 8% already offer such a service and 65% are planning to do so.
Steve Cain, a Capita Systems Architect provided the
first full presentation of the day discussing the UNIT-e technology roadmap. This session explained how UNIT-e has evolved and its future direction. This outlined the move away from Visual Basic, performance improvements and the need for wider web and mobile access. Steve was joined by FE Product Specialist Brian Mann, who presented the improved user interface designs incorporated into the release of the Single ILR module.
Christophe Landuré, a Capita Product Manager, continued the day with an introduction to
Information Interface Web Edition. This extension of Capita’s, now familiar, application will allow applications developed in a WYSIWYG design environment to be deployed as web applications. This will provide a very efficient method for both Capita developers and customers to provide easy, yet secure, access to management information.
Taking this one step further, David Young and Ben Potter provided a demonstration detailing how using templates provided with
UNIT-e Launchpad and Report Generator feature-rich KPI Desktops can be created. David also
demonstrated the highly graphical KPI tool, Veritas, which makes use of Microsoft’s Silverlight technology.
Microsoft technology evangelist, Andrew Fryer,
provided a briefing on Microsoft Business Intelligence and Denali (SQL Server 2012), including a look at the use of the free
PowerPivot tool. This tool can be used with the latest versions of MS Excel and provides some powerful business intelligence tools. It has the ability to connect to several data sources.
Presented again by Steve Cain, the last session of the day
demonstrated UNIT-e Mobile Launch Pad. This enables staff and students to gain access to management information using a range of mobile devices including Apple, Android, BlackBerry and Windows smartphones and slates.
Alex Richards from Totton College complemented this session,
demonstrating how the mobile design features for Information Interface Web Edition had enabled his institution to rapidly develop and deploy a new mobile information portal for their staff.
Thank you to all those of you who attended this event – we hope to see you very soon one of
our upcoming events...