Dear Colleagues,

I’m pleased to say that we now have a provisional agenda for the important event which will be as follows:

09:30 – 10:00: Arrival and Registration

10:00 – 10:45: Welcome and VDI Demonstration

                                Hertford Regional College are running three Pilot VDI projects using Microsoft’s FX

technology, Citrix KAVIZA (http://www.kaviza.com/), and IBM’s VERDE (from

Virtual Bridges). The Demonstration will be useful to those who are considering

Implementing this technology in the near future as it will enable you to see the

Three solutions side by side and to assess actual performance in an academic

Environment.

                10:10: Possible Sixth Form College Breakout Session (see below)*.

10:45 – 11:15: Coffee

11:15 – 11:45: JANET Update (with details of recent ‘cloud’ initiatives)

11:45 – 12:15: HRC3

                                Hertford Regional College will introduce their new ‘Cloud’ based services which are

                                geared to the needs of Learning Providers. These include Disaster Recovery, Hosting,

                                Co-Location, IP telephony etc.

12:15 – 13:15: Lunch

13:15 – 14:45: Shared Expertise Plenary

                                This session is being held to discuss the ‘Shared Expertise’ proposal which has been

                                brought forward by a number of Colleagues and is aimed at setting up a pilot service

                                to broker expertise between Organisations. The intention is to draw in as wide a range

of Learning Providers as possible including Work-Based and Local Authority Providers

and possibly to extend this to a National Project if successful. Issues that need to be

discussed include Charging Mechanisms, Membership/Subscription, Pricing, Liability, &

last, but not least VAT!!

14:45 – 15:00: Summary and Departure.

*The RSC has been made aware of a potential questionnaire which may be circulated to Sixth Form Colleges in the near future to assess the nature and extent of their utilisation of JANET. This is very much breaking news but, if this appears on further investigation to be both imminent and important then we will facilitate a special meeting of Sixth Form Colleges during the morning sessions to enable discussion of the proposal. I hope to circulate more details of this shortly.

Bookings for this event can be made at:

http://info.rsc-eastern.ac.uk/events/event_details.asp?eid=806

I would urge as many of you as possible to join us for this event since a broad spectrum of support for the Share Expertise Pilot is going to be essential if we are to provide a replacement pool of expertise for the tasks currently undertaken by expensive Contractors.

Kindest Regards,

Thomas

Thomas Rochford, e-Learning Advisor, JISC Regional Support Centre - Eastern

Tel: 07500 669002, 01223 564749 e-mail: [log in to unmask], skype: cambridge.serendipity

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