New IT Services

Find Time Outlook Add-in – Available Now

If you’ve ever had to arrange a large meeting with multiple participants you’ll appreciate it can be difficult to find a time slot for which all attendees are free, even if you can see their calendars. A solution that some staff may find useful is the FindTime add-in for Microsoft Outlook.

FindTime can hold potential meeting slots and email all attendees a poll for them to vote on the time slot(s) they prefer. These are sent back to the meeting organiser allowing them to easily select the time slot that the most attendees can attend. If an online meeting is specified in your FindTime poll, then the Microsoft Teams meeting will be automatically set up once a consensus has been reached. FindTime is available to staff to install should they wish from the “Get Add-ins” facility within Microsoft Outlook. Further information can be found on our Find Time Add-In page.

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Microsoft Bookings – Available Monday 30/05/22

Microsoft Bookings is a powerful scheduling tool that helps teams and groups to advertise services, assign staff and manage appointments. Bookings allows you to create a group calendar and booking page which is ideal for organising student tutorials, staff 1-to-1s and other service-based appointments at fixed times. Staff availability can be customised, and the system integrates with staff calendars to prevent double booking. The pages that potential attendees use to book an appointment are customisable, 24/7 self-service, and provide a professional user experience with reminder notifications for upcoming appointments.

Bookings has been in pilot testing with staff from the Disability & Dyslexia Service team in Student Services since the beginning of the year and the feedback received has been very positive. Microsoft Bookings will be available for staff to use from Monday and requests to setup a Bookings calendar can be placed via the IT Service Desk. For further information, please see our MS Bookings page, and our training materials that can be found within the IT Service training portal.

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Personal Bookings (“Bookings with me”) – Coming Soon

To compliment these services, Microsoft have also announced that they will be releasing personal bookings calendars called ‘Bookings with me’ in the near future. This will allow all staff members to advertise services using their own calendar and booking page. Bookings with me is still in development by Microsoft but once it is supported we will provide further information on its use.

In addition to the above, a new solution for room bookings is about to be launched:

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Resource Booker – Available Monday 30/05/22

The University’s web room booking service is due to be replaced on Monday with a upgraded solution called Resource Booker. This will be available from the same link on the Staff homepage as the current system.

Resource Booker is a highly flexible, responsively designed web application that enables staff within the University to book general teaching rooms across all campuses for non-module related bookings. Resource Booker enables users to

• Book a single or multiple rooms in a single booking.
• Book rooms across all campuses that have teaching rooms.
• View notifications at each stage of the booking process.

Training material on how to use Resource Booker can be found on the FAQ section of the IT webpage. The Resource Booker section of that can be found here.

Lastly Information Governance would like the following sent out please:

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New data breach reporting facility

We are pleased to inform you that we have implemented a quicker, easier method to report data breaches via the IT Service Desk Portal using a dedicated button on the main page.

This simple procedure will ensure that your data breach incident is given our immediate attention. The IT Service will deploy the technical measures at their disposal to help keep data secure.

When you use the portal to report a breach this will be shared with the University’s Information Governance Officer, Gemma Harris, who will contact you if necessary following the incident.

For further training or guidance about data breaches and how to keep data secure, please consider attending the GDPR, Data Protection, FOI and Information Security training session hosted by Saj Hussain and Gemma Harris. 

This is available to book here: Staff Development Workshops.

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