Hosting
Five of the trial projects chose to host their main collaborative tool within the college or university. However two of these also used externally hosted tools. The reasons for the decisions are shown below:
| External Hosting | Internal Hosting |
|---|---|
No University/partner control - independence/semi-detached Easier than discussions with IT Services/marketing |
Control over security/system behind firewall Central support and training |
In order for Northumbria University to host the collaborative tools of the trial project's choice, IT Services enabled Skype to be used via the wireless network and provided a separate virtual server.
'...one of the requirements was that the ICT tools enable information to be exchanged securely. As the Universities network security policy does not permit peer-to-peer (P2P) software on the wired network; certain communications tools had to be transferred to wireless networks (e.g. Skype contains a P2P component).'
Northumbria University
'Discussions about where G-Blog would be hosted covered buying a dedicated server, asking for space on the University's server, or paying a small fee for external hosting, which fitted well with the 'semi-detached' nature of the business incubation facility. The decision was made to use WordPress, hosted by MediaTemple based in the US, which meant that if there was downtime, the time difference would work in our favour, unless everyone was blogging at night!'
University of Glamorgan - Note: G-Blog is the name that Glamorgan University gave to their collaborative online working space.
'External so outside of University considerations ...additional benefit of... that we didn't have to deal with any internal IT issues over licenses, approval etc, which meant that the whole project was agile and could adapt to any changes rapidly and effectively.'
University of the Arts
