Things will get going next year: ETH Zurich is promoting employee reachability and collaboration with the introduction of the service UCC "Unified Communication and Collaboration". To this end, IT Services will be providing a modern platform, which will support users in their daily work in different ways. The core strength of this service is the mobility of the telephony, chat, desktop sharing and video functions.

Irrespective of place, time or device: the future of communication is called Unified Communication. The UCC service combines the communication channels telephony, chat, desktop sharing and video within the "MiCollab solution" from Mitel. No matter how you communicate: smartphone, browser or other PC client -- communication without limits. For example, in future the telephone won’t be on your desk, but instead started as an application on your mobile device that can be taken with you. With the help of ETH Zurich's IT Shop, users can switch to the UCC service by themselves within a very short timeframe. This will allow all mobile employees or employees who often switch workspaces to benefit from the new possibilities as soon as they are introduced.

The UCC group from the section ITS ICT Networks will continue to develop the UCC service on an ongoing basis with new functions and connections. We'll keep you up to date.

Pius Baumann, Group Manager Unified Communication and Collaboration (ITS NET)

You have questions and want answers. There's no need to search for the right tool, simply start a survey! ITS offers support for Select Survey, which is an easy-to-use web-based survey tool. It has all of the functions required for creating, executing and analysing surveys and evaluations. It includes more than 30 different types of question, the possibility to use your own logo and branding, data exports to Excel or CSV files, powerful logical control functions and the ability to adjust the look and feel easily.

Using the survey tool should be just as clear and simple as the questions in your survey. At ETH Zurich, you can make use of the survey tool Select Survey. It can be accessed for free by all employees and lecturers at ETH Zurich as well as the boards of student associations. You are of course responsible for the content of your survey. The IT Services Service Desk can help in the event of problems or questions. It provides technical support in the implementation and evaluation of surveys. It is therefore responsible for handling all support enquiries. It records the enquiries and forwards them to the right area or escalates them if required. The Select Survey service is reviewed on a regularly basis by ITS and kept up-to-date. In order to be able to use Select Survey, you need to register first of all and then request activation. More information about the procedure, the handbook and the service can be found in the IT Service Catalogue.

Aleksandar Glisovic, ITS Service Desk (ITS SDL)

Networking is of great importance at ETH. Therefore, IT Services provides a SharePoint-based collaboration platform available to all units of ETH Zurich. It is already in use by several departments, institutes and research units to deal with a large variety of use cases. IT Services is planning to upgrade the current infrastructure to the newest version SharePoint 2016 in autumn 2017.

It just needs a little understanding of what is possible in SharePoint, to unlock some great benefits of the platform. The most common scenarios our users are requesting is a team site for sharing documents and assigning tasks within a team. However, there is much more!

Here, within IT Services, we also love using blog site template; for example, our management has made it a part of internal communication to share news (we call it insIDe Xpress News). To add structure to our projects (and we have many of them going on at any time of the year) we use project sites that include project timelines (synchronizing with MS Project for project managers’ convenience) and customized document libraries. Moreover, many of our teams have their own SharePoint sites as information portals, to easily reach out to their customers and share news quickly and hassle-free.

This autumn we are upgrading SharePoint to version 2016, which offers improvements and new capabilities. To find out what’s new, visit the ITS Blog.

Kinga Kazala, Service Owner SharePoint (ITS SDL)