Poly win Microsoft award

Bay of Plenty polytechnic software developers are expecting a shower of Microsoft goodies after winning a national award.

The polytechnic's Ozone software won the Microsoft Award for Technology Application at the 32nd Tertiary ICT Conference, held at Palmerston North's Massey University in September.

From left: Patrick van Rinsvelt, Application Development Team Leader, Bay of Plenty Polytechnic; Rabindra Das, IT Manager, Bay of Plenty Polytechnic; Kevin Adamson, Head of Information & Technology Services Division, University of Waikato; Matt Bostwick, Tertiary Education Sector Manager, Microsoft.

The prize includes $3000 worth of Microsoft products and is awarded for the creation of the student focused, identity-based service.

Ozone enables the automatic provisioning of student technology services such as Moodle, library, gym, printing, card security, and network/internet access. It also caters for third party students from other institutions, online students and Polytechnic staff.

The prize will be put toward future innovation and team inspiration, says Bay of Plenty Polytechnic IT Manager Rabindra Das, who is extremely happy with the result.

He says; 'We had one or two setbacks on the project but we stuck at it, and it's pleasing to see that it's paying dividends in terms of fewer student queries and faster provisioning times.”

They started work on the project in March 2013, with the software going live in December and made available for the new intake in 2014.

Creating the service was a huge undertaking, involving not only the technical building aspect but also forming a project team, project management, business analysis, administration requirements and service provisioning timelines.

'We are ecstatic with the win,” says Rabindra. 'The award is for all those that worked hard in the team to ensure that the vision we had came to fruition.

'No one else is really doing this. When you talk to them they are still doing manual data transfer to copy data from one system to another, whereas ours is all automated.

'Next year we are looking at doing the off-boarding for staff so when someone joins it's all automated instead. To have it all automated just means we become more efficient.”

The department's application and development team support all of the larger applications at the polytechnic.

'Anything big,” adds Rabindra. 'The student management system, library system, finance system - those type of applications.

'We worked with a local company called Origen. It was essentially their engine that we worked with and we developed that product with them.”

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