ANU Collaboration Toolset (Staff Productivity ... · solution for collaboration within and outside of the University. 4. Alliance Alliance has been the University’s primary collaboration

ANU Collaboration Toolset (Staff Productivity)

Requirements Analysis Version: 2.0

R E Q U I R E M E N T S A N A L Y S I S – A N U C o l l a b o r a t i o n T o o l s e t ( S t a f f P r o d u c t i v i t y )

I n f o r m a t i o n T e c h n o l o g y S e r v i c e s 2

Document Control

Version Name Title Date Summary of Changes

0.1 Kyaw Kyaw Maung

Business Analyst 10/03/16 Initial draft

0.2 Kyaw Kyaw Maung,

Business Analyst 16/03/16 2nd draft review and changes

0.3 Kyaw Kyaw Maung

Business Analyst 11/04/16 3rd draft review and changes

0.4 Kyaw Kyaw Maung

Business Analyst 19/04/16 4th draft review – change of requirements categorisation

0.5 Nalini Nair Business Analyst Manager

25/04/16 5th draft review - Restructured, reformatted, edited, added and deleted content

0.6 Kyaw Kyaw Maung

Business Analyst,

02/05/2016 6th draft review and changes based on discussions and feedback from Helen Duke and April Weiss

0.7 Kyaw Kyaw Maung

Business Analyst 09/5/2016 7th draft review and changes based on discussions and feedback from Helen Duke and April Weiss

1.0 Kyaw Kyaw Maung

Business Analyst 11/5/2016 Released for Karen Hill to review, approve and comments

1.1 Carol McAlwee Business Analyst 30/5/2016 Changes made based on further consultation with a wider stakeholder group

1.2 Helen Duke Manager, PMO 1/5/2016 Minor Changes

2.0 Carol McAlwee Business Analyst 1/5/2016 Released for review and approval by Karen Hill



Table of Contents

Executive Summary ...................................................................................................... 4

1. Introduction ............................................................................................................. 5

2. Business Objective ................................................................................................. 5

3. Background ............................................................................................................. 5

4. Alliance .................................................................................................................... 6

5. Business Problem ................................................................................................... 8

6. Requirements .......................................................................................................... 9

7. Findings ................................................................................................................. 15

8. Options ................................................................................................................... 16

9. Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 16

Appendix A: List of Stakeholders Consulted ........................................................... 18

Appendix B: Collaboration Tools Commonly Used On Campus ............................ 20

Appendix C: Go8 Universities’ Preferred Collaboration Tools (CAUDIT 2014 Report) ......................................................................................................................... 24

Appendix D: Meeting Current Collaboration Needs with Existing Collaboration Tools ............................................................................................................................. 25



Executive Summary

To enable the University to meet its strategic goals, creating an environment that fosters working collectively, and sharing insights, expertise and solutions is widely seen as an important role for information technology services. The current collaboration environment and processes are disparate, lack clarity in the direction of how collaboration should be facilitated, tools available or commonly used are inefficient and, from consultations with stakeholders, no longer meet the University’s requirements.

To support the ANU in collaboration, information sharing and working with internal and external stakeholders, the University depends on the toolset supporting multiple collaborative scenarios or services. An analysis was undertaken after consultations with a range of stakeholders across the University (for a list of stakeholders consulted please see Appendix A) and through this analysis, major issues with the University’s current enterprise collaboration platform, Alliance, has been highlighted. Currently Alliance does not support core collaboration functionalities, such as:

Document collaboration by multiple users simultaneously Tracking changes or version control Storage capacity allocated for collaboration sites Modern collaboration technologies e.g. desktop video, voice and web conferencing

There is a general dissatisfaction in using Alliance. This has led to many business areas implementing localised toolsets or selected components of toolsets with varying degrees of success. Furthermore, stakeholders are using their own personal accounts for collaboration, such as private Dropbox accounts, with no consideration to security and propriety issues.

The option of upgrading Alliance, currently running on a version of Sakai 2.8, to the latest release of 10.5 was assessed and is not recommended as an option. This is due to the number of constraints in the latest version and the significant number of ANU customisations currently implemented which would need to be applied to the latest version. The time and effort required to re-develop these customisations to a new version of Alliance (Sakai 10.5), whose core functionality is a learning management system, would be a better invested in technology that provides a true enterprise collaboration platform.

The migration of existing data and content stored on sites in Alliance, and migrating any remaining active users over to a new collaboration platform, remains high risk. To mitigate these risks, a robust data migration strategy, including the opportunity for stakeholders to review content, along with University wide communication campaign and good change management governance, will need to take place. A migration strategy and process must form a large component of a project to replace Alliance.

There is also a wide discrepancy in the University’s understanding of what an enterprise collaboration platform should deliver and how it would work. There are many tools and technologies readily available that support some functions of collaboration and while it is impossible replace the use of some of these options available (particularly those options that are free), many business areas are looking for the University to provide a supported and secure collaboration platform that will address general requirements. A high priority for the majority of users (that is Academic and Professional Staff and Students) is the ability to easily share information within and external to the University without compromising security. Alliance is used because of this ability and this functionality would need to be replicated in a replacement product. In addition, as Alliance does not have document control or versioning capability, Staff and Students are finding and using standalone tools that are not supported or secure. It is this risk that the University needs to address.

It is proposed that the University replace Alliance through an Expression of Interest (EOI) process to assess the various enterprise collaboration tools or platform available from the marketplace. The Alliance replacement should enable users to select functionality that has been introduced since Alliance was developed, and also additional collaboration features which provides the ability to collaborate anywhere, on any device, across any type of content.



1. Introduction

1.1. Purpose

The purpose of this document is to provide an understanding of the needs of key stakeholders for a collaboration tool set, evaluate the University’s main collaboration tool, Alliance, against those needs and provide a recommended approach to establishing an effective collaboration capability for ANU.

1.2. Intended Audience

This document is intended for the Information Technology Services (ITS) Executive Management Team, University ICT Committee (UICT), IT Operational Managers Group and other interested stakeholders.

1.3. Scope

The scope of this analysis focuses on the current collaboration requirements across the University and the benefits or deficiencies of Alliance. It seeks to identify the current use of Alliance and if replaced, what functions and activities are required by the current users. It covers the high level requirements of Academic and Professional Staff and Students.

1.3. Approach

Requirement gathering meetings were held over several weeks with key Service Division and College representatives (for a list of stakeholders engaged please see Appendix A).

Requirements were discussed at a high level aiming to identify what collaboration tools are used generally and Alliance specifically.

Key points and discussions from each meeting were captured and have formed the list of requirements below.

2. Business Objective

The key objectives for an ANU Collaboration Toolset are1:

Improve the ability for ANU staff and students to collaborate, share information and work together on various projects seamlessly either on campus or remotely;

Replace and decommission the University’s Alliance collaboration platform; Define the requirements for data migration; Provide a clearly defined consolidated set of collaboration services and tools; and Consolidate existing technology.

3. Background

For several years at the University there has been an identified need to replace or upgrade Alliance with a more robust enterprise collaboration toolset managed and supported centrally by ITS. To date, there have not been any requirements for supporting collaborative activities documented at a University wide level and this document seeks to address that need.

The need for ITS to support collaborative activities is widely seen as a critical activity for the University in supporting collaboration among:

Academic staff Professional staff Students Combinations of groups within the University that may include groups of Academic, Professional

staff and Students Between various internal and external stakeholders to the University; and Inter-university collaboration

The University’s focus on interdisciplinary research, contribution to the development of public policy and research-led education, drives a need for significant collaboration both within and external to the University.

1 Information Technology Services – 2016-2017 Program of Work: UICT Summary, pg.11 (UICT Document 2015/59)



There is a need to implement and support collaborative environments and tools that will operate effectively across all stakeholders2.

An enterprise collaboration platform generally refers to a system that combines tools and processes to ensure users can connect and collaborate with people, information and resources they require at any given time, to achieve a business benefit, such as:

Enterprise knowledge management, discovery and sharing Establish workgroup portals Connect and communicate via instant message or video web conferencing Organise and co-ordinate projects or sharing calendar schedules Provide an enterprise social network for shared interests

The University currently uses a wide range of methods to collaborate (for a list of collaboration methods, see Appendix B). The tools used across campus often run on independent platforms or are freeware with little consideration of security and have limited interoperability. They are commonly used by Academic and Professional Staff and Students both on and off campus. A number of these tools are legacy tools and some are more contemporary.

The proliferation of disparate toolsets has resulted in a lack of clarity around the University’s preferred solution for collaboration within and outside of the University.

4. Alliance

Alliance has been the University’s primary collaboration tool for the past seven years. It is used by Staff, Students and a multitude of external guests. Alliance has provided the University’s communities and external stakeholders with a shared platform for collaborating and information sharing within a virtual space.

Alliance provides a set of user-friendly, built-in tools such as announcements, calendars, forums, resources, wikis, etc. that can be used within a team web site built in Alliance. These can be made accessible to selected groups and members or made open to the public.

From discussions with Stakeholders there are two main benefits of Alliance:

1. Ease of creating a new site (that is, no special technical skills or additional permissions are required to setup a collaboration site); and

2. Access to a site is easily managed, including the ability to add external users to whole or parts of the site.

Alliance has over 27,380 active sites, of which 4,433 are project sites. In the past 6 months, the number of users who have accessed Alliance at least once are as follows:

Type of User Number of Users

Academic Staff 539

Students 155

Professional Staff 1302

External to ANU 183

Total 2179

This number does not count the number of times the user has logged on but we are able to determine that each week, there are on average approximately 50-100 unique log-in’s.

The volume of data stored on the Alliance platform constitutes approximately 285 GB of data3.

Despite being the most used collaboration tool currently across the University, Alliance has significant limitations in its ability to meet the demands of users for a modern sophisticated collaborative environment with state of the art toolsets that can enable efficient and effective use of their time.

2 Information Technology Services Strategy 2015-2017, pg.3 (https://services.anu.edu.au/files/review/ANU%20Information%20Technology%20Strategy.pdf)

3 Alliance statistics (13/6/2016) provided by ITS (REQ0149986)



4.1. Limitations of the ANU Installation of Alliance

Runs on Sakai version 2.8 which is no longer being supported by vendors nor the Sakai developers’ community.

While there is some support of Alliance, no upgrades and development activity has been completed to enhance the product. ITS only provides best effort break fix support4.

Has reached the end of its support and product lifecycle

Has a storage capacity of 1 to 2 GB allowance for Alliance’s collaboration sites which is insufficient for the majority of users for managing and maintaining the growing volume of data such as research data, reports, etc. Resources for fieldwork require collaboration site capacity of up to multiple GBs of data storage.

Large individual file size exceeding 200MB cannot be uploaded to Alliance, without the need for specialised tools.

Unable to undertake simultaneous editing of documents by multiple users nor does it provide version control for documents. Individual users are required to download the document locally to their hard drives and then re-upload new versions upon completion.

Unable to support advanced synchronous collaboration such as web conferencing or presence. Only basic chat function is available.

It is a standalone platform that does not integrate with other university enterprise systems such as ANU email or calendar.

The infrastructure supporting Alliance remains on ageing physical hardware (Oracle Solaris), which exposes the University to risk of potential failure.

Not mobile-friendly nor is it optimised for use through mobile devices or tablets.

Alliance is delivered through the Sakai, a free Java based, open community source education software platform designed to support teaching, research and collaboration. Sakai is distributed under the Educational Community License (a type of open source license). The Sakai system type is considered to be a Course Management System (CMS) and Learning Management System (LMS). It is an alternate solution to products such as Blackboard Learn and Moodle (Wattle) which the ANU has already implemented to support and enhance its academics and students in their ‘teaching and learning’ experience.

The current version of Sakai, 10.5, released on July 7, 2015, offers significant improvements to existing features and functions seen in the University’s Alliance (Sakai 2.8) such as:

Ability to create/build a site to support project and research collaboration; Document distribution; Chats, announcements; Integration to other third party learning systems through Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI); Email client and calendar; Drop Box tool for file sharing (not an actual DropBox platform integration); Host wikis, discussions and forums; and Gradebooks, syllabus, tests and quizzes.

But the Sakai 10.5 still lacks some core collaborative functions such as:

Create document or document collaboration with multiple users; Version control and track changes to documents; and Native Desktop web conferencing – relies on integration with Adobe Connect and other 3rd party web

conferencing tools.

To upgrade from the Alliance version Sakai 2.8 to the current version 10.5 the following would need to be considered:

Sakai has to date released versions 2.8, 2.9, 10.1 through to 10.5. An upgrade path requires an assessment of all the changes across the different versions of the

Sakai platform.

4 Alliance: Past, Current and Future Briefing Paper, by Peter Ness p.g.1 (8/4/2015)



The ANU has previously made many customisations to Alliance Sakai 2.8, and these customisations would probably need to be ported over.

ANU ITS currently does not have sufficient Java based development resources to conduct an analysis of Alliance’s customisation and then re-develop them over to the 10.5 version of Sakai.

Further development of features and functionalities to Sakai is reliant upon its developer communities.

The business requirements gathered in this document identify gaps in collaboration capabilities with Alliance (Sakai 2.8). An upgrade of Alliance from Sakai 2.8 to 10.5, would not be sufficient to fill these gaps. The University would still need to look for an alternate solution to cover these capabilities.

It is recommended that the University does not proceed with upgrading Alliance. The time and effort required to re-develop and port various customisations to Alliance (Sakai 10.5), whose core functionalities is focused towards a learning management system, would be better invested in technology to establish a true enterprise collaboration platform and toolsets for the University. There are a number of options that are available for the University to move forward but these must address the business problems and the stakeholder requirements.

5. Business Problem

Alliance, the University’s primary collaboration has reached the end of its product lifecycle. There are a number of other tools being used across the University however, these tools don’t resemble a true unified collaboration capability as they serve as independent disparate components of collaboration, and do not fit onto a seamless interoperable collaboration platform. The use and description of these tools are available in Appendix B.

Following a consultation exercise with a number of stakeholders, it was discovered that there are varied levels of understanding on how collaboration should be initiated or managed, and the following deficiencies in our current environment and its impact on business activity were identified.

Deficiencies Business Impact

Ageing and inadequate technologies that are not fully supported and reaching end of life resulting in unreliable capability.

Increased risk of exposure to loss of critical data in the event of a system crash.

Missed opportunities to increase business value through effective collaboration.

Absence of an overarching strategy to ensure the right choice of collaboration tools is made for ANU.

Unable to optimise business efficiencies.

Absence of a standardised collaboration capability across the University resulting in a number of disparate tools being used to meet individual needs and preferences.

Unnecessary cost relating to inefficient use of technology capabilities through non-competitive pricing model.

Heavy dependency on phone, emails, face-to-face meetings and tele-conferencing or expensive video conferencing infrastructure.

Unnecessary cost relating to inefficient time consuming methods of finding information.

Use of personal accounts on non-ITS supported tools and software licences for undertaking work related activities resulting in significant legal and data security risks.

Exposes the University to unauthorised access to corporate information and enterprise content.

Multiple document, record and file repositories. Unnecessary cost relating to duplication of effort.

File sharing through a limited email attachment size (i.e. 25MB) is insufficient for many users with large data sets or reports to circulate and share.

Unnecessary cost relating to inefficient time consuming methods of sharing information and duplication of effort.



Deficiencies Business Impact

Access to folders between academic and administrative areas across the University is difficult to establish and manage.

Unnecessary cost relating to inefficient time consuming methods of finding and sharing information.

Concerns over the security of websites predominantly developed by researchers themselves with limited skills in web development.

Exposes the University to unauthorised access to corporate information and enterprise content.

6. Requirements

6.1. Requirements Prioritisation

The stakeholder and technical requirements that were captured through consultations with stakeholders (Appendix A) and market research are prioritised according to the MoSCoW prioritisation method as defined below.

Priority Ranking Description

M – Must Have Describes a requirement that must be satisfied in the final solution for the solution to be considered a success.

S – Should Have Represents a high-priority item that should be included in the solution if it is possible. This is often a critical requirement but one which can be satisfied in other ways if strictly necessary.

C – Could Have Describes a requirement which is considered desirable but not necessary. This will be included if time and resources permit.

W – Won’t Have Represents a requirement that stakeholders have agreed will not be implemented in a given release, but may be considered for the future.

6.2. Stakeholder Requirements

The following stakeholder requirements are grouped into modular elements (i.e. capabilities that can be used independently and/or across a single platform). It is focused around key collaboration activities selected as a most suitable combination that aligns with the required user experience and environment. Based on this, there are requirements that fall into one or more modular elements.

Ref Requirements Priority Does Alliance Meet the Requirements?

1. Connect and Communicate

1.1 Allow the University’s internal stakeholders to easily connect and access the collaboration platform by authentication with their university identity and password credentials, regardless of divisions or academic areas.

M Yes

1.2 Allow internal stakeholders to invite and connect with external stakeholders of the University through the collaboration platform.

M Yes

1.3 Allow system administrators or site owners to set up and administer user profiles and allocate users to groups.

M Yes

1.4 Allow a user to be a member of more than one group or site. M Yes




1.5 Ability to integrate seamlessly with other University enterprise systems such as email and calendar services.

M Yes

1.6 Ability to send notifications from the collaboration site with the email client, with the user able to select notification options (e.g. when new content added only).

M No

1.7 Ability to view other stakeholders’ profiles, or persons collaborating in the site or groups.

M Yes

1.8 Provide a simple, intuitive interface to better organise, engage and collaborate with other users.

M No

1.9 Provide interoperability of unified communication tools across a common collaboration platform for group communication such as video web conferencing, instant message, chat, etc.

M Limited

1.10 Ability for communication tools to be accessible from desktop, laptop, web browser and mobile devices as part of the standard ANU image

M No

1.11 Provide email client, mailbox and mail archive services integrated into a collaboration site for sending, forwarding and responding to emails.

M Yes

1.12 Provide rich communication features such as screen or application sharing capabilities, white boarding and recording meetings.

M No

1.13 Ability to integrate communication tools with existing telephony networks such as PABX or VOIP services.

C No

1.14 Ability to integrate with existing video conferencing technologies such as H.323/ Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Video Conferencing hardware etc.

C No

1.15 Ability to support multiple meeting groups and sizes for web/video conferencing and easily scalable to accommodate any size groups, for example under or over 20 members.

S No

1.16 Ability to view group emails, calendars, and schedules related to the collaboration activity directly from within the collaboration site.

M Yes

1.17 Accessible from and across multiple devices, platforms and ANU supported environments (e.g. web browsers, desktops, laptops and mobile devices either issued by the University or personal devices), without the need for authentication tokens

M Yes

1.18 Provide a consistent user experience across multiple platforms and devices, i.e. mobile friendly and optimised.

M No

1.19 Provide automatic termination process for access to the collaboration platform after an internal user is no longer affiliated or employed at the University.

M Yes




1.20 Ability to revoke access from external parties. M Yes

1.21 Ability to use without the need to download a client or other users needing to setup an account.

S Yes

2. Initiate, Build, Create

2.1 Allow users to easily initiate and create web based collaboration sites to support their activities such as projects, workgroups and communities

M Yes

2.2 Ability to support the development of ‘extranet’ style sites for publishing websites related to a collaboration activity. For example, invited or permitted users could potentially access information such as datasets, files or documents that are stored in the back-end interface, through an ‘extranet’ portal.

M Yes

2.3 Provide a simple and intuitive interface for user settings and configuration of a collaboration site.

S Yes

2.4 Flexibility to create additional collaboration site categories to meet broader stakeholder needs such as the University’s Council and committees such as the Education, Research and Academic Boards.

M Yes

2.5 Ability to structure or organise workgroups or groups of collaborators with ease, through an intuitive interface.

S Yes

2.6 Ability to integrate with the University’s enterprise systems such as Office Productivity suites, email and calendar services

M No

2.7 Ability to create discussion boards, microblogging, blogs, wiki pages, etc.

M Yes

2.8 Ability to support customisation of capabilities if necessary, to enhance collaborative features.

M No

2.9 Provide a number of default collaboration templates, tools and applications with the ability to customise as required.

S Yes

2.10 Ability to use an easy rich text entry for wiki’s and blogs. S Yes

3. Organise and Manage

3.1 Ability to schedule group meetings or events. M Yes

3.2 Ability to synchronise calendars from collaboration sites to enterprise calendars services.

M No

3.3 Ability to assign tasks to other collaborators/group members and track their progress from within the collaboration site.

M No

3.4 Provide project management functionality or ability to integrate with existing project management tools

S No




3.5 Ability to synchronise data across multiple devices. M No

3.6 Ability for the system administrator to provision adequate storage capacity on the collaboration platform to store a large number of files and documents and increase capacity as required.

M No

3.7 Enable multiple users to co-edit and create dynamic versions of a file or document being collaborated on.

M No

3.8 Ability to track versions, review and accept changes between versions of documents in collaboration.

M No

3.9 Ability to organise content in the collaboration site in multiple folders and sub-folder structures.

M Yes

3.10 Ability to upload large file sizes without the need for specialised connection tools or process.

M No

3.11 Ability to support storage of multiple file formats, e.g. jpg, tiff, png, gif (photos), mp4, mov, (videos) and other popular files formats such as pdf, zip, ppt, doc, xlx, exe, rtf, xml, dat, db.

M Yes

3.12 Allow the site owner or the information owner to directly assign different access levels and capabilities for users and invitees of their collaboration sites to create, view, edit, share etc. information.

M Yes

3.13 Ability to archive and retrieve content. M No

3.14 Ability to restrict user access to folders, groups or system functions according to user role and system administration controls.

M Yes

3.15 Provide multiple access levels for users defined by the University such as no access, read, write, administrator, etc according to user role and system administration controls

M Yes

4. Discover and Share

4.1 Ability to search for content, such as corporate information, publicly shared information and targeted sites based on user profiles and shared interests.

M Yes

4.2 Ability to search for user profiles, collaboration sites or content. M Yes

4.3 Ability to easily assign metadata tags or data categorisation taxonomy of content for effective search indexing.

M No

4.4 Provide enterprise social network knowledge sharing capabilities such as discussions, microblogging, blogs, wikis, tagging, likes, etc.

M Yes

4.5 Ability to make user profiles, shared documents, sites or corporate information easily discoverable.

S No




4.6 Ability to discover other collaborative activities occurring at the University.

S No

4.7 Provide real-time user presence status and push notices/alerts/notifications.

S No

4.8 Ability to easily share or make accessible, documents and files on the collaboration platform via cloud based file sharing services.

M No

4.9 Ability to archive content by identifying last activity or by group to another product or storage

M No

4.10 Ability for an external user to have some administration ability on a site, such as add users, within appropriate ANU oversite and auditing ability

M Yes

5. Analytics and Reporting Tools

5.1 Ability to produce scheduled and ad-hoc reports based on user or workgroup activities, system storage allowances or allocations.

M No

5.2 Ability to produce scheduled and ad-hoc reports based on stored or defined metadata and fields on documents or files stored on the collaboration platform.

M Yes

5.3 Ability to set up standard reports and reporting formats that can be automatically generated as required.

S Yes

5.4 Ability to provide a reporting dashboard for the collaboration platform administrators and support teams.

S No

6. Deployment, Security and Governance

6.1 Provide deployment options for hosted on-premises, managed services or cloud based solution, allowing content to be stored on different servers if required e.g. some files on the collaboration platform, others on a file share, etc.

M Yes

6.2 Provide federated servers and data sovereignty for storing content on the collaboration platform.

M Yes

6.3 Ability to integrate with the University’s identity management and security suites, i.e. Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), Active Directory, Identity and Access Management (IDAM), for internal users.

M Yes

6.4 Ability to authenticate user credentials against ANU Active Directory without the need to store user id and password externally.

M Yes

6.5 Ability to manage different instances of the same system in order to ensure confidentiality and security of information between different user groups.

M Yes



6.6 Provide reliable backup and recovery of collaboration site contents and other relevant information.

M Yes

6.7 Ability to action prescribed business contingency and disaster recovery plans with the appropriate service level agreements.

M No

6.8 Provides uptime of 99.9% with acceptable system performance, usability and response time.

M Yes

6.9 Provide the option to run on redundant infrastructure. M Yes

6.10 Ability to patch and apply security updates with minimal downtime or user impact.

M No

6.11 Ability to track and manage external users from a site wide perspective for system administrators

M No

6.12 Provide defined integration capabilities, and an API (both for ingesting and exporting data)

M No

6.13 Ability to apply styling to the tool to match the ANU brand M Yes

6.14 Ability to mark materials as “not to be shared” or “not to be shared beyond ANU” with appropriate access controls applied.

M Yes

6.15 Ability to centrally monitor and control what material is being shared, by who and with whom.

M No

6.16 Ability to recover any deleted material (with the exception of 6.17)

M No

6.17 Ability for designated system administrators to permanently remove material (with appropriate logging)

M No

6.18 Ability to search the system for specific material to meet FOI and similar obligations

M No

7. Training and Vendor Support

7.1 Provide local vendor support. M No

7.2 Provide comprehensive training for all levels of users and system administrators and support teams.

M Yes

7.3 Provide support for any other languages, other than English. W Yes

7.4 Complies with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) accessibility guidelines.

M No



7. Findings

Through discussions with Stakeholders, the following activities were highlighted as the main areas of collaboration (though this is not exclusive or an exhausted list):

Committee management: used for managing dissemination of committee papers and access to those papers.

Document collaboration: used to create and edit documentation with or without version and access control.

Research collaboration: share research related material, including documents, datasets and repositories.

Teaching and Learning collaboration. Broadcast: used to share information such as changes to policy, knowledge base or training

documentation and the like or social activities.

There are many tools used across the University under each of these areas, often with no or little consideration of security implications, propriety issues, record keeping, backups and the like. Operating in this manner puts the University at high risk.

Most stakeholders use Alliance for either committee management or broadcast purposes and it is mostly by Professional staff. Resoundingly, stakeholders found Alliance an effective way to manage access to committee papers and is highly used by the Academic Governance office to post agendas and minutes of the Education, Research and Academic Board papers. It is also used for project work, particularly the dissemination of tender type activities or some recruitment activities. The benefits of using Alliance in this manner included restricting access to some documentation for example specifically to committee members, while other documentation is able to be open to a broader user group and the user group is not restricted to internal users.

Some of the issues described by Stakeholders included the inability to:

manage versions of documents; link to calendars; track correspondence and tasks; and provide access to a position email account rather than personal email addresses.

Also, duplication of records occurs with multiple records kept, for example, on Alliance, on a shared drive and on ERMS. Stakeholders with external members on the committee were unable to use ERMS to manage the sharing of documents without proceeding through the Person of Interest process, which they thought added significantly to administration overhead. When using Alliance they liked simplicity of entering the external members email addresses to provide access. From a University perspective, this does add to problems of identity management, particularly with identifying associations and administratively in the sense that if that external member no longer has any association there is no easy way to remove access across multiple sites.

Most of the users of Alliance for committee management stated that they do not use the other features in Alliance such as the wiki and blog tools.

The Student Administration area uses Alliance to broadcast important dates, changes to policy or procedure, training documentation and the like.

Students are using Alliance to share information and documentation with supervisors or other students, particularly in the research area. It was felt that this was a method of circumnavigating around using the supported website tool, Drupal, due to the restrictions and effort to establish a site using this tool.

Some issues stakeholders raised on the use of Teaching and Learning collaboration tools, such as Moodle, was the inability for students to comment or contribute and remain anonymous. This was deemed important and drove one area to use other tools not supported enterprise wide.

It was apparent through the discussions, that document collaboration is one of the biggest issues for the University. The ability to easily create and edit documentation among a number of users is not being met with our current enterprise or supported technologies. The gap is being met with either an excessive use of email (requiring the collation of comments) or through the use of other tools such as SharePoint, OneDrive, GoogleDocs and Dropbox. All stakeholders raised a concern over the use of personal Dropbox accounts to share information, particularly among Academic staff. Currently ITS are examining this issue and will determine shortly if it is possible to provide a business account that will cover the security risks. The ERMS underlying software does have document version and workflow capability, but this was not implemented in the first release.



The needs of research collaboration vary across the University, with some areas requiring specialised tools, for example specialised software engineering collaboration or for large datasets. It was thought that beside some specialist collaboration tools, there was a need and benefit to provide an enterprise supported and secure tool that would support a general ability to collaborate with internal, external, local, national and international collaborators.

There are numerous other tools that are currently been used in various areas across campus to assist with collaboration, including Skype, Confluence, Doodle, Hipchat, Padlet, GitLab, GitHub, GlobalMeet, CloudStor, social media applications and many more.

It is widely accepted among the stakeholders that with the proliferation and availability of these tools, it is impossible for the University to supply the functionality, at speed, that many of the freely available software provides. However, all agree that there are significant advantages in using enterprise supported tools, including the security of access and content, economies of scale and robust environments. To successfully implement any collaboration tools enterprise wide, the solution or solutions must meet the above stated requirements.

Migration

While there is a significant amount of data/documents held within Alliance, it has been identified that many of these documents may be already stored elsewhere (for example on a shared drive or in the ERMS) or are not the final versions or if they are the final version, should be stored in the ERMS rather than moved to a new collaboration tool. Each stakeholder consulted advised that they would prefer a review of the documentation currently held in Alliance before any migration occurred.

8. Options

Moving forward, the available options are:

1. Do nothing and continue using Alliance and a number of existing collaboration tools (See Appendix D).

Risks/Impacts: User needs and business objectives will not be met. Deficiencies will continue. No changes to the current users’ behaviours in continuing to seek alternative solutions, tools and products unsupported by the University.

2. Leverage Existing Technology by examining current collaboration platforms to determine the fit for purpose against the requirements, including the feasibility of using Office365, SharePoint, ERMS and Dropbox collaboration capability. Risks/Impacts: User needs and business objectives will not be met without a comprehensive

suite of capability. A known resistance in using Microsoft products. Reluctance to adopt existing technologies as the University’s preferred collaboration platform may result in users continuing to look for and use alternative collaboration solutions.

3. Approach the market with an ‘Expression of Interest’ (EOI) to procure a suitable product and decommission Alliance. Opportunity to select from a range of products, assess their capability against user needs and business objectives. Risks/Impacts: Some tools may not meet specific or specialised user needs. This may inhibit

uptake of the tool. If the selected product’s usability is too complex and performance is unacceptable, uptake will be impacted and reluctance to adopt existing technologies as the University’s preferred collaboration platform may result in users continuing to look for and use alternative collaboration solution. The complexity and volume of data needed to migrate across to a new platform remains high risk and must be a key factor in the selection process.

To establish an effective, modern collaborative environment for ANU, it is recommended that Alliance be replaced with a suitable product through an open market procurement activity.

Option 3 is the recommended option for ANU.

9. Conclusion

Based on the consultations, analysis and findings, it is clear that there are many issues with the current collaboration tools and systems used across the University for supporting collaborative activities. The tools do not provide interoperability capability across the University’s current collaboration platform, with the stakeholders having to access separate systems to use or conduct certain collaboration activities.



Academic, Professional Staff and Students are using a variety of systems, some of which are supported for enterprise use, and others which are the users’ own personal preference or personal accounts. The absence of a purpose fit tool or platform of tools is driving local areas to implement their own tools with varying degrees of knowledge, experience and success, without appropriate support. It is also inefficient, both in wasted time and lost opportunities in achieving competitive pricing models.

Alliance and its supporting infrastructure is out dated and unreliable. The option to upgrade Alliance to the latest version was assessed and it was concluded that the latest version had far too many constraints to be considered as a viable option. A replacement for Alliance that meets the requirements should be implemented, along with a review of content to determine if it should be migrated or stored elsewhere such as the ERMS.

.



Appendix A: List of Stakeholders Consulted

Name Title Area

Anne Lahey Manager Digital Scholarly Communications

University Scholarly Information Services

Azure Hermes Community Liaison Officer JCSMR – NCIG Group

Belinda Farrelly General Manager (Acting) ANU College of Asia and the Pacific

Bill Roberts Programmer, Computer Section

ANU Research School of Astronomy & Astrophysics

Candida Spence Information Literacy Program

Library Services – Scholarly Information Services

Christopher Delfs IT Officer Research School of Chemistry

David Akers College General Manager ANU CMBE & CPMS

Deborah Veness Manager and Senior Educational Developer

ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences

Dr April Weiss Associate Director – Enterprise Systems

Information Technology Services

Dr Hardip Patel Research Fellow (John Curtin School of Medical Research (JCSMR) – Genome Biology Department - National Centre for Indigenous Genomics (NCIG)

Helen Corliss Senior Systems Developer ITS Support Enterprise Systems

Helen Duke Manager – Project Management


Jackie Stenhouse Administrative Executive JCSMR – NCIG Group

James Irwin IT Manager Research School of Physics and Engineering

Jennifer Turini System Administrator, System and Desktop Services

ITS Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS Windows team)

Jo Poole Senior Business Analyst ITS BA, Project Management Office

Joan Angel Deputy Registrar Division of Student Administration

John Boland IT Consultant The Fenner School of Environment & Society

John Frezza Associate Director HR Systems

Human Resources

Karena Pryce Laboratory Manager JCSMR – NCIG Group

Karl Nissen IT Manager ANU CMBE & CPMS

Kathrin Kulhanek Deputy Director Research Services Division



Name Title Area

Kyla Wilson Manager Remuneration & Conditions Branch, Human Resources Division

Leslie McDonald Governance Officer Corporate Governance and Risk – Office of Vice Chancellor

Megan Easton Manager Academic Governance

Corporate Governance and Risk – Office of Vice Chancellor

Michael Dobbie Project Manager JCSMR – NCIG Group

Osama Alkadi Digital Resources Services ITS Enterprise Systems

Pat Boling General Manager ANU College of Business & Economics

Peter Ness Manager – Enterprise Systems


Rim El Kadi Assistant Registrar, Student Systems

Division of Student Administration

Roxanne Missingham

University Librarian University Scholarly Information Services

Sara Rowley Acting Manager Evaluations, Evaluation Analyst

Planning & Performance Measurement

Sharyn Wragg IT Manager Research School of Biology

Sian Moon Senior Business Analyst Planning & Performance Measurement

Simon Easteal Director JCSMR – NCIG Group

Stephen Milnes Deputy Director Student Experience, Division of Student Life

Steve Blackburn Professor Computer Science, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology

Steve Leahy IT Consultant Fenner School of Environment & Society

Sylvia Mansell Associate Director (Acting) Corporate & Client Services, Facilities and Services



Appendix B: Collaboration Tools Commonly Used On Campus

The products listed below have some capacity to support the University’s functions for ‘Collaboration’

Tool/Platform Name

Supported by

Business Purpose Users Description

Alliance (Sakai)

ITS Primary Collaboration Platform

Supports:

Create virtual ‘sites’ or space for collaboration

Document repository Data storage Wikis/forums/discussions Email and chat

communications

Internal Users:

Academic Staff Professional Staff Students

External Users:

Alumni Other universities

collaborators Vendors/Suppliers Temporary or

contract staff

Provides the ANU community with a space for creating websites for collaboration and information sharing. A set of tools such as announcements, calendars, forums, resources and wikis are used and made available to a selected group or open for public viewing.

Microsoft Office365

ITS Primary Suite of Office Productivity tools

Internal User access only

Provides an end-to-end enterprise collaboration platform which supported a number of collaboration tools and services

Office Productivity Tool (MS Office Suite)

Supports:

MS Office Products Online MS Office Products

Offline/Desktop clients

Internal Users:


Supports the ability to create content, online and offline such as:

Documents Spreadsheets Presentations Email (see ANU Email –

Outlook) Calendar

Cloud Storage and File Sharing (OneDrive)

Supports:

Cloud Storage File Sharing Data Synchronisation

between desktop and cloud services

Internal Users:

Some Academic Staff

Professional Staff Students

Provides cloud enabled storage capabilities, file sharing and synchronisation across multiple devices, of folders on the desktop to the cloud.

Collaboration Platform (SharePoint on Office365):

Supports:

Create virtual ‘sites’ or ‘site collections’ space for collaboration

Content and Document repository

Document Collaboration File Sharing

Internal Users (ITS User access only):

Professional Staff

Provides a browser-based collaboration and document management platform. SharePoint is capable of creating and hosting ‘sites’ (websites) or ‘site collection’ for securely store, organise, share and access information from any devices.

Web Conferencing (Skype for Business)

Internal Users:

Academic Staff Professional Staff

Provides the ANU community with low-cost instant messaging, user presence status, desktop web,



Tool/Platform Name

Supported by


Students voice and video conferencing capabilities.

Also supported is an integration with Outlook email and calendar services

Enterprise Social Network (Yammer)

Internal Users:


Currently not configured to be integrated to the ANU Office365 platform.

It is a standalone product, but can be configured to support:

Microblogging Activity Stream Create and View user profile Organise people into interest

groups Informal communication Shared interests and topics

Digital Note Taking and Sharing (OneNote)

Internal Users:


OneNote provides the ANU community with free-form information or note taking capabilities to support multi-user collaboration

In-Room Video Conferencing

ITS and AV Services

Video Conferencing Internal Users:

Academic Staff Professional Staff

Provides the ANU with high definition in-room video conferencing capabilities for collaboration.

Very high cost to maintaining in-room video conferencing equipment and subscription to service providers

Enterprise Project Management

ITS Project Management (MS SharePoint On-Premise)

Internal Users:

Professional Staff

Provides Project Managers from selected business areas, the ability to manage projects. Most of the functionalities are not fully utilised. It is mainly used to store project documents and log and extract project progress reports.

ANU Email & Calendar services (Microsoft Exchange and Office365 Outlook)

ITS and LITSS

Email Communications & Calendar services

Internal Users:


Heavily utilised across the ANU to support the majority of the University’s communication and collaborative activities.

Shared Network Drives & Folders

ITS and LITSS

Corporate data storage and document repository

Internal Users access only

Supports the University’s content/document repository function. Searching, access and sharing of documents is restricted to each business unit, department or school



Tool/Platform Name

Supported by


Zoom Cloud Conferencing

(Pilot Program)

AARNet Video, Voice, Web Conferencing Communications

Internal users:

Academics

Provides video/web conferencing capability. Currently being trialled as a pilot implementation by ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics (RSAA).

Zoom does support integration with the University’s existing in-room video conferencing infrastructure through a subscription cloud based services

CloudStor AARNet Data repository and file sharing services

Internal Users:

Academic Staff Students

Available to professional staff

External Users:

Other university users on the AARNeT customer network

A file sharing, cloud storage platform supported by Australia’s Academic and Research Network (AARNet) infrastructure. It enables Australian education and research institutions to collaborate with each other and their international peer communities.

Drupal ANU Marketing and Communic-ations

Create websites and web content management

Supports Internal Users only

Professional Staff

An open source online web content management platform that provides a blogging and community site building tool for knowledge management and business collaboration.

It is currently used by various ANU business areas to support its web content functions.

ServiceNow ITS IT service support and management

Internal Users:


ANU’s primary IT support service management tool. It is under consideration as a centralised document repository for technical knowledge sharing (KB articles, wiki information).

Mahara

(UICT Project Delivery not yet implemented)

ITS and ANU Online

ePortfolios, content management

Internal Users:

Academic Staff Students

Web based application for the creation of electronic portfolios, it enables its users to create, store and share content. Has limited collaboration capabilities to other users in a group (document sharing , co-editing, version control)

Adobe Connect

ITS and ANU Online

Video, Voice, Web Conferencing Communications

Live Learning and Teaching Collaboration

Internal Users: • Academic Staff • Students

An established web conferencing tool supported by ITS, that provides a platform for ‘real time learning and teaching collaboration’ for ANU Online students and their lecturers



Tool/Platform Name

Supported by


Wattle (Moodle)

ITS and ANU Online

Learning Management System

Internal Users: • Academic Staff • Students

The University’s primary learning management system (LMS), currently supported by ITS and the ANU Online program as the centralised ‘Collaboration and Learning Management’ function for students. Moodle is an open-sourced platform, it offers deep levels of application programming interface (API) integration with other ‘learning tools interoperability’ (LTI), such as:

Adobe Connect Echo360 Lecture Capture Turnitin Mahara Equella Gradebook, Quiz

Social Media N/A Sharing information Academic Staff Professional Staff Students

Social media such as Facebook, Twitter and the like.



Appendix C: Go8 Universities’ Preferred Collaboration Tools (CAUDIT 2014 Report)

Tool/Platform Name Business Purpose Go8 University

Microsoft Office365 Office productivity and collaboration

ANU

Microsoft Office 2010 Office productivity

University of Adelaide University of Melbourne University of New South Wales University of Queensland University of Sydney University of Western Australia

Google Apps for Work Office productivity and collaboration

Monash University

Microsoft Exchange Office email communication

University of Adelaide University of Melbourne University of New South Wales University of Queensland University of Sydney University of Western Australia

Google Gmail Office email communication and collaboration

Monash University



Appendix D: Meeting Current Collaboration Needs with Existing Collaboration Tools

The products listed below are currently supported by ANU ITS and will support some collaboration functions

Collaboration Purpose

Administration Academics & Research

Teaching and Learning

Students

Email and Calendar Services

ANU Email (Outlook)

ANU Email

(Outlook)

ANU Email

(Outlook)

ANU Email

(Outlook)

Desktop Video Web Conferencing

Skype for Business

Skype for Business

Adobe Connect Skype for Business

Zoom (pilot)

In-Room Video Conferencing

Polycom Polycom

Zoom (pilot)

Office Productivity Tools

Office365 Office365 Office365 Office365

Cloud Storage and File Sharing

OneDrive OneDrive OneDrive OneDrive

CloudStor CloudStor CloudStor CloudStor

DropBox DropBox DropBox DropBox

Project Management

SharePoint SharePoint SharePoint SharePoint

Enterprise Project Management (EPM -SharePoint)

Collaboration Platform

Alliance Alliance Alliance Alliance

SharePoint SharePoint SharePoint SharePoint

Enterprise Social Network

Yammer Yammer Yammer Yammer

Enterprise Storage Shared Network Drive

Shared Network Drive



Learning Management System

Moodle (Wattle) Moodle (Wattle) Moodle (Wattle)

Live Learning and Teaching Collaboration

Adobe Connect Adobe Connect

Web site and web content management system

Drupal Drupal Drupal