Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Incredibly exciting project update.

It turns out the Moodle course population thing isn't going to be used until summer, but that's OK since it'll be ready to go whenever they need it and meanwhile I can turn to other projects.

Right now the main ones are updating the user account deletion system, automating the resetting of guest user accounts, and setting up a system for automatic creation and changing of email aliases. All very exciting stuff, I know. I'll take a minute so you can stop jumping up and down and get back in your chair.

Seriously, though, even though these kind of things are dull as dishwater to talk about, they are important. Updating the user account deletion process will let us clean out thousands of unused accounts from our servers, and free up a lot of space. This means we can go longer before having to buy more disk space, and it means a time savings for those of us in UCS who administer these accounts; several processes go way too slow because of the sheer number of accounts. Every minute we don't spend waiting on pages to load is a minute we can spend solving problems for you. The guest account reset and email alias update automation will save significant time for some of us, who can then get on with other projects.

So, even though projects like this aren't sexy and cool, they are important. Saving time and money is always a good thing. but even more so right now.