Institutional support models for Xerte

I'm a learning technologist in a TEL team in a very large university and I'm currently in discussion with our IT department about getting Xerte (3.1) upgraded and 'normalised' as a service here. Our IT people want to be able to schedule future upgrades and for there to be clarity about who (IT or TEL people) is responsible for what.

So I'm looking for advice and recommendations about upgrading schedules. Also I'd like advice about the division of labour between TEL people and IT people with regard to supporting Xerte. Can anyone on this forum share how it is done in your institution?

How often do you upgrade and when in the year do you do so?

Who has access to the <mydomain>/management.php interface? (I don't currently have access to this but I'm thinking that maybe I should have so I can fix some issues quickly myself without needing to ask our IT department for help.)

Who has access to the files on the web server? (I'm assuming this should be restricted to IT people only)

Is a sensible division of labour for TEL people to deal with management.php and IT people deal with the files on the server?

Where can we see usage stats? E.g we'd like to know which members of staff are using Xerte to develop content so we can inform them of any downtime when upgrading and also to see how much space on the server they are using. We'd also like to see viewing stats of the LOs created.

We are interested to know how other institutions go about supporting Xerte so any info would be very welcome.

Thanks
Oli

Hi
I look after lots of Xerte installations for organisations large and small often because the IT team doesn't have the time or resources to setup and/or maintain the installation themselves. In most cases I have remote access to their internal server to maintain the installation when appropriate. Sometimes this is upgrades etc but other times its supporting end users and rescuing broken LO's etc. The answer to some of your questions is less cut and dried as you might think but a few comments:

>How often do you upgrade and when in the year do you do so?<
In my experience when IT teams do this themselves it's once or twice a year at most and often less frequent than that. The problem is just like other applications like Moodle we add fixes and improvements and new features all the time and far more often than there is a formal new release. So there's no fixed answer here except that its best to upgrade when appropriate according to issues and fixes relevant to your usage.

>Who has access to the <mydomain>/management.php interface?<
In my opinion this should be whoever looks after your installation on the server side but also the relevant person/people in the TEL team. Like other applications you need to keep the number of different 'admins' to a minimum (and at the moment there is only one login) but it's definitely as much a TEL team role as it is a server admin role.

>Is a sensible division of labour for TEL people to deal with management.php and IT people deal with the files on the server?<
I'd say it needs to be both not just IT or just TEL. The most important thing is that whoever has access invests enough time in know what to do and how to use the management features.

>Where can we see usage stats? E.g we'd like to know which members of staff are using Xerte to develop content so we can inform them of any downtime when upgrading and also to see how much space on the server they are using. We'd also like to see viewing stats of the LOs created.<
Authors can see viewing stats of each of their LO's via workspace properties.
Server admins can interrogate and generate stats about space usage etc.
For some organisations that I work with and other members of the Xerte development team we have additional code that we've developed to provide more detailed stats and also reports. At some point that functionality might find it's way into a future release but for the moment it's something we provide as part of paid consultancy.

HTH
Ron

Like Ron,

I do the same in the Netherlands and Belgium. Most of the installation I maintain are running on our server, not the server of the institution.

As part of the service we send out usage reports once a month.

We upgrade an installation about 2 months after a release, or when required because of fatal errors.

For the rest, I concur with Ron

Tom

Hi Ron and Tom

Thanks for your speedy replies. You've clarified some questions and alerted me to other issues I hadn't considered. Very useful indeed, so thanks again.

Oli