Microsoft Global Customer success story

University of Nottingham Microsoft Global Customer success story- Empowering Research and Teaching with collaborative technology

In Autumn 2020, Microsoft published a global customer success story, showcasing what has been achieved by the University of Nottingham to empower research and teaching over a 2-3 year period, working collaboratively with Digital Learning Directors, Digital Research and Information Services.

The success story outlines how colleagues made use of Microsoft Teams, Azure and a new Windows Virtual Desktop to expand research capabilities and teaching models, as well as facing the challenge of moving students, academics and staff to remote working, teaching and learning during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The article describes a number of scenario’s where using collaborative tools has enhanced the student experience when the University shifted to ‘remote’ learning. One example describes how the use of Microsoft Teams soared from 9.500 regular users to more than 33,00 in the first few weeks following the pandemic.  Dr. Nick Mount, Digital Learning Director for the Faculty of Social Sciences commented, “It was clear from the very get-go that Microsoft Teams and the rest of our Microsoft infrastructure were going to be absolutely central to the shift to taking the university remote.”. As academics grew used to using Teams as a mechanism for teaching they were able to see the benefits of increased interaction and engagement through chat and collaboration features.

The article also explores the benefits and new possibilities that have been introduced connecting students and faculties with cloud services, particularly to support research.  “Our researchers used to be limited by the processing power of their computer,” says Ross Shonfeld, Technical Manager and Cloud Solution Specialist “with Azure, we can spin up a 64-core virtual machine to help them advance their work, and then spin it down again once their process becomes less data-intensive again. That sort of flexibility can have a major impact on how people approach their work”.

 For more examples of collaborative working using Microsoft technologies, you can Read the full Microsoft Case Study here.