Role and Responsibilities of an OU Administrator

In an ideal situation the OU Administrator will be a member of the School IT Support staff. Where a school does not have such a facility, another member of staff can be nominated for this role and the responsibilities can be limited to suit that person's availability although a good knowledge of IT is needed. Windows Infrastructure Team provide basic training and support for OU Administrators.

If you decide to take on the role of OU Administrator, you will be expected to carry out the following duties:

Management of your School Organisational Unit within the Active Directory

  • Building Campus Desktop installations using RIS/WDS
  • Managing PC security using ready-made and custom group policies
  • Applying software to PCs using group policies

Note that you will be given full training for all of the above.

Support for Campus Desktop users in your School

  • Whilst ISS are able to provide comprehensive support for OU Administrators, we do not have the resources to provide support for individual users and this must be provided by the School itself.

Packaging of applications to run on a Campus Desktop

  • This is an optional responsibility which requires a certain degree of technical know-how. For schools not having technical support staff, ISS recommend installing a standard Common or Managed Desktop which already includes popular software items, such as the Microsoft Office Suite, pdf reader, virus checking software, etc.

OU Administrators seeking help and support in packaging software applications can email campus-support@ncl.ac.uk to draw on the wealth of knowledge and experience of other Computing Officers across Campus and in ISS.

Adherence to Software Licensing procedures

  • The Campus Desktops have brought about a change in the way that software is installed and managed with many packages becoming centrally available. Whilst this has made software installations far easier to carry out, it is still essential that any centrally packaged licensed software is not installed without first signing the necessary license agreements. Contact it.servicedesk@ncl.ac.uk for all software licensing queries.

Liaison/collaboration with ISS and other OU Administrators

  • ISS encourage Computing Officers to send all routine enquiries to the ISS Helpdesk. However, there is also a well established IT support community within the University consisting of Computing Officers from across the whole campus. Computing Officers use the campus-support mailing list to share ideas and have technical discussions. Membership of the campus-support mailing list is mandatory for OU Administrators as ISS also use this to notify changes to Campus IT resources and to pass on other essential information.

    New OU Administrators will benefit from the wealth of knowledge and experience of staff who have been using and enhancing Campus Desktops for many years now.