Working from Home

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Staff

The following information has been designed to support and underpin the administration and management of the Executive Office and University partners.

For those staff working from home in Hybrid situations, only one set of equipment will be provided. See Hybrid Working Policy for further info.

Students

Please look at the Technologies at UHI.

Sometimes there may be a need for you to work from home outwith the UHI network. This page aims to provide you with the information in order for you to work from home as efficiently as possible.

Teaching staff Information

Specific instructions for teaching and learning staff are available on the Remote teaching page. All lecturing and associated academic staff should follow the instructions provided on that site for remote teaching, particularly those on the Synchronous learning page.

Broadband Speedtest

Managing Capacity

It is important to make sure that you realise that some services will only have a certain capacity for use. Services such as Video Conferencing can only handle a limited number of connections at any one time.

Managing this is important in order to reduce the impact on teaching and availability to those staff who have no choice but to use that service.

The following services can be affected by large volumes of use:

Video Collaboration - Staff, if you are struggling with connections on Teams try turning your camera off to see if that helps with the connection (especially if you are in a meeting with lots of participants).

Home Broadband - Your home internet can also play a part on your experience at home. Please use our speedtest to check your broadband Broadband Speedtest

General and Academic Partner Information content

General and Academic Partner Information

This page is intended for use by all staff across the partnership so does not encompass everything or anything partner specific. Full instructions for online teaching, please refer to the Remote teaching page.

There may be pieces of software or services that are more specialised or partner specific that we have not published to this page, please refer to your local IT teams for these queries or log your query via the relevant Unidesk form

Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS):

SAMS are exceptionally different in the services/applications they use and information regarding working from home has been provided to you by local IT.

myday content

myday

What is myday?

This is the University's student/staff portal, designed to assist you in easily navigating the various services all in one place, simply click on that services tile to access.

How do I use myday?

Myday can be accessed by going straight to myday

A new UHI specific myday app will be released in September and announcements will be posted in myday when it is available for download

More information on using this service, including an instructional video, can be found on our myday pages

Email & Office365 content

Email & Office365

eMail icon

What email service do I use?

Office365^TM is the University's email service and all staff of the University have an Office365 email account.

How do I use it?

You can access your email in various ways:

If you are using a corporate/UHI laptop you can open and use outlook as usual.
If you are using a personal device you can download Office365 onto your device and use outlook as usual (after initial setup).
You can go directly to Office365 webmail to access your emails from a browser (username: staffID@uhi.ac.uk) although you will be challenged to provide additional proof that you are you. This is because Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is enabled to prevent unauthorised access.
- To setup MFA please have a look at our Setting Up your UHI account guide

Note: the look of webmail is different to the Outlook client view and in order to access any mailboxes that you have access to you will need to select your initials or picture icon at the top right and choose "Open another mailbox", search the mailbox and select it to use this mailbox in another tab

Office365 Apps

How do I access Office365 apps?

If you are using a corporate/UHI machine these applications should already be on your device.
As a staff member you are entitled to download Office365 onto your personal device, allowing you to use word, outlook, excel etc at home.
You can access Office365 applications online by logging into webmail and selecting the 'squares' icon at the top left (shown below)

Screen-grab of Office 365 apps

Sharepoint content

Sharepoint

This can be accessed from your personal or corporate machine using any internet browser.

You do not need to be connected through MyUHI or Direct Access to use this service

To access your SharePoint area click one of the relevant links below:

Note: some Academic Partners have their own Sharepoint areas, please contact your local teams for access.

University documents and records must ONLY be saved into the University SharePoint area and must NOT be downloaded onto personal devices. For policies regarding other academic partners and records please contact your local team.

Do not download sensitive documents to your own device or allow friends/family to view corporate material. All staff are expected to follow best GDPR and data protection practice and adhere to all information security guidelines.

Microsoft Teams content

Microsoft Teams

At present MS Teams is only available to the following:

Staff
All Postgraduate Research Degree Students
FE Students at West Highland College and North Highland College

If you do not have access to Microsoft Teams please raise a request for this through the MS Teams Unidesk form.

What is Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft Teams is a communication and collaboration platform with functions such as chat, video meetings, file storage, and application integration. It is the evolution from Microsoft Skype for Business.

Note: at this time some of the features for Microsoft Teams are still under review so are not accessible.

How do I use Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft have various tutorials on using MS Teams as well as a welcome/introduction video to the service.

Brightspace & Teaching and Learning content

Brightspace & Teaching and Learning

'B' - Brightspace thumbnail

How do I access Brightspace?

You can log on to Brightspace and access materials anywhere you have an internet connection.

To do this:

You can go directly to https://brightspace.uhi.ac.uk/
You can access the tile through myday
You can use the Brightspace mobile app available on iPhone and Android

See also:

Other Teaching and Learning resources

More information on other teaching and learning resources can be found on Sharepoint.

SITS content

SITS

How do I access?

Access to SITS is through the following link: SITS Access

A username and password will be provided to you when access is granted.

Access to SITS should be requested through the SITS Unidesk form

Broadband at Home content

Broadband at Home

Please note that the Servicedesk and support teams are unable to assist you with any connection or performance issues with your home network.

Given the current situation with the Coronavirus pandemic it is highly likely that your connection speeds at home will be impacted with internet service providers being strained with many more people working from home. Please be advised that if you are having performance issues with one of our online services it may be worth checking your connection performance first.

Any known performance issues with our services will be posted on the Unidesk self-service portal and/or via email comms.

If you are working from home and need to get yourself a Mobile Data Service for your device, we recommend that you visit the Ofcom mobile and broadband checker to help you choose which might be the best provider for your area

Capacity

If you are working from home, your home broadband will only have a limited capacity according to your location, supplier and package. This may affect the quality of connections to UHI Services.

You may want to look at how many other devices are connected to your internet connection at home, such as Mobile phones and TV sets for streaming as these will also be using capacity on your home network.

We are unable to provide any assistance in directly supporting your home network but would ask you look at your device usage at home before raising an issue on connection quality.

IT Problems - Who to contact content

IT Problems - Who to contact

Having IT Problems?

If you have problems with accessing any of these services or something just isn't working, the UHI IT ServiceDesk are here to help.

Unless it is urgent, your initial method of logging a fault with us should always be through Unidesk

If your query is urgent please see the other methods of contact.

telephone: 01463 279150
email: servicedesk@uhi.ac.uk - note: if there is a relevant form on the Unidesk self-service portal we will advise you to raise your query there