It’s not flashing lights and glamour All time on the web team, we do a lot of work that we hope you don’t even notice moving forward.

This week we made some important changes to the way we handle authentication to the CMS. When you log into the CMS, we authenticate you using a protocol called LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol). Some time ago UoD IT introduced a new LDAP server to improve the performance and resiliency of the service. They were hoping to take down the old server soon and so we had to do some work to keep our CMS up and running!

We have been working behind the scenes for some time to lay the foundations for a smooth transition from the old LDAP service to the new one. This involved making changes on our development servers to test and identify issues we may encounter, going through the IT change management process so that all affected people are aware of the change, notifying our CMS users when the change was happening and what to expect, and of course planning for the change on our production servers.

Earlier this week, working with our IT colleagues and TerminalFour partners, we updated the configuration of our production CMS. Everything went exactly as expected and we are now authenticating against the new updated LDAP servers.

This is a great example of the work being done in the web team which you will hopefully never see (if we do it right!), but which has a huge impact on the day to day work as usual that we do as a University.