It's freezing...

It's upgrade time here at the University of Bedfordshire! This week we'll be upgrading both Matrix and Funnelback to the latest versions on our servers. This will give us lots of new features to experiment with and also should make all of our sites run a bit faster.

While this takes place we'll need to have a short content freeze which we've been communicating to staff for the last few weeks. We're also using this opportunity to make one particularly significant upgrade to our system - Edit+!

Currently, we have an excellent editing platform for staff to amend their own pages (Easy Edit Suite) but we're going to be one of the first of Squiz's clients to upgrade to the latest version and make web editing even easier for our staff! Some of these new features will include:

• A much simpler way to add images and link to pages
• No need to run an HTML clean up when copying text from Microsoft Word
• editing can now be done on tablet devices (e.g. ipad)
• Much more sophisticated table creating and editing tools

In the Digital Marketing Team we are constantly striving to offer as good a service as possible. So, for the past week, we've been running demo sessions to staff and the feedback has been great! Hopefully, all this will mean a much more efficient product for us to support as well as greatly improved webpages.

We'll also be making use of the brilliant Accessibility Auditor which detects any issues on the page (relevant to WCAG 2.0 A, AA, or AAA standards), the exact location of each detected issue, advice for how to correct it and even automatic correction of the content. This will give our editors the ability to help us achieve a compliant and accessible website.

So, exciting times and another example of us trying our best to keep up with the latest developments and engage our users. According to our account manager at Squiz they have our work order for this framed as the first client to roll this out on a large scale!