It’s not flashing lights and glamour all the time in the web team, we do a lot of work which we hope you never even notice going on.
This week we made some important changes to the way we handle authentication to the CMS. When you sign into the CMS we authenticate you using a protocol called LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol). Some time ago now UoD IT introduced a new LDAP server to improve performance and resilience of the service. They’re hoping to decommission the old server soon and so we needed to do some work to keep our CMS up and running!
We’ve been working away behind the scenes for some time now to lay the foundation for a smooth transition from the old LDAP service to the new one. This involved making the change on our development servers to test and identify issues we might face, going through the IT change management process so everyone affected was aware of the change, communicating to our CMS users when the change was taking place and what to expect, and of course planning for the change on our production servers.
Earlier this week, working with our colleagues in IT and partners at TerminalFour, we updated the configuration of our production CMS. Everything went exactly as planned and we now authenticate against the new upgraded LDAP servers.
This is a great example of the work that goes on in the web team that you’ll hopefully never see (if we do it right!) but that has a huge impact on the day to day business as usual work that we do as a university.