This post was originally published on The University of Bath's Web Services Blog.

So what an exciting first few weeks back we’ve had!

We started off nice and easy, picking up all the support requests that had been filed over the Christmas break and, after a suggestion from Kelvin last year, put together a demo of an augmented reality map of the University campus using Layar (which I will post more about later).

We also started preparing for our next set of work, delivering the most-requested features and fixes to our news publishing service, which is based on WordPress.

The shortlist of work we’d do was created in December during face-to-face meetings with members of the Press Office after which it was published on our wiki using the survey macro to give everyone a chance to vote and comment on which items were most important. At the same time, we got on with estimating all of the listed items so that once voting was complete we’d be able to balance the importance with how long they were going to take!

And then the snow came.

Fortunately the University had prepared for this already and an emergency telephone number had been set up with the current status of the campus and there were prepared news articles ready to be published. Of course, yet again the use of Twitter was instrumental in delivering the message that campus was closed as quickly as possible (and at least one person enjoyed their 7.30am tweet delivery!)

Sadly for us in Web Services, there are excellent remote working facilities provided by Computing Services, with a good VPN and remote desktop connection to work PCs and a wake-on-lan facility if your PC is off. There is also an instant messenger server which enables both one-to-one chats and chatrooms for groups of people which enables us to co-ordinate effectively even when we’re at home in our PJs.

The combination of remote desktop provision and web-based tools for documentation and issue-tracking meant we were able to complete the work for the news system on time. Now that the snow's melted we're just waiting for a moment to deploy our changes and show the Press Office what we've done!