University Application Packaging Services
University Application Packaging Services
Prepare teaching and learning applications for the new academic year.
What is your application estate costing your engineering team?
Use the slider below to select the total number of applications you package each year. Based on a blend of 30% easy (4 hrs), 40% medium (12 hrs), and 30% complex (24 hrs) applications, see how many hours your team can save per annum.
ROI Calculator
Engineer Hours Saved Per Annum
680 hrs
The bow wave hits every summer.
In-house teams protect term-time stability by deferring application updates — then the backlog, the holidays, and a skeleton crew collide in August. We package your estate year-round, so the bow wave never builds.
80% of the request-to-retirement lifecycle is typically spent on discovery and packaging alone.
- THE BOW WAVE:deferred updates land all at once
- Autumn Term: stable, updates deferred
- Spring Term: backlog quietly grows
- Summer Term: the bow wave breaks
IN-HOUSE WORKLOAD ACROSS THE ACADEMIC YEAR
One equation explains most university IT backlogs:
(In-house Apps + COTS Apps) x Term Deadlines x Holidays = Annual ChallengeVulnerability patching gets done efficiently all year. Feature updates and in-house bespoke applications are the ones saved for "out of term" so they fall due at the end of Summer term. That bow wave of work coincides exactly with staff holidays and application sponsors being away, right when the University needs them most. It's a pattern we see at nearly every institution we work with.
Universities also carry an unusual mix of applications that general IT teams rarely touch day to day - specialist engineering and research software that needs real subject expertise to adapt and support correctly.
Specialist software we regularly package:
- MATLAB
- SolidWorks
- Ansys
- R Studio
- Anaconda
- ArcGIS
- QGIS
- Maplesoft
- Minitab
THE SOLUTION
Discovery and packaging that runs all year, not just in August. We work as a continuous extension of your team, so the Summer term stops being a sprint against the clock.
01. DISCOVERY Capturing every application's DNA Before anything is touched, our discovery team evaluates each application and records exactly how it works and who relies on it.
- Owner details and original installation media
- Licence information and renewal terms
- Interview with the application owner
- Screenshot of every installation step
- Dependencies on other applications
- Test criteria for user acceptance testing
02. PACKAGING Lean packages, built to industry standard The packaging team takes that discovery record and builds a package that's ready for deployment and documented for whoever maintains it next.
- Smoke tested against defined standards
- Passed through virtual UAT
- Packaging document covering any custom scripting
- Six-month warranty on every package
Get your teaching applications ready for the new academic year
Every summer, university IT teams face a familiar deadline. Faculties need new applications and updated versions; teaching rooms, labs and managed devices must be ready before students return. Yet requests often arrive late, application owners are difficult to reach during holiday periods, and packaging, testing and deployment must all fit into a short window.
APPtechnology can help with cyclical burst capacity packaging, or alternatively deliver communication and processes designed to smooth the peak demand over a more sustainable timescale. For instance we proactively use previous year’s application packaging records to contact application owners and establish what will be needed for the upcoming year. Starting this conversation before the summer break helps spread discovery and packaging work across more months, flattening the summer demand peak. We then provide specialist packaging capacity when requests rise. Your team retains control of priorities, request acceptance and deployment while we prepare and quality assure packages to the agreed standards.
Free up your internal team’s capacity for other projects
The summer months are a key time for university IT to deliver key projects, and today’s streamlined teams struggle with adding application packaging to the workloads, either as an annual burst requirement, or as a yearlong ongoing service. The biggest application packaging time thief for an internal team’s capacity is typically application discovery, namely communicating with application owners for confirmation of their needs. Whether it is simply confirming versions, chasing for media locations, or confirming how an application should be configured, this typically takes time and repeated effort to glean from the academic workforce.
APPtechnology uses automated communications as a pestering agent to contact application owners, and we offer a discovery interview service alongside our application packaging activity, undertaken by our packaging consultants. Configuration information is gathered and documented, used as a reference during the packaging process, and included in the completed application packaging documentation we supply for each application. This becomes a valuable source of information for next years requirements, as well as being an obvious component of any CMDB records.
Webinar: How UK Universities Are Solving the Summer IT Crunch
Free, No registration Required
David R. Mays, co-founder and director of APPtechnology, presents a 22 minute overview of how application packaging-as-a-service can revolutionise the critical summer break period for university IT services.
Plan earlier using what you already know
Your prior packaging information is a head start; we can use existing records of applications, versions, owners, configurations and packaging requirements to prepare the next academic year's request list. We contact application owners ahead of the summer to confirm whether they need the same version, an upgrade, a configuration change or a new product. Reminders and response tracking help your IT team see what is confirmed, outstanding or at risk.
This approach reduces repeated discovery work and gives you an earlier view of the likely summer workload. Where owners respond early and installation media are available, packages can be prepared before the rush. Requests needing licences, dependencies or user testing can be identified sooner, helping flatten the demand peak rather than simply adding people to clear it in August.
University of Plymouth Success Story
How APPtechnology freed up to 80% of the internal team’s time on application packaging so they could concentrate on bigger projects.
Make the next summer easier to manage
Tell us how many applications you expect to update, when teaching environments must be ready, and how your team currently gathers requirements. We can help you shape an early owner-confirmation exercise and a packaging plan that fits your academic calendar.
Discuss your university packaging plan