I’ve recently added a new poll to the NGS website home page which asks if our users collaborate internationally and, if so, if this involves the NGS.

The latest question is the 7th poll to appear on the NGS website so I thought that in this blog post I would recap some of the results of previous posts.

The polls have covered a wide range of topics from “do you like our new website?” way back in November 2009 when we launched the new site, to questions regarding funding and access to resources.

Back in March last year we asked people which operating system they used to access the NGS. This has an important bearing on how our tools and applications are developed in the future as we need to ensure that they are usable by NGS users regardless of their operating system. We had 175 responses and the results were -

• Windows – 35%
• Linux – 43%
• Mac – 19%
• Other – 3%

The results were pretty much as expected with Linux users being in the majority. However it was interesting to see that Windows users are catching up and Mac users growing in numbers.

Also many moons ago we asked if our users would like us to offer an academic cloud service. This was a popular poll with 137 replies and the following results –

• Yes -66%
• No - 20%
• Don’t know – 14%

We are pleased to say that the NGS cloud prototype has been very popular and is currently running at capacity as we help and assist NGS users to make the most of this new prototype service.

Of course it’s not just specialised services that we offer, we also offer the day to day stuff that enables people to get started using the NGS. We wanted to see how the users thought we were doing in terms of authorising new applications to use NGS resources. Were we taking too long? Were we meeting expectations? We were pleased to see that nearly half (46%) of applications were approved the same day with 28% approved in the next 1 – 3 days.

We are always looking for new polls for the NGS website so if you have any suggestions then we would love to hear them. You can ask anything about software, hardware, services, usage, user stats etc. All the polls are anonymous.