Recently in Migration Initiative Category
Progress continues on several fronts with Taylor Online and the Portal.
Over the past several weeks, Online Communications, Information Technology and several other departments have been homing in on a solution for moving distribution of promotional announcements from e-mail to a channel in the portal. A prototype has been developed and approved. Once we work through a few remaining issues and setup the organizational structure, we should be able to begin using it in time for the fall semester. This solution will allow mostly free form Web pages in order to display graphics and other design elements. It will also resolve the hosting and accessibility of attachments.
While awaiting finalization of the athletics templates, we were able to migrate the following departments:
Additionally, we were able to add the Master of Arts in Relgious Studies program to the site. The MES degree will be migrated later since an area other than my own currently maintains that content.
At this stage we have just over 30% of the site migrated. When we complete Athletics, we believe we will have just over 50% of the site completed and hope to be able to provide an estimated timeframe for completion.
We will start Athletics next week and hope to have it complete by the end of the second week in August. Progress will once again be slowed due to vacations during the first week of August.
This week we successfully migrated the following areas into LCMS v3:
Additionally, the Experience Taylor section is now fully migrated -- with the Fresh Perspectives and Family Forum pages migrated with the assistance of Information Technology. (Those pages are now being dynamically generated -- easing the maintenance efforts required by Online Communications.)
The rendering issues have been resolved. The site should look normal again in Internet Explorer.
After conversations with Ted Bowers, we will be starting the Athletic content migration on July 10.
Next week we will migrate the Registrar's office in preparation for the new catalog and curriculum guides that are being updated this summer. This should set us up to be able to update departmental curriculum while we migrate academic departments. We may also migrate several other miscellaneous departments as well as completing an urgent project related to AQIP.
The week of July 3rd will not see much progress on actual content migration due to vacations. However, work on templates and training will continue.
This week we successfully migrated the following areas into LCMS v3:
- Alumni
- Parents
- Giving
- William Taylor Foundation
- Additional Experience Taylor content
- Search, Directory, Calendars
Everything went well, and I have a better sense of how long it will take to migrate areas of differing sizes.
For the rest of this week, we are working to resolve a few remaining rendering issues -- including a major issue with Internet Explorer indenting content in the main body area -- as well as preparing for the migration of Athletics. I hope that we will be able to start Athletics next week; however, that is yet to be determined.
We are also very close to completing the Experience Taylor section which has taken longer because of its many interactive components. Chris Swiontek (Information Technology) is putting the finishing touches on a script that will make the creation of the Chapel, Fresh Perspectives and Family Forums Web pages much easier.
This week we successfully migrated the following areas into LCMS v3:
- President's Office
- Inauguration
- Provost's Office
- University Relations
- Conference Services
- Most of Experience Taylor
These areas were migrated first since Online Communications is currently responsible for maintaining their content. If we would be asked to update them during the migration, it will now be much easier and quicker for us to do so.
Next week we plan on migrating the Advancement area, including Alumni, Parents, Giving and the William Taylor Foundation.
I forgot to mention this earlier, but the TUFW Web site now exists (non-templated) within LCMS v3. On April 18th, Tricia Halferty, Taylor Online Communications and IT worked to move the TUFW off of its "temporary" hosting in Indianapolis and onto our new content management system.
This doesn't mean that the TUFW migration is complete; there is still a lot of work to do to get the static HTML pages "templatized" so that the new CMS's WYSIWYG editor can be used to maintain the content. However, it was a big step forward and will allow us to incrementally migrate each area of the TUFW site, instead of having to do it all at once.
This further migration of the TUFW site will occur after the baseline templates have been created and tested.
Part of the Taylor and TUFW Public site migration projects, implementation of nTreePoint is continuing. Dan is close to finishing training materials for basic form creation, and we are also actively pursuing LDAP integration to ease logins and account maintenance.
We hope to rollout nTreePoint training for form creation along with the rollout of LCMS v3. A timeline for rollout to departments for creating surveys is uncertain due to concerns raised regarding "over surveying" of our internal constituencies. Discussions with the IRB and Tim Herrmann are being planned.
I apologize for the lack of recent updates. Between the conferences mentioned earlier, end-of-year vacations, the events surrounding the van accident, and a delay in our project (see below), we haven't had many updates to post about.
That ends today. :)
With the start of "real" work on the LCMS v3 Implementation Initiative, any new subsite not critical to the success of the University or continuing function of the public Web site will need to be put on hold.
I understand the inconvenience this will cause and want to offer a short explanation:
- With the effort required of our team on the initiative, we will unfortunately not have the time or resources to commit to setting up new subsites on the public Web site. Our efforts and focus need to be fully devoted to implementing LCMS v3, an initiative of the same scope as the Web site redesign two years ago. In the end, this should result in a quicker migration to the new content management system and, as a result, a quicker path to getting new content on the public Web site.
- Any new content that we implement now will extend the duration of our implementation initiative. Because of our desparate need to move to the LCMS v3 product, we are doing everything possible to keep the duration of this initiative as short as possible.
It is important to note that we will consider implementing critical needs, and all current content can and should continue to be maintained. Additionally, we encourage you to submit content plans/requests. Doing so will ensure that you will be ready to go when new development is resumed; we will still be reviewing such submissions.
I appreciate your patience and understanding during this time. Please contact me if you have any concerns.
