Online Communications: June 2006 Archives
Beginning this afternoon, I will be on vacation for the remainder of this week and next week. I will be "in town" and accessible if necessary next Monday evening through Wednesday.
If you need critical assistance in my absence, please contact Dan Reeves (dnreeves@taylor.edu).
The script allowing us to use our normal network usernames and passwords with the nTreePoint forms/surveys tool has been installed and we will be testing it over the next week. We've run into a couple issues already that we are hoping to resolve.
But the good news is that with this integration soon to be complete, all that is left to do before rolling out the tool for departmental use is to finalize the training materials.
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. :)
