February 18, 2015

Web Advisory Committee 

3:00p.m., February 18, 2015. NH 3001

Present:

Donald Duff-McCracken (Chair), Darren Bondy (Secretary), Daniel Allen, Herbert Balagtas, Kirsty Budd, Michelle Douglas-Mills, Chris Francis, Tom Graham, Chris Gray, Marlon Griffith, Karen Jack, Stephenie Koerne, Andrew McAlorum, , Mark McKay, Amy Meredith, Liam Morland, Kevin Paxman, Megan Saunders,  Susan Shifflett, Andrew Smith, Sam Thoman, Jeff Voskamp (guest), Heather Wey, Kristina Zelko

Regrets:

Janice Cooke, Elizabeth Rogers, Terry Stewart

Absent:

Amy Aldous, Dave Annable, Marta Bailey, Nigel Henriques, Dianne Inacio, Jim Johnston, Joe Kwan, Paul Miskovsky

1. Approval of the minutes of the January meeting

The minutes of the January meeting were accepted as distributed.

2. Campus Map update (Andrew McAlorum, Don Duff-McCracken, James McCarthy)

• The current Campus Map is out of date in terms of design, is not mobile-friendly (i.e., not responsive), and is not AODA compliant.
• The Mapping, Analysis and Design (MAD) team from the Faculty of Environment have agreed to share their cartographic experience to review some of the options for improving the map.
• James McCarthy (from MAD) provided a demo of the work he has been doing on a new campus map.
  • They wanted to retain the current functionality of the existing map but resolve the above mentioned issues.
  • Most of the data is pulled from the open data repository on campus or from the Region.
• Andrew has been working with Creative Services to get all of the data that is in the current map, and transition it into open data. Nathan has been working on this task. Currently the map data is layers in one Illustrator file.
  • Will be working with Creative Services to ensure it is on brand.
• Regarding questions from the audience about adding new features, the initial goal is to replicate the functionality in a responsive and ADOA compliant map. The design is being built on as flexible of a platform as possible, however, so that new functionality could be added at a later date.

3. Business Arising

• A follow up discussion regarding the URL shortener was held.
  • The purpose of uwat.ca was to shorten URLs for use in social media.
  • While there was some concern for using it over Hootsuite’s default URL shortener (ow.ly), but Hootsuite can be configurable to use other shorteners with no loss of functionality.
    • McAlorum and Mark McKay will report back at the next WAC meeting regarding Hootsuite.

4. Waterloo CMS update (Andrew McAlorum)

• DDoS attack happened this morning; for example, over the course of several hours we got over thousands of requests on an IST feedback page.
• Based on the logs this attack came from on campus.
• It caused an intermittent outage throughout the morning.

• Development Roadmap (Andrew McAlorum)

  • Quentin sprint took place from January 26- February 17^th
  • Responsive publication site port was added, which was high on our priority list.
  • Some of the projects on the go include a security project; we are working with ISS to make the WCMS more secure. We also took on the IST Service Catalogue project.
  • Raquel sprint is up next which will include migrating the Daily Bulletin to the WCMS.

• Training & support update

  • Migrations: 460 sites lives, 52 in progress.
  • Added an additional co-op training session (February 25 & 26) due to demand
  • A Friday morning seminar was held -- Getting started with Drupal development – without coding! This was recorded if you missed it.
  • We have added a new section to the how-to docs.
    • How-to documents for Web Form Editors
  • Added how-to docs for:
    • How to Schedule content to publish/unpublish
    • How to Create fillable PDF forms
      • How to Change the Submit button into Download PDF
      • How to Create a download PDF link on the confirmation page
    • How to Compare revisions
  • Responsive CAS is now live -- which is an excellent step in the movement towards responsive pages on campus.

• Technical update

  • Working towards the 1.10 release of the WCMS.
    • To see the full list of features included in this release please refer to the web resources website.
  • We are looking at potentially culling revisions past a certain point; we have come across a module that will allow us to cut it off after a specified number of revisions. The reason to do this is to improve performance of the system.
    • Andrew will further research this and present the findings at the next meeting.

5. Responsive Design update (Andrew McAlorum)

• Project management support of web redesign – it was approved and we have completed the project intake form for that project. Jonathan Woodcock will be the project manager for the responsive redesign. He started to write a project charter for it. As Jonathan has a vast amount of web experience (and is a former WAC person), this is a great addition to the project.

6. Chair’s Remarks/ web steering update (Don Duff-McCracken)

• Introduced the new representative from the Faculty of Environment, Sam Thoman to the committee.
• The Web Steering Committee has a website that will include membership, minutes, mandate, etc. It was previewed at the meeting and is now live at https://uwaterloo.ca/web-steering-committee/

7. Other Business

None.

8. Adjournment

Adjournment at 4:13pm