Web Advisory Committee (WAC) Meeting

Wednesday, July 20, 2011 – Needles Hall (NH) 3004 – 3:00 pm

Present:

Janice Cooke, Don Duff-McCracken, Michelle Douglas-Mills, Sarah Forgrave, Guillermo Fuentes, Eva Grabinski, Chris Gray, Bob Hicks, John Kemp, Pat Lafranier, Tammy Marcinko, Isaac Morland, Kris Olafson, Kevin Paxman Terry Stewart (Chair), Kelley Teahen, Chris Francis, Chris Gray, Marlon Griffith, and Wendy Philpott, Jeff Voskamp (Guest) and Heather Wey (Guest)

Absent:

Marta Bailey, Mary Lynn Benninger, Jaymis Goertz, Paul Miskovsky, Liam Morland, Evan Truong and Jonathan Woodcock

1. Chair’s remarks

No Chair’s remarks

2. Minutes of June 15, 2011 -

Approved

3. Waterloo Content Management System (WCMS) Project update (Content Management Systems (CMS) Team)

User-interface testing report (Heather) – Nine people from across campus were invited to participate – 5 people participated – the purpose to gauge the ease of use, and identify any issues for content contributors of the WCMS. Two were from faculties, 1 from a department/school and 2 admin support. All are content authors and editors; 3 site managers/administrators and 1 site developer.

Participants were guided through completing 3 tasks and filled out questionnaires after completing each one.

Task 1 involved creating a brand new piece of content; task 2 involved creating another one by cutting and pasting text from an existing site; and task 3 involved participants editing an existing piece of content.
Feedback – make admin bar more obvious, hide extra functionality, create short how to documentation accessible for User Interface, improve tools for adding and aligning an image, remove grey box that appears under the settings group when only one or two options are available and finally make the task of moving a menu item easier.

See “WCMS Project Usability Testing (PDF)”.

Rollout and migration schedule (Eva)

There are approximately 1000-1500 websites to move. Applications will not be moved in the short term. The project has received approval to hire co-op students in January to assist the CMS team with migration, because many departments don’t have the resources. The co-op migration team will begin after department reviews and approves with intended launches within a two week timeframe. A second training and support specialist position has been advertised.

Schedule: September 2010 - September 2011 will be building the foundation (leverage Drupal CMS framework to build University of Waterloo; develop internal expertise to support). September-December 2011 will be for migrating early adopters and January 2012 and on it is intended to rollout University of Waterloo CMS product. See “WCMS Timelines (PDF)”.

Migration strategy (Eva)

Existing content for a site will be moved as-is into pre-launch CMS space. Departments will have ~ 2 weeks to review pre-launch space before going live in the CMS. See “WCMS Migration Scenarios (PDF)”.

Training and support plan update (Heather)

V2 will have migration added to it with author, editor and site manager on Sharepoint. The team is preparing training modules and is developing “drop in” labs where authors and editors can work on sites and ask questions including “test sites”. For a copy of the plan, contact Heather Wey.

Update on team expansion (Eva)

Two back end developer positions have been approved by the Provost and are awaiting final approval from HR. The team was given consolidated space in Math and Computer building (MC) 2037. Don Duff-McCracken is also assisting with design work.

Information architecture work update (Sarah)
- Long-term structure/picture
  - Domain-name naming conventions (e.g. avoiding name-space collisions)
  - Flat URLs and structure are going to change. Published URLs will be redirected to new sites for approximately four years.
  - Controlled taxonomy (and vocabularies)
  - Inventory of redirects required as sites moved over (closer to migration dates of particular sites)
- Short-term priorities
  - Work with early adopters on IAs
  - Work with early adopters on controlled vocabularies
  - Work with early adopters on domain-name naming conventions
Work with early adopters on inventories of required redirects. Webapps are being worked on a case-by-case basis but departments will have input into the site names using best practices. This information is being added to Sharepoint for review.

Planned updates for panels for University of Waterloo home (Eva)

4. Web Content Ownership and Reuse Committee

Members: Chris Francis, Eva Grabinski, Nancy Heide, Ryan King, Joanna Magee, Kelley Teahen, Jonathan Woodcock (Chair). The objective is to develop plain-language guidelines and outline best practices for web-content maintainers about web-content ownerships and re-use.

Notes: Follow-up to Web Content Stewardship report submitted to WAC
Documentation: Minutes and report to come (timeline for report to be decided)
Schedule: Kick-off meeting was July 7 and meetings will be held every two weeks starting next week

Next meeting – Wednesday, September 21 – 3:00 pm in NH 3004