Web Advisory Committee (WAC) Meeting

Wednesday, June 15, 2011 - Needles Hall (NH) 3004 - 3:00 pm

Present:

Lara Babalola, Don Duff-McCracken, Michelle Douglas-Mills, Sarah Forgrave, Guillermo Fuentes, Eva Grabinski, Adam Hewgill, Bob Hicks, John Kemp, Pat Lafranier , Tammy Marcinko, Paul Miskovsky, Isaac Morland, Liam Morland, Kris Olafson, Kevin Paxman, Terry Stewart (Chair), Kelley Teahen, Evan Truong, Chris Francis, Chris Gray, Marlon Griffith, Wendy Philpott, Jonathan Woodcock

Guests:

Chris Carignan, Jeff Voskamp, Heather Wey

Absent:

Marta Bailey, Mary Lynn Benninger, Janice Cooke, Jaymis Goertz, Chris Gray

  1. Chair's rem arks

a) This is Adam's last meeting. Thanks to Adam for his contributions over the years. Housing is reviewing their membership in WAC.

  1.  Minutes of May 18, 2011 - Approved

  1. *Web Redesign Project Update (Sarah Forgrave)* The team is working on information architecture for Departments within Faculties. Shorter more concise material will be launched as part of the content development kit. Sarah reminded the committee that taxonomy and how to integrate it into the Content Management System (CMS) is very important and that units keep it as a high priority.

  2. Waterloo CMS Project update

a) Domain Name Structure (Jeff Voskamp) Full document on WAC website. * A flat URL scheme for site names (eg, uwaterloo.ca/science; uwaterloo.ca/biology) * Redirects will be maintained for existing URL's for a period of time * No www for URL's The Chair suggested that members take these recommendations to their constituencies and that they be reviewed at the July meeting.

b) Faculty Pilot Demo (Chris Carignan)
A demonstration of the Environment Faculty pilot was shown. The demo is at uwaterloo.ca/environment . The rainbow navigation will be standard across all templates.

c)Usability Testing (Heather Wey)
Currently in the process of user acceptance testing (June 13-24). The purpose is to gauge the ease of use of the user interface and identify any issues. User testing protocol is on the WCMS SharePoint site (https://sharepoint.uwaterloo.ca/sites/waterloocms/). Improvements will be implemented in future iterations of the pilot. There will be more user acceptance testing when workflows are implemented in the Waterloo content Management System (WCMS). Results will hopefully be ready for the July meeting.

d) Open Source Model (Kris Olafson)
Website to visit - drupal.org/contribute/development. Can involve people all across campus and will be discussed at Student Technology Advisory Committee (STAC) as part collaboration with open data initiative.

e) Canadian Higher Education and Information Technology conference (CANHEIT) Panel Report (Eva Grabinski)
CMS sessions and "birds of a feather". Some of the lessons learned or shared:

  •  need for dedicated content-migration staff (trained students)
  • how to move forward for the mobile web - Waterloo asked to lead this
  • limit number of themes
  • focus support on 400-600 sites
  • 1200-1500 university-sites planned for migration
  • very large interest in Waterloo's taxonomy work
  • found Waterloo's proposed open-source model "fascinating"
  • vertical navigation is the norm
  • multi-site implementation is standard
  • design contractors don't know CMSes * what Waterloo is doing with features is really neat
  • migration is not trivial - even from CMS to CMS
  • interest in Waterloo implementation of Drupal 7

 
f) CMS Project Time Lines Environment (ENV) (environment.uwaterloo.ca) will launch in September/October and Applied Health Sciences (AHS) in November/December timeframe. From the pilots to date we know that outlining is time consuming 75-80% of time; ~2-3 weeks with knowing the content and ~250 -300 pages; there will be content that needs to be created and much that needs to be rewritten.

g) Accessibility and Forms Capability
Liam Morland is now the accessibility consultant on the CMS team as well as for the university. Liam will take the lead on the development of a Forms Capability for the university as there is a large demand - there are several legal and policy requirements and the goals is to leverage the Drupal implementation and to have a prototype in place for the January 2012 timeframe.

  1.  Guidelines on the reuse of content across websites sub-committee  

Last meeting asked for volunteers - Eva, Chris G and Kelley T. This committee has not yet met - Chris G will chair.

  1. Other business

Google Analytics Code (Jonathan)
Recommend use current version - Google, Javascript. Documentation will be posted at web.uwaterloo.ca.

  1. Next meeting - Wednesday, July 20 - 3:00 pm in NH 3004

*Meeting adjourned - 4:20 pm*

-- TerryStewart - 01 Jul 2011