January 21, 2015

Meeting Minutes January 21, 2015

Present:

Donald Duff-McCracken (Chair), Darren Bondy (Secretary), Amy Aldous, Daniel Allen, Marta Bailey, Herbert Balagtas, Kirsty Budd, Michelle Douglas-Mills, Chris Francis, Tom Graham, Chris Gray, Marlon Griffith, Jim Johnston, Stephenie Koerne, Andrew McAlorum, Collin McIntyre, Mark McKay, Amy Meredith, Liam Morland, Kevin Paxman, Megan Saunders, Susan Shifflett, Terry Stewart, Jeff Voskamp (guest), Heather Wey, Andrew Smith, Kristina Zelko

Regrets:

Janice Cooke, Joe Kwan, Elizabeth Rogers, Dianne Inacio

Absent:

Dave Annable, Nigel Henriques, Paul Miskovsky

1. Approval of the minutes of the November meeting

The minutes of the November meeting were accepted as distributed.

2. Business Arising

none

3. Information Architecture Working Group (Mark McKay)

  • The 3rd IA work group meeting was held on January 20th; we thank everyone who attended these sessions and provided feedback.
  • Joe Kwan and Amy Meredith are working on a formal recommendation to report back to WAC, possibly in time for the next meeting.

4. Update on the State of the University Report (Mark McKay)

  • Marketing and Strategic Communications (MSC) has been working on the State of the University Report which will be unveiled in the first week of February.
  • This site was done outside of Drupal, as a way of quickly piloting new design concepts and technologies. Standalone sites such as this one are exploring features that the WCMS team hopes to roll into the WCMS, and thus serve as a way to prototype features.

5. Hootsuite (Mark McKay)

  • Currently working on a plan for how we can maximize the use of this tool through a sample experiment with use of the analytics features and to get familiar with the tools.
  • We decided on 50 users for the initial roll out; as we get more familiar with it and its capabilities we will look to add more users. 

6. Waterloo CMS update (Andrew McAlorum)

  • The Requested Features list was due for a refresh to make sure our priorities are aligned
  • There were 25 respondents to the survey and it is still open for those who would still like to respond.
  • We started publishing a Development Roadmap so people can see where we are at and what we are working on.
  • Ideation Initiative
    • We have been looking at our back log in the WCMS queue and have been categorizing the work; put them into 4 categories:
      • Projects, changes, infrastructure and unplanned work.
    • Currently working on ways to resolve as many of those as we can; Heather Wey, Kevin Paxman and Andrew McAlorum have been meeting each week to go through the list.
      • Of the 356 open tickets, we have review 118 so far; we were able to resolve or close 33, and found 23 projects, 51 changes, 7 infrastructure, and 3 unplanned work requests. Our goal is to resolve 20% of the backlog by the next fiscal year.
    • We will be contacting the owners of these tickets to get these issues resolved.
  • DevOps Role
    • We did a rejig of some positions within the WCMS team to address a bit of a bottleneck; a lot of work is needed in this area and Jeff Voskamp cannot do it all himself.
    • Liam Morland and Chris Shantz will be taking on some of that extra work to help speed up out work flow.
    • We want to look at doing automated testing for the build and deploy process.
    • Had some meetings last week regarding the performance issues with the WCMS and outages; tentative green light to refresh our hardware. Will keep WAC updated on the progress of this.
    • We need a dedicated project manager for the responsive web design project; McAlorum is working to make that happen.
  • Technical update
    • LDAP servers went down the day before the Christmas break, which broke all of our web forms; during this time content maintainers were unable to make new forms or edit current ones etc.
      • It was down from 9-11am.
    • Released version 1.9.6 of the WCMS on December 17th.
    • On January 30th the Friday morning seminar will be on “How to get started in Drupal without coding”
    • We silently re-launched uwat.ca to shorten URLs.
      • It is currently in beta form.
      • If you need a self-serve short URL, you can log onto https://uwat.ca and a randomly generated URL will be created.
  • Training update

7. Responsive Design Update

  • Collin McIntyre has been investigating a new template to use within the WCMS; a little more complex than we hoped it would be.
    • In conjuction with the good pace that is being made with the IA working group, it may be worth looking at the IA instead of continuing with templates.
    • Collin is taking an 8 month leave of absence to take on a project of his own. Appreciated the work that was done in this.

8. Web Steering update and Chair’s Remarks (Don Duff McCracken)

  • Members think it would be a good idea to have a party for when 500 sites have been migrated over to the WCMS.

9. Other Business

None.

10. Adjournment

Adjournment at 4:06 pm