Web Advisory Committee Minutes - April 19, 2017

3:00p.m., April 19, 2017. NH 3001

Attendance

Present:

Donald Duff-McCracken (Chair), Darren Bondy (Secretary), Herbert Balagtas, Anna Beard, Michelle Douglas-Mills, Laurel Forbes, Chris Francis, Tasha Glover, Tom Graham, Marlon Griffith, Andrea Jennings, Stephenie Koerne, Joe Kwan, Andrew McAlorum, Isaac Morland, Liam Morland, Trevor Ridgway, Elizabeth Rogers, Carlos Saavedra, Susan Shifflett, Kayla Snyder, Michael Tjendra, Heather Wey, Chao Yang

Guests:

Colin Bell, Eric Bremner, James McCarthy, Zachary Seguin, Chris Shantz

Regrets:

Marta Bailey, Beth Cotter, Janice Cooke, Sarah Forgrave, Alison Hitchens, Amy Meredith, Carrie Nickerson, Kevin Paxman, Andrew Smith, Lori Suess, Claire Taylor, Melissa Zapletal

Absent:

Jim Johnston, Martin LeBlanc, Andrea Sweet

Approval of the minutes of March meeting

The minutes from the previous meeting were accepted as distributed.

Business Arising

Questions and comments about IA and the responsive design should be directed to Joe Kwan.

UW Map

James McCarthy and Zachary Seguin presented an update on some new features upcoming in the Campus Map.

  • Will be launching a search function in beta soon.
    • Will need to do some work on the taxonomy of the map before launching search function (for example, if you search for coffee it doesn’t bring up Tim Horton’s at this point).

Agile platform (Colin Bell)

Colin Bell, Director of Information and Integration Management in IST, discussed three pieces of technology that his team is working with.

  • Jira
  • Confluence
  • Mattermost

Still in the early stages of this but for those interested in the technology, please contact Colin Bell for more information.

Waterloo Content Management System (WCMS) updates

Technical update (Chris Shantz)

  • WCMS 2.4.1 and Drupal 7.54 was released. It includes theming fixes for accessibility, editing pages for all standard content types now include links to documentation for that content type to name a couple. View the release notes for more details.
  • WCMS 1.13.4 and Drupal 7.54 was released. This release was to update Drupal and to update modules that had security releases available. View release notes for more details.
  • Open Scholar 1.0 final was released. Some new features include support for LaTeX, Bio and CV are now separate entities and users can now select a specific citation style for their site, to name a few. View the Open Scholar release notes for more details.
  • WCMS 2.5.0 is coming, some features include adding Snapchat to the social media icons as well as bringing publications into the responsive profile. The full feature list and release date are to be determined.
  • Our current sprint is focusing on Open Scholar and Conference.

Training and support (Andrea Jennings)

Migrations and training – by the numbers

Since March 22, 2016:

  • 711 sites live
    • 5 new sites have launched (in responsive theme)
    • 6 sites have relaunched in the responsive theme (351 websites in responsive design)
      • 397 responsive sites live in WCMS
  • 58 in progress on pilots (56 are responsive)
  • Clients to Drop-in lab: 11 clients
  • WCMS training courses: 24 attendees

What’s happening with the WCMS?

Co-op student training for the Spring term

The May 2 and 3 offering of the SEW099, Content Maintainers course is now full. We are continuing to collect submissions and will contact you regarding additional options.

Register your co-op student for the training.

Site Managers: time to review permissions!

At the end of the current term, and the start of the new term - don’t forget to review permissions on your site for past co-op students.

New to Web Resources

Upcoming SEW courses offered throughout May and June will be posted soon!

Drop-in lab

The lab will be closed April 6 and April 17 – 28. If you require special arrangements outside of the regular drop-in hours please contact Andrea, ajenning@uwaterloo.ca.

Regularly scheduled WCMS Drop-in lab hours: Tuesdays & Thursdays - 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm in MC 2060.

2017 Accessibility Conference: Becoming the Catalyst for Inclusion

Registration is now open for the 2017 Accessibility Conference, taking place May 30 and 31, 2017 at the University of Guelph.

  • Link to the conference website
  • Information about registration
  • Session descriptions

Collaborate EOL (Andrew McAlorum)

  • Brought up the idea of decommissioning Collaborate a few meetings ago; there wasn’t much push back then. Wanted to bring it back here one more time to see if there was anyone opposed to it being decommissioned.
  • as no members expressed concern over it being decommissioned, it will be so. 

Personal websites for staff (Andrew McAlorum)

  • Following a seminar on UWaterloo Scholar, some people were asking about staff being able to use the service to create pages of their own.
  • We are capable of making this available for staff.
  • We would need to determine a name for it as it would differ from the Faculty/researcher instance of it.
    • One possible name could be uwaterloo.ca/staff
  • Guidelines on appropriate use will need to be drafted prior to release.

UW design template for non-WCMS web apps (Andrew McAlorum)

Following up on the discussion at the last meeting regarding a template for non-WCMS apps.

  • Andrew’s team will work on this; Kevin Paxman has already done this for the staff conference registration site.
    • Kevin may be able to demo something at the next meeting.
  • It will be available on git.uwaterloo.ca but it will not be heavily supported via RT/support requests.

Other business

Information Architecture working group

  • Meeting hold was sent out for a date in June.
  • For those who are not on the list but are interested, please contact Joe Kwan.

Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL)

  • The next tier in CASL will be taking effect on July 1, 2017.
  • Will discuss at more length at the next WAC meeting.

Meeting adjournment

The meeting adjourned at 4:26 p.m.