Web Advisory Committee meeting (September 19, 2012)

September 19, 2012– Needles Hall (NH) 3004 – 3:00 p.m.

Present:

Marta Bailey, Beth Bohnert, Kirsty Budd,  Natalie Cockburn,  Janice Cooke,  Michelle Douglas-Mills, Don Duff-McCracken, Chris Francis, Guillermo Fuentes, Alison Gelata, Chris Gray, Marlon Griffith,   Karen Jack, John Kemp, Pat Lafranier, Colin McIntyre, Isaac Morland,  Liam Morland, Kris Olafson,  Terry Stewart (Chair),  Jeff Voskamp, Dave Wallace (guest) and Jonathan Woodcock.

Regrets:

Heather Anderson, Chris Carignan.

Absent:

Amy Aldus,  Dave Annable, Mary Lynn Benninger , Cynthia Breen,   Nigel Henriques,  Jim Johnston, Tammy Marcinko, Geoff McBoyle, Paul Miskovsky, Wendy Philpott, Suzana Pinto, Megan Saunders, Jodi Szimanski.  

1. Chair’s Remarks

  • Welcome and thanks to Liz Doede (IST) who has agreed to be secretary for the Web Advisory Committee.
  • Welcome to Dave Wallace, CIO, who started July 9th and is already putting his stamp on IT at UW.  He will speak later in the programme. 

2. Report on PSEWeb Conference (Alison Gelata, Kirsty Budd)

“PSEWEB is a conference for college and university marketers, programmers, designers, digital architects and community managers – the people behind the online faces of our institutions.”  Alison and Kirsty attended the conference in July in Halifax.

  • Presentation is online. (Powerpoint version / PDF version)
  • Kirsty and Ali are waiting for results of a follow-up survey that have requested.
  • Content strategy - letting campus know that it is a must. 

Question and comments:

  • Comment:  In terms of different uses of web and stakeholders, were there any question regarding that?  Notion that we should not be "App-happy" and determine a strategy for apps. Possibly look at undergrad website and see what is be used that could be an app (i.e., a shadow program).
  • Question:  a lot of different roles connected to UW, difficult to get website set up like this.
    • Answer: A few schools are looking into creating a blog, making it student focused.
  • Question:  Did the Conference target faculty or students?
    • Answer:  it depended on which were attended; the attendees split their participation between the two.
  • Question: When is the next PSEWEB conference and where?
    • Answer: Location has not been decided, should be in the GTA.
  • Question: Perhaps, we could contribute or offer to host?
    • Answer: Perhaps.  At minimum, we recommend everyone consider attending some time.

3. Introductions and Remarks from Dave Wallace, CIO

Dave commended the Web Advisory Committee for its work and said it  is critical for the University. Before starting in IST, he first searched the University web site.  When searching for the organizational charts found many old documents, orphaned documents and old links. Hopefully, this is being corrected with the migration to the WCMS and the new Google Search Appliance.

IT strategic plan:  is asking for more people to get involved, this is for IT people not just IST group.  IT infrastructure, IS people, information, services, technology, etc. 

IT has never been defined, what does it mean to us?  Deans and provost want it to continue to move forward, particularly as it betters the student experience.

Integration, how to make it seamless? Mobile was a key factor. While at the City of Toronto, Dave pushed open data.

  • Most open data is GIS
  • Open data is about statitistics and  open bench marks
  • What are the bench marks?  Who determines that?

Strategic plan -Enterprise Architecture, framework is important to lay out basic blueprint.

  • Waterloo is known for technology, but we are not living up to the standard. Students have trouble getting the support when they get here.
  • Wants us to invest in our people to be better supported so they can work on their career strategy.
  • IT strategic plan is being done 100% by staff, there are 22 plus on the committee.
  • the consultation plan that will be completed by December.
  • Dave would like as many people involved in the committee as possible.

The Chair thanked Dave for taking time out of his busy schedule to learn more about the Web Advisory Committee and to talk about directions for IT on campus.

4. Approval of minutes.

  • Minutes were approved with one correction: Megan Saunders was in attendance.

5. Business Arising

  • The Chair noted that Web steering is meeting regularly now and he will be able to act as a conduit with that group
  • Eva Grabinski (Digital Initiatives) will be providing an update on Web Accessibility at the October meeting.
  • An update on the HTTP/HSTS initiative was requested. The first pass apparently broke a number of pages. Would there be a warning next time?
    • Yes, there was a problem for about 15 minutes before it was caught and corrected. The page content was correct but was badly formatted. 
    • Yes, there will be a warning next time. 
  • Feedback on the home page.
    • The Chair agreed to ask Chris Carignan for a report on the feedback on the new home page at the October meeting.
  • Natalie reported that the WCMS team and CPA were working on a mobile overhaul of the website.

6. Digital Initiatives Update (Jonathan Woodcock)

  • Web Steering is looking into the question of whether to update the CLF to match the look and feel in the WCMS;

  • Feedback on the Homepage from WAC:

    • home page is looking busy;

    • hard to find things;

    • biggest complaint: e-mail and Daily Bulletin links not on the homepage

    • finding the right pathway to get to some departments difficult

    • search doesn’t work (see below under 8. Google Search Appliance).

7. Waterloo CMS Update (Pat Lafranier, Kris Olafson)

  • Please familiarize yourself with the Guidelines for use of the Waterloo Content Management System (WCMS).
  • It’s the start of a new term, don’t forget to review permissions on your site for past co-op students!  (We recommend that you remove the role(s) assigned to a user rather than removing their account from your site.)
  • WCMS Drop-in Labs. Come and meet our new training and support co-op students, Ben and George.  They will be happy to help you!  We have had a total of 133 in attendance at the Drop-In Labs in the previous 2 terms.
  • Developer Drop-in Labs. If you are interested in providing feedback to the Waterloo Content Management System (WCMS) development team, please join us!  Labs are held on the 4th Wednesday of every month, from 1-4:30 p.m. MC 2060.
  • WCMS 1.5.7 now pushed out to all sites. 
  • Latest Stats:

  • Added 'diff' capability to see changes made to pages over time

    • Needed for wikis

    • Working on wikis for Nexus documentation (knowledge base), Student Technology and IT Strategic Plan on prototypes

  • There have been requests for changes in IA from Faculties/Dept

    • Can be difficult to make exceptions for one group;

    • We should try to avoid this as it kills consistency across campus;

    • Once we have a portal, IA becomes much more important for directed messaging

    • Is anyone interested in meeting once a term to review the current IA? If anyone is interested, please contact Kris Olafson or Chris Carignan.

  • ​There are currently 140 outstanding feature requests.

  • WCMS team hopes to have full-width page template available soon.

  • A request for video banners is being considered.

8. Google Search Appliance Update (Kris Olafson)

As discussed at previous WAC meetings, a Google Search Appliance (GSA) has been purchased to replace the current search at http://search.uwaterloo.ca. The search appliance has completed a crawl of campus sites (600,000+ pages) and is now available for testing at http://eureka.uwaterloo.ca.  The crawl was limited to sites within the uwaterloo.ca domain space; if you feel that you have a compelling case for indexing sites outside of this scope we can discuss at the next WAC meeting. We are still working on indexing "people" for the People Search from UWLDAP, and we expect that functionality to be live for the launch. In addition to ensuring that content you wanted crawled is accounted for, please check that any content you wanted ignored was not indexed. Please provide feedback to request@uwaterloo.ca ASAP as we hope to launch in 2 weeks’ time, and add ‘GSA feedback’ in the subject line”. 

Currently working on: 

  • Pages that are in http and https
  • Servers with multiple aliases
  • Retired servers
  • 'Same content presented multiple ways
  • People search and theming of people search
  • Getting a new globalsign certificate on UWLDAP to solve.

Everyone should check their content for pages that should not be indexed.  If you are using an access control list that restricts content delivery to 129.97, this will not prevent the new GSA because it is within 129.97.  Web maintainers are requested to use robots.txt or some other method to make sure that GSA does not index information. 

Launching early October. Communications will be send to uw-web mailing list and the Daily Bulletin. 

9. Next Meeting 

  • NH 3001, 3:00-4:30p.m., October 17, 2012

10. Meeting Adjourned at 4:30 p.m.