Web Advisory Committee Minutes - August 17, 2022

Attendance (25/79)

Donald Duff-McCracken (Chair), Michael Tjendra (Notetaker), Alexis Condotta, Amanda Vos, Bernice Ma, Charlotte Armstrong, Caitlin Yu, Daniella Cross, Danielle Jeanneault, Elizabeth Rogers, Erica Clement-Goudy, George Choy, Greg McIntyre, Iva Badjari, Janice Cook, Jessica Barch, Joe Kwan, Kevin Paxman, Krista Godfrey, Marlon Griffith, Michelle Douglas-Mills, Nick Di Benedetto, Sarah Forgrave, Tom Graham, Trevor Ridgeway, Troy Grandy

Absent:

Amy Meredith, Andrew Smith, Andrea Jennings, Adriann Kennedy, Alyssa Clarkson, Andre Gignac, Anar Jahangirli, Beth Cotter, Cassie Bechard, Dawn Charlton, Derek Leung, Elisabetta Paiano, Elizabeth Kleisath, Greg Smith, Harminder Phull, Herbert Balagtas, Irene Boby, Israel Cefrin da Silva, Jay Mielke, Jen Konkle, Jennifer Halcrow, Jennifer Gillies, Jim Johnston, Jodi Szimanski, Kayla Snyder, Kathryn Fedy, Lannois Carroll-Woolery, Liam Morland, Lisa Brackenridge, Lori Suess, Marta Bailey, Martin LeBlanc, Melanie Scott, Melissa Benajmin, Michael Dorr, Nancy Schnarr, Natasha Jennings, Pavol Chvala, Rebecca Graper, Ryan Lahti, Sami Iskandar, Stephanie Longway, Stephanie Koerne, Tara Hillis, Tasha Glover, Traci Dow, Thulasi Mahendrarajah, Tom Cauduro, Troy Grandy, Valerie Pablo, Wendy Pilpott

Minutes of June 2022 and Business Arising

The minutes were accepted as distributed. No business arising.

WCMS 3 Development (Kevin Paxman)

  • Unfortunately, infrastructure issues prevented the release of 3.1.10 before the person who normally builds releases went on vacation, and capacity issues prevented the release from being built in the interim. He’s back now, we are in the process of building and testing.
  • 3.1.10 will introduce support for authentication required sites, with the same caveat as WCMS 2, that files and images are accessible without authentication if you know the URLs
  • Bibliography replacement (aka BibCite/References/Publications/Biblio) might come as early as 3.1.11, actual timing depends on sorting out the last remaining issues
  • Focus points in the current sprint include:
    • Adding the CSV content report
    • Starting work to add the missing caption field to facts and figures
    • Fixing date/time display bugs with opportunities

WCMS 3 Migration Update (Charlotte Armstrong)

Stats:

Our migration co-op team remediated all of the sites that were requested! We didn’t say no to any migration requests. These sites including some more complex sites (Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC), Stratford, Writing and Communications Centre, Plant Operations) that helped us move forward with future remediation planning.

Eligibility updates:

Although expand/collapse feature doesn’t migrate, based on capacity, we are able to offer manually migrating content to the expand/collapse feature. With this new remediation service, the number of Wave-1 eligible sites have increased by 134, and we now have 401 sites that are eligible for migration.

Each site is re-evaluated then we receive a request and if the site is complex, the migration plan and site migration preparation will be discussed with the website lead.

Current items that make a site ineligible:

  • Customization
  • Non-english sites
  • Authenticated sites (coming soon!)
  • Bibliographies/publications (coming soon!)

Migration request queue:

Continue to submit your migration requests with the knowledge that we will start migrating sites the week of September 9th and in order of date received/requested.

Resources:

  • Migration prep checklist page update
  • Remediation resources
    • Video embedded on the how-to remediate docs coming in the fall.
  • Remediation training – will commence September 15. Do not register until you have your site prepped for remediation. Remediation training is updated every time Migration issues have been updated and we encourage people to retake remediation training if a significant amount of time has passed since your last session.

Migration remediation process updates:

  • Collaborative remediation options (our team remediates all content types except for web pages) coming in the Fall.
  • All-hands migration specialist remediation approach for complex sites greatly improves our turn-around time for completions.

Fall-term co-ops:

We will have a team of 6 co-op WCMS Migration Specialists. We found that assigning a faculty to specific co-ops was not as efficient as assigning specialization in certain remediation issues. We had each one specialize in a certain remediation (e.g. image galleries, promotional items etc.) and this increased our efficiency tremendously.

We will have an aggressive training plan for these new co-ops so that we can quickly accelerate and keep our momentum for migrated site remediations.

Training & Support:

  • Expand/collapse module along with an optional activity will be included in WCMS 3 Fundamentals starting in the Fall of 2022.

WCMS 3 Communications (Joe Kwan)

  • Joe is looking into migrating the WCMS' issue tracking software from RT to Jira Service Desk.
  • Eric Bremner and Tyler Stryuk are back from parental leave. Welcome back!
  • Sarah Cooper and Andrea Jennings will be back soon.
  • Joe is drafting an RFP to properly support multilingual sites on WCMS 3.
  • Joe is in talks with GitLab Inc. to move their on-prem GitLab over to vendor-supported GitLab.
  • A question was asked about whether IST has started looking for a replacement for Liam Morland's role as the web accessibility expert. IST is reassessing the role.

Other Business

  • Marlon Griffith asked whether the University of Waterloo will be notified when law enforcement agency request access from our vendors to our data stored on the cloud. Kevin Paxman responded that vendors have to follow the law of their country. Pantheon has servers all over the world, but IST prioritize the use of servers located in Canada to host the WCMS 3. Greg Smith would know more, and Joe will follow-up with him.
  • Kevin Paxman shared an article about alternative text for NASA’s Webb images. He asked whether anyone knows of any recent study being conducted on how often people are manually typing "www." in the URL bar when the URL doesn't require it. Also, all redirects from http should now work on https as well, if managed by IST's redirect servers.

Adjournment

Adjournment at 3:57 pm