Web Advisory Committee Minutes - December 18, 2019

3:00 p.m.,  18 December 2019, NH 3318

Attendance

Donald Duff-McCracken (Chair), Melissa Holst (Secretary), Jamie Cook, Michelle Douglas-Mills, Graham Faulkner, Chris Francis, Marlon Griffith, Joe Kwan, Derek Leung, Liam Morland, Kevin Paxman, Elizabeth Rodgers, Carlos Saavedjra, 

Absent:

Iva Badjavi, Herbert Balagtas, Lisa Brackenridge, Cynthina Breen, Lannois Carroll-Woolery, Tom Cauduro, Beth Cotter, Sandra David, Laurel Forbes, Sarah Forgrave, Tom Graham, Troy Grandy, Danielle Jeanneault, Andrea Jennings, Adriann Kennedy, Ryan Lahti, Martin Leblanc, Greg McIntyre, Amy Meredith, Trevor Ridgeway, Andrew Smith, Greg Smith, Lori Suess, Annaka Willemsen, Mirko Vucicevich  

Regrets:

Mart Bailey, Tash Glover, Neil McKay, Isaac Morland, Michael Tjendra

Approval of the Minutes of Previous Meeting

The minutes from the previous meeting were accepted as distributed.

Business Arising

None

Portal 2.1 update (Pavol Chvala)

  • The overall look and feel has been refined in 2.1.
  • With the redesign we have made everything more accessible from the bottom bar, calendar is more user friendly, more options have been implemented to make it easier to add future options.

Assessing search after eight months (Joe Kwan)

  • New search has been launched, working with current state and going through gap analysis to see what are we missing and how can we improve.
  • Features that they use to deliver an overall satisfaction, will re-exam search options in the future.
  • Managed search solutions, was something that we did not look at nor are we committed to it. Would like to see if it will work just like google search.
  • Time frame looking at the end of April 2020.
  • More to follow.

WCMS Training/Support update (Andrea Jennings)

All WCMS courses offered throughout January and February are posted on the Web Resources website.

WCMS co-op training

  • We will be offering WCMS for Content Maintainers Co-op training on January 7 & 8 from 9am to noon.
  • Register your co-op student! Cancellation - 72 hours cancellation with no penalty - contact Sarah White

Drop-in lab

  • The WCMS Drop-in lab will resume regular hours beginning in January: Tuesdays & Thursdays - 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm in MC 2060.

     If you require special arrangements outside of the regular drop-in hours please contact Andrea, ajenning@uwaterloo.ca.

Site Launches

  • The last day to launch sites in the WCMS before the Christmas holiday will be December 19. The first day to launch sites in the New Year will be January 9.

WCMS Technical Update (Kevin Paxman)

  • Focus points in this sprint are: prep for next WCMS feature release with latest Drupal 7 version, Drupal 8 build-out, Catalogs content type, and improving our site accessibility database
  • We will be tying server updates with PHP 7.x to the next WCMS release instead of doing them as separate updates.
  • The Friday morning Web Dev Rev Sessions are done for the year and will return on January 10th.

Cloud hosting project update (Joe Kwan)

  • An approved hosting member was awarded to Pantheon, who is the 2nd largest Drupal provider.
  • Contract negotiations are on going at the present time.

  • The Cloud Hosting project is for the in-development WCMS 3 and not for the existing WCMS 2 nor for other for Drupal-based non-WCMS purposes such as 'Scholar'.

Consulting plan for Drupal 8 (Joe Kwan)

  • We are currently consulting with 3rd party vendors.
  • Looking at best practices, experiences, who has deployed this before. There is also potential for people across campus to help out.
  • There are roughly 800-1000 sites that require to be moved.

WCMS 3.0 Update (Kevin Paxman)

  • This was presented at WatITis.
  • WCMS 2.8 started to be built, tested and deployed to release the current set of completed fixes.

Other Business

None.

Meeting Adjournment

The meeting adjourned at 4:10 p.m.