Web Advisory Committee Minutes - February 15, 2023

The minutes of the January 18, 2023 Web Advisory Committee meeting were accepted as distributed. No business arising.

1. Mailing list and MS Teams group updates (Tom Graham)
   • We currently have a list on mailman, MS Teams, and website with different members of WAC.
   • WAC mailing list and MS Teams will continue.
   • Action item: Tom will look into streamlining the process.
2. Hybrid meetings (Tom Graham)
   • There is space in Needles Hall with OWL capabilities for a meeting.
   • A poll was administered and 80% of respondents want to keep the meeting online.
3. New website (Tom Graham)
   • How can we better organize the material from Web Advisory Committee and Web Steering Committee to figure out what’s going on in the web governance world?
   • Web Governance site is in staging and won’t be launching soon.
   • Action item: Send Tom ideas through email as we move towards a launch date.
      

1. Google Analytics 4 (Tom Graham)
   • A working group will be put together to share best practices, create documentation for guidance, and to ease transitions with new employees
   • Action item: Send Tom and email if you’d like to join the GA4 working group

1. Product updates (Joe Kwan/Michael Tjendra)
   • Single page features will soon be deployed to WCMS 3 – we have gone through requirements and validation for responsibilities and added items to sprint
   • Requirements and validation gathering for publications and conference are done
   • Providing supporting communications as everything is ready and shipped
   • There is no date set for when all sites need to be in WCMS 3
     • We will find out sometime in June whether Drupal.org will extend community support for another year (was previously extended to Nov 2023 and but will reassess at that time)
     • 60-70% installations are still Drupal 7
2. ​​​​​​​Development update (Kevin Paxman)
   • ​​​​​​​Next version of WCMS 3.2.3 will launch soon
     • Conducted QA testing and found some bugs that will be fixed
   • Focuses for the current sprint:
     • Migration bug fixes
     • ImageX is taking on research and analysis for French and Chinese site reports
     • Blocker fixes in publishing references
     • Tickets for maintenance of WCMS 2 custom modules
   • WCMS 3 release in the near future will provide Site Managers the ability to set Form Editor
3. ​​​​​​​Training and support update (Sarah Cooper)
   • ​​​​​​​Course completions have been busy for start of term: 25 content maintainers, 13 site managers, 39 WCMS 3 Fundamentals course completions, 24 WCMS 3 Web Forms course completions
   • Please use and promote the WCMS Help Portal rather than submit an RT
     • Communications will circulate once the IST team shuts down RT
   • Helpful tips:
     • Site migrations – Tokens may not populate properly. Please make sure that the token path matches in WCMS 3.
     • For web forms – The “from” email needs to be a @uwaterloo.ca email but the email element can be any email address
4. ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Migration update (Charlotte Armstrong)
   • Migrations by the numbers:
     • ​​​​​​​357 sites on WCMS 3
     • 697 sites on WCMS 2
       • 534 FDSU
       • 31 Publication
       • 82 Single page sites
       • 50 Conference sites
     • ​​​​​​​36 sites have migrated so far this term
       • 27 sites remediated by our team so far this term
     • ​​​​​​​220 eligible FDSU sites still not migrated. Others are being re-evaluated.
       • Reminder: Website ineligible for migration include those with:
         • customized content types
         • bibliographies
         • non-english sites
     • 34 migrated sites still sitting in the RT queue waiting for launch dates
   • ​​​​​​​What's new?​​​​​​​
     • Migration request form walk-through. The form can be found on the WCMS support portal or the Requesting a WCMS 3 site page on the Web Resources site.
     • Submit migration requests with preferred migration dates now. The more requests we receive in advance, the better we can plan to make sure we have the resources in place to remediate the sites.
     • Spring migration planning for Faculty sites: 3 out of 6 faculties have given tentative dates to migrate their faculty sites. We are focused on migrating and remediating large sites (faculty and departmental) that abide by the academic schedule during the Spring 2023 term.
   • ​​​​​​​Reminders
     • ​​​​​​​Collaborative remediations for large sites: Website lead’s team remediates web pages, our WCMS co-ops remediate all other content types and also assist with any web pages that have a lot of expand/collapse. 
     • Migration preparation help: if we have capacity, we will help delete past events since events
     • After remediation tasks for Website Leads: re-applying the Google Analytics tracking code.
     • Spring term starts May 8, site creation/migration/launch pause is the first week of term, the week between terms and last week of term
     • Happy to delete old migrated and remigrate or old staging sites – understanding that resources, time, content changes etc. may mean the site has to be re-migrated. 
     • Let us know if you are having trouble encouraging your stakeholders to delete old pages (such as Events, old syllabi, etc.) from the site and Joe Kwan will be happy to help
   • ​​​​​​​Kudos​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
     • Michelle @ Faculty of Health for sharing migration planning for Winter and Spring term
     • Erica @ Faculty of Eng. For sending an updated migration plan spreadsheet
     • Migration of the month: Jen Konkle – Conrad Grebel university college site

1. The topic of accessibility and websites on campus came up during a FAST meeting (Marlon Griffith)
   • Our website is not fully compliant with the AODA and University Relations is working with a number of campus stakeholders to create a Digital Accessibility Plan to address these issues (Tom Graham)
     • An AODA report was filed in 2021 and we were non-compliant for web accessibility
     • We are working on addressing public-facing content on our websites, including WCMS and non-WCMS content
     • Other groups are also working on addressing documents and applications behind a log-in screen which will be required to be accessible as well
     • The digital accessibility project includes procuring a software solution that will help us monitor our website and proactively identify some accessibility compliance issues 

Adjournment at 4:07 p.m.