Web Advisory Committee Minutes - May 17, 2017

3:00p.m., May 17, 2017. NH 3118

Attendance

Present:

Donald Duff-McCracken (Chair), Darren Bondy (Secretary), Herbert Balagtas, Janice Cooke, Michelle Douglas-Mills, Graham Faulkner, Laurel Forbes, Tasha Glover, Marlon Griffith, Melissa Holst, Andrea Jennings, , Joe Kwan, Martin LeBlanc, Andrew McAlorum, Amy Meredith, Liam Morland, Kevin Paxman, Elizabeth Rogers, Susan Shifflett, Michael Tjendra, Chao Yang

Regrets:

Anna Beard, Beth Cotter, Sarah Forgrave, Chris Francis, Alison Hitchens, Stephenie Koerne, Andrew Smith, Kayla Snyder, Lori Suess, Claire Taylor, Heather Wey

Absent:

Marta Bailey, Tom Graham, Jim Johnston, Isaac Morland, Trevor Ridgway, Carlos Saavedra, Andrea Sweet

Approval of the minutes of April meeting

The minutes from the previous meeting were accepted as distributed.

Business Arising

None.

Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) update (Joe Kwan)

Joe Kwan provided an update on the second phase of CASL that takes effect July 1, 2017. CASL dictates the rules of engagement for the terms for which businesses are allowed to communicate with consumers.

  • The legislation is designed to prohibit the sending of commercial electronic messages without consent.
  • The initial implementation of CASL allowed consumers to report possible spam infractions to the government who would then follow through if they deemed it necessary.
  • As of July 1, consumers will have the option to open civil litigation against organizations without having to report it to the government.
  • Current staff/faculty and students do not fall under this legislation as they are considered to have a current business relationship with the University.
  • Businesses currently have the opportunity to seek express consent from consumers (in situations where they already have implied consent) before July 1.
  • Dawn Charlton will be meeting with Logan Atkinson to discuss wording for an email to go out asking for expressed consent.

Publications theme (Joe Kwan, Martin LeBlanc)

Provided a brief overview of the work that has been done on the publications theme in the WCMS. Joe Kwan would appreciate feedback/comments on the theme by June 9.

Slack presentation/demonstration (Kevin Paxman)

Kevin Paxman provided an overview of Slack and demonstrated how the tool works. View Kevin's presentation on Slack.

Waterloo Content Management System (WCMS) updates

Technical update (Kevin Paxman)

Since last meeting:

  • Open Scholar 1.1 was released, featuring minor changes and improvements from the 1.0 release, plus fixed a bug that could cause homepage deletion. Release notes.
  • Collaborate was decommissioned.
  • WCMS 2.5.0 is coming soon; hoping to have test release up on profiles server by the end of this week. The full feature list and release date are to be determined. One new item is that contacts and home page banners will have endpoints to connect to Open Data.

Other news:

  • Focus points in our current sprint include Open Scholar, Stories, non-English Responsive and Drupal 8.
  • Generic template based on conference look.
  • Considering requiring off-campus use of non-production servers (pilots, training, dev, etc.) to use the VPN, for additional security and to limit accidental sharing. Looking for input on whether WAC members feel the convenience of not having to use the VPN is important, if having to use the VPN would be a barrier that would discourage users, etc., as well as whether the policy should be different for some servers vs. others; all fine

Training and support (Andrea Jennings)

Migrations and training – by the numbers

Since April 19, 2016:

  • 684 sites live
    • 401 websites in responsive design
      • 449 responsive sites live in WCMS
  • 61 in progress on pilots (60 are responsive)
  • Clients to Drop-in lab: 14 clients
  • WCMS training courses: 72 attendees

What’s happening with the WCMS?

New to Web Resources

  • Web courses
    • All SEW courses offered throughout May and June are posted!
  • UWaterloo Scholar how-to docs
  • Proposed change to the WCMS guidelines for use
    • Current guidelines reflect the experience of moving sites over when more oversight may have been required initially.
    • In most cases now, this responsibility is delegated to another person - that’s often someone in charge of communications.
    • We don’t think we should replace (remove) those 2 statements (it is important that site requestors know they need the support of a higher-up).

The WCMS supports websites for use by academic and academic support departments of the University within the following guidelines:

  • The website supports the administrative, research, teaching and learning objectives of the University.
  • A designated faculty member or regular staff person; (authorized by the department) must be assigned as Point of Contact and Site Manager.
  • Requests for a new website from academic support units must be supported by the unit head.*
  • Requests for a new website from academic units must be supported by the Faculty Associate Dean of Computing or equivalent.*
  • For security reasons, access to development servers is restricted to WCMS staff. Units on campus can request access to the development server to work on projects that may be integrated into the central build.

* Unit heads/Associate Deans of Computing (or equivalent portfolio) may assign a Point of Contact to approve new websites for a specific area.

Drop-in lab

No scheduled closures.

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.

UWScholar and staff (Andrew McAlorum)

After the discussion at the last meeting regarding UWScholar for staff it was brought to the Web Steering Committee; members agreed that it should be only used for professional reasons for staff members.

  • Members also agreed that 'uwaterloo.ca/staff' is an appropriately named URL for this service
  • Staff who are scholars should have access to a page on uwaterloo.ca/scholar but those situations will be addressed individually.

Other business

  • Kevin Paxman provided a brief demonstration of the generic template for the WCMS that is now available.
  • Manager, Web Development in IST has now been posted.

Meeting adjournment

The meeting adjourned at 4:12 p.m.