Web Advisory Committee Minutes - November 21, 2018

3:00 p.m., 21 November 2018. NH 3318

Attendance

Present:

Donald Duff-McCracken (Chair), Michael Tjendra (Secretary), Lannois Carroll-Woolery, Graham Faulkner, Chris Francis, Laurel Forbes, Tom Graham, Marlon Griffith, Andrea Jennings, Joe Kwan, Derek Leung, Isaac Morland, Liam Morland, Carrie Nickerson, Kevin Paxman, Elizabeth Rogers, Andrew Smith, Heather Wey, Chao Yang

Regrets:

Herbert Balagtas, Marta Bailey, Lisa Brackenridge, Sandra David, Tasha Glover

Absent:

Approval of the minutes of September meeting

The minutes from the previous meeting were accepted as distributed with minor changes:

• Added a space before and after "IdM-SA-Graduate Studies".
• A comment from Marlon that in Engineering, all HTTP redirects to HTTPS.

Business arising

No new business arising.

Waterloo Content Management System (WCMS) training update (Andrea Jennings)

Migrations and training – by the numbers

• 888 sites live
• 51 in progress on pilots
• WCMS training courses: 4,516 attendees
• LEARN training courses:
  • SEW099: 157 completed; 41 work-in-progress (WIP)
  • SEW100: 31 completed; 11 WIP
  • SEW101: 33 completed; 7 WIP

What’s happening with the WCMS?

Known issue with MailChimp:

MailChimp changed their embed code so that only the “M” is capitalized, and our embedding widget expects the old style where MailChimp is “camel-cased” with a capital M and C. Existing embeds still work, but until 2.7.0 is shipped, if you need to add a new MailChimp form to your site, you will have to manually change the lowercase “c” in “Mailchimp” to a capital C.

On Web Resources

Web courses

All SEW courses offered throughout November and December are posted on the Web Resources website.

New course: SEW106 – Creating Accessible Documents

Now that you have been introduced to web accessibility, this course will provide you with the knowledge and skills needed to create accessible documents. Through hands-on activities and lecture material, you will be able to make Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents, as well as PDFs accessible – therefore contributing towards the University of Waterloo’s commitment in achieving accessibility, and complying with the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA).

 Please note:

• There are currently 7 spots available for the Nov. 28 offering
• Pre-req of SEW026 – Intro to Web Accessibility (no exceptions)
• Will be offered once per term

WCMS co-op training

We will be offering SEW099 Co-op training on January 8 & 9 from 9am – noon. Register your co-op student! Cancellation - 72 hours cancellation with no penalty – contact Sarah White.

Drop-in lab

The Drop-in lab will be closed:

• November 22
• December 4 (WatITis conference)
• December 20 (end-of-term maintenance)
• January 3 (maintenance)

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.

Site launches

The last day to launch sites in the WCMS before the Christmas holiday will be December 20. The first day to launch sites in the New Year will be January 8. If you need alternate arrangements, just let me know.

…reminders!

End of a new term is a great time to review site permissions!

WCMS technical update (Kevin Paxman)

• As of today, the demo sites on wms-profiles are running the 2.7.0 beta; an announcement email with preliminary release notes will go out in the next few days.
• We have shipped our first “Open Street Maps” (OSM) map in place of Google Maps on the Food Services location page (OSM maps for events is shipping with 2.7.0)
• Google Search Appliance (GSA) replacement RFP has just closed; currently reviewing options.
• Focus points in this sprint include preparing the final 2.7.0 release, work on important dates, contrib module updates, and testing the WCMS against PHP 7.x. The full list will be on the Web Resources site’s web development roadmap page in the next few days.
• Two presentations from WCMS team members at WatITis:
  • Liam Morland will be doing a live accessibility audit
  • Eric Bremner and Tyler Struyk will be doing an update on the Pattern Lab/Drupal 8 theming
• Friday morning seminar on December 14^th: “Whatever Happened to Drupal 8?”

Campus web font usage (Joe Kwan, Kevin Paxman)

[Don] - Download the PowerPoint presentation (PPTX).

• The web fonts used by the WCMS were licensed by University Relations for use on the WCMS only.
• Non-WCMS sites have been directed to use alternative fonts (see Bureau Grotesque, Le Monde Livre Std, and Typ1451) or to pay for their own licenses.
• Until recently, brand fonts had to be licensed directly from the font creators.
• In October, Adobe announced changes to their Adobe Fonts (formerly called TypeKit) service; the key changes for us:
  • As long as someone in the organization has an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription – for any product that includes access to Adobe Fonts – all websites in the organization can use fonts from the Adobe Fonts collection.
  • All limits on page views, domain limits, etc. have been removed – unlimited usage is now permitted.
  • Any individual with an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription can use any font from Adobe Fonts on their desktop.
• Two of the three brand fonts – Bureau and Le Monde – are in the Adobe Fonts collection.
• A proposal is in front of web steering to:
  • Allow Adobe Fonts to be endorsed as another method to obtain the brand fonts.
  • Identify an alternative to Typ1451 in Adobe Fonts.
  • Include Adobe fonts information in documentation on the Web Resources and Brand sites.
  • To respond to requests for brand fonts with information about Adobe Fonts.
  • To change the WCMS to point to Adobe Fonts instead of locally hosted web fonts.

Review of domain name management policy (Donald Duff-McCracken, Joe Kwan)

• The current policy on management of campus domain names was last updated in 2011. The policy is under review to bring it to date.
• The main change is to de-escalate the issue of one domain name being requested by multiple parties (e.g., more than one group requested for "artificial-intelligence", both subdomain and subdirectory).
• A draft copy has been circulated on the WAC mailing list for members to review and provide feedback. If no one express concerns by the end of November, it will be assumed that WAC has accepted the document.

Meeting adjournment

The meeting adjourned at 4:30 p.m.