Web Advisory Committee Minutes - October 23, 2019

3:00 p.m.,  23 October 2019, NH 3318

Attendance

Donald Duff-McCracken (Chair), Melissa Holst (Secretary), Lannois Carroll-Woolery, Tom Cauduro, Pavol Chvala, Michelle Douglas-Mills, Graham Faulkner, Laurel Forbes, Alayna Frey, Chris Francis, Troy Grandy, Marlon Griffith, Jennifer Halcrow, Joe Kwan, Ryan Lahti, Derek Leung, Iaasc Morland, Liam Morland, Jay Mielke, Kevin Paxman, Elizabeth Rogers, Stefany Snedden, Michael Tjendra,

Absent:

Herbert Balagtas, Lisa Brackenridge, Iva Badjari, Marta Bailey, Cynthis Breen, Beth Cotter, Sandra David, Jasmin English, Sarah Frograve, Tasha Glover, Tom Graham, Danielle Jeanneault, Andrea Jennings, Adriann Kennedy, Martin LeBlanc, Greg McIntyre, Neil McKay, Amy Meredith, Trevor Ridgeway, Andrew Smith, Lori Suess, Carlos Saavedra, Greg Smith, Calire Taylor, Annaka Willemsen, Mirko Vucicevich

Approval of the Minutes of May Meeting

The minutes from the previous meeting were accepted as distributed.

Business Arising

  • The question was raised regarding the SEW/IPD Courses, as to what the cancellation policy is as it is unclear. Joe will clarify and report back at the next meeting.

Open Data (Sergei Bobkin)

  • Currently using version 2, version 3 will be live soon and hoping to have all the issues fixed
  • With the launch of version 3 we have reorganized as to what is the high priority concerns, which includes course listings, important dates, Quest data and how to keep it updated.
  • Questions/comments please feel free to reach out to Sergei at sbobkin@uwaterloo.ca

Odyssey Instructional Support (Isaac Morland)

  • This tool helps with assisting course staff and administrating their courses, the primary use for this tool is to help tasks associated with scheduling, printing, and administering written exams.
  • This will ultimately cut down on the emails and paperwork that flow through the registrars' office.

WCMS Training/Support update (Kevin Paxman)

All WCMS courses offered throughout September and October are posted on the Web Resources website.

WCMS Drop-in Lab

  • Regularly scheduled WCMS Drop-in Lab hours have resumed: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1-4 p.m. in MC 2060.
  • The WCMS Drop-in Lab will be closed on October 24 and 29.
  • If you require special arrangements outside of the regular drop-in hours please contact Andrea Jennings.

Reminders

  • Have you hired a co-op student to work on your website?  See this list of resources that will help them get up to speed.
  • LinkedIn Learning IST-WCMS playlist is available. The playlist will answer questions like: What is responsive design? What is Drupal, and why do we use it? How do I create and maintain an effective website within the WCMS?

WCMS Technical Update (Kevin Paxman)

  • Focus points in this sprint are: search, recoupling conference sits, adding PowerBI embedding, bug fixes, and Drupal 8 work.
  • Recoupled publications work was tested by site maintainers; in our next sprint we will be working on the issues discovered
    • the need for this work pushes back the 2.8.0 release and may mean we see a 2.7.2 release focused on PHP 7.2 compatibility, as we begin to update our servers.
  • A fix for the issue with Chrome and randomized home page banners was shipped within a few days of the last WAC meeting; an update was shipped this afternoon to fix the issue where randomized banners might be replaced multiple times.
  • An update to UWaterloo Scholar 1.7 is expected on the evening of October 30th. this is a bug fix release. Release notes are online.
  • The development freeze for external (non-WCMS team) developers, mentioned at last month's WAC was officially announced.

People Search (Kevin Paxman)

  • In-depth discussion regarding the new people search
  • The new search provides web results on the left side and people's profile on the right, it was noticed that there were some errors when it came to the people profile.
  • Kevin will go back and look into some of the concerns that were brought forward, regarding formatting issues fixing the the people's profile.
  • A link will be sent out to members to make further comments/concerns before launch.

Replace Mattermost with Teams? (Donald Duff-McCracken)

  • It was brought forward to see if there any interest within the group to continue with live chat when it comes to general web discussions.
  • Submit an RT request if you would like to join the mattermost group 

Other Business

None.

Meeting Adjournment

The meeting adjourned at 4:30 p.m.