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23 Sep 10 ITTS News Meeting – September 21, 2010

  1. CMS Update (Louise)
    the contract is with the lawyer – we hope to have it signed in October
    Louise is giving an update to Unit Managers at their October 6 meeting
  2. Introducing Jeff Dong, newest member of the ITTS staff (Sherri)
    Jeff’s primary responsibility is for our database servers and the interaction with them (maintenance, upgrades, support, etc.)
    we’re very happy to have Jeff on board
  3. Blogs & wikis migration (Rob)
    Rob is working away on the Dreamhost migration and is making good progress; he’s already about 50% done
    one thing he’s discovered during the process is that themes can get lost for blogs, so make sure you have a copy you can reapply

    Rob is contacting units to schedule the migrations; submit a Track-It ticket if you want to discuss timing before he contacts you

    many of our wikis seem to be informational and aren’t updated much
    a lot of them are getting spammed to the point where they’re unusable
    Rob has developed a script that checks for any admin activity in the last 90 days
    if the admin hasn’t logged in during the last 90 days, it will send an email to the address listed for that account to let them know the site is being converted to “read-only” status
    this means updates/edits will no longer be possible, but Rob can always reverse the read-only status so that it can be edited if changes need to be made at some point
    this will prevent spammers from creating new accounts and vandalizing the wikithe new blogs/wiki server is working amazingly well and is nice and clean

  4. ALA Connect Updates (Jenny)
    Jenny showed screenshots of the following Connect enhancements:
    – Round Table statistics
    – New link to download all attachments at once
    – Email notifications when someone friends you
    – New option to attach files to comments
    – Added a direct link to the revisions page for online docs in email notifications
    – Position titles now appear on rosters that synchronize with iMIS; note that if a member has two affiliations with a particular group, only the last one listed in iMIS will display in Connect; if that’s a problem, you might want to remove the affiliation you don’t want to display.
    – iMIS groups can no longer be made “open” since the rosters synchronize with the member database
    – We added more options for listing additional education and work history information in profiles
    – Because we’ve added the time and date of an event to the email notification for it, we now require you to pick a time zone; if you don’t, it will say “no time zone selected” instead of listing a time zone, so please be sure to pick one!

    We also upgraded chat a few weeks ago; there have been no reports of users getting kicked out of chat rooms since the upgrade was installed.
    There are some new features that came with the upgrade (see next blot post for more details), but you can now:
    – Pop the chat out into its own window
    – Pause autoscrolling
    – Make the box you type in bigger by pulling down the bottom border of the box

    Right now, we’re working on offering the ability to do “drafts” so that you can start writing something and stave it but not publish it yet.

    This fall, we’ll be working on the new conference scheduler (used to be known as the “event planner”) and giving each group its own file repository. We’re also going to redesign the Connect home page and group home pages so that they’re easier to read and use.

    These three major projects will take up the bulk of our time, so there won’t be a lot of smaller enhancements until either December or January.

  5. Web Application Firewall (Sherri)
    everything will be down when this is being worked on
    will be between 5-60 minutes at 5pm on Wednesday, October 6 (which is our normal maintenance time)
  6. KM System (Irene)
    we’ll be upgrading the KMS starting at 2pm this Friday (/24)
    it should be back up in a couple of hours, but if you access it during that time and notice something strange, it’s because the system is being upgraded in the background
  7. Web Editorial Board update (Karen)
    meeting summaries are publicly posted to its Connect space, with an email notice sent to unit managers
    there’s a special WEB meeting next week to discuss what needs to be done in preparation for the migration
    the overall message: be prepared to spend some time working on your unit’s content to make it clean and valid

    the Library has become less reactive to questions and more proactive to get the information out there and reorganized ahead of time
    they’ve have been working on the Guidelines and Standards section, the Library FAQ Sheets, an A-Z of topics
    they’re also doing interventions in major areas because then the number of questions about that subject drop when work is done to address problems
    one of the problems has been the Policy Manual, which was originally posted as a straight translation of the print version to the web (150 print pages as one long scrolling page)
    – the Library has redone it, with Rebecca taking the lead to work with Lois Ann and the Governance Office
    Karen showed work that was done to make it a true web document, such as making the data that needed to be in tables accessible, adding anchors for navigation, and adding a section for recent changes
    they’re still building the left navigation
    ITTS fixed everyone’s links to the Policy Manual and deployed the pages so the links wouldn’t break
    please be sure to link to the new version, rather than reproducing it (or sections of it) elsewhere on the site

    the Library has begun working with OIF to restructure some of its pages and is starting another project with the Governance Office

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