ITTS Update

Collage-a-Rama: n. (fr. Old Eng., lots of Collage); 1. a two-week intensive push to get all remaining Active Matter web content moved over to Collage. 2. March 10 – 21, 2008.

We are about to embark on “Collage-a-Rama,” an intensive two-week push to get all remaining units’ web content live in Collage. Beginning March 10, we will “freeze” all remaining sections of Active Matter content, migrate them, review them, clean them up, and take them live in Collage. During this time, ITTS and Duo Consulting will be working overtime to import and deploy content in Collage, clean up any import problems, and provide training and one-on-one help.

In addition, Diane Foote, Executive Director of the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), has graciously agreed to serve as project mentor for anyone having Collage conversion jitters. ALSC recently migrated its content to Collage with very little drama, so Diane has a wealth of practical advice on what to look for, how to fix minor problems, and when to ask for help. We will also solicit other Collage-savvy volunteers to help units that are short-staffed or otherwise in need of help.

There is a rough schedule for Collage-a-Rama (.doc file), but we are still working out with Duo which units will be converted on which days and hope to have that information to you by the end of this week (02/29/08). When your content has been imported and deployed in Collage, your unit will have 24 hours to review it and report any problems. Duo and ITTS will fix major structural, layout, graphic, and navigation issues you report. Units will be required to fix broken links and upload missing files themselves. If staff in your unit have not been to Collage training, now would be a good time to look at the schedule of upcoming training in the KMS (http://km.ala.org, click on “Training” tab). Five full-length Collage classes and nine 2-hour drop-in help sessions have been scheduled during Collage-a-Rama.

Units/Sections not yet live in Collage are: Advocacy Bucket, Awards & Scholarships, Awards Bucket, Book Links, Book Lists, Contacts & Questions, Continuing Education, Editions, ERT, Events & Conferences, IFRT, Issues & Advocacy, Meetings, News/ Press Releases, NMRT, OIF, OLOS, Our Association, PIO, Pre-White House, Products & Publications, Professional Tools, Site Map A-Z, SORT, Support ALA (Development), Website Advisory Committee

Please contact Rob Carlson at x3272 with any questions.

Posted by Jenny under CMS | No Comments »

This coming Sunday, March 2nd, we will be completing the Sympa upgrade and migration (to its own server). Beginning around 9:00 a.m. and continuing throughout the day, Sympa will be unavailable. We don’t know exactly how long this will take, but ALA mailing lists will be down during this time. We’re estimating 4 to 6 hours, but we won’t know for sure until we’re in the thick of it. (We may have a better estimate by Friday.) No list mail will be lost. Mail will be queued and delivered after the upgrade. If all goes well, we anticipate that the queue will be cleared out by Sunday evening.

After the upgrade, you will see a significantly improved “landing page” for Sympa. As part of the migration process, we will be assigning all lists to various unit and subject categories, which users may then browse. There will still be the option of viewing all lists, and searching for a list name. Please remember, though, that if a list of yours is set to be “invisible” it will not appear in the new unit and subject categories, nor will it appear in the list of all (visible) lists, nor will it appear in search results.

Please know this is a work in progress, and we welcome your ideas for improvement. If you have any questions about the upgrade/migration, please let me know.

Rob

Posted by Jenny under Mailing Lists | No Comments »

1. Enhancements to current services (Sherri)
* Outlook migration
Down to just a few people left
Louise will do training on the calendaring function in March
Reminder you can schedule meetings in Outlook without having to share calendars
Louise discussed two levels of access for sharing calendars: full access (includes) editing, viewing only capabilities; can schedule meetings without sharing calendars
Can also create a group calendar within Outlook, all without having to display any details about individual appointments
Working on feature to allow meeting room booking via Outlook

* New GiveALA form
Showed new version of the form
Also includes a printable version
New online version charges the user’s credit card automatically and puts record in iMIS automatically
“Eye” icon on the form gives you more info about the individual fund for that donation
Can also add categories, including divisions (working with the Development Office to do this)
Also handles paying pledges

Question: where is contact information if someone wants to ask a question?
Answer: Development Office info is on the main GiveALA page

2. Web issues (Rob)
* Donavan Vicha has joined ITTS

* Collage implementation
Kudos to ALSC for their work on the most painless migration yet
All of the divisions are now live in Collage
Since Midwinter, we’ve had an issue importing files, but have an open ticket on the issue with Serena and are pushing to have this fixed
Working on a plan to pull all of the remaining units over en masse; 85% of the ActiveMatter site is live in Collage
Have to put an end to this endless migration! Have to just migrate the last of it and then clean up any problems
Have a couple of roundtables that will go live and then will do everyone else at once

* Next steps
UserWorks is currently reviewing the comments on the final graphic design and they will have a report for us next week; most are highly positive, and the ones that aren’t tend to be helpful, a few are just snarky and not helpful

Last big push is to get the information architecture survey online so that we can then push on combining the IA and the design

Question: is the design template still up somewhere?
Answer: no, but we can probably get a copy of the files

3. New Capabilities
* Intro to Dreamhost services (Matt)
(See Matt’s slides here for the “easier to read” version)
New hosting service is called “Dreamhost” (name of the company)
Problems we were trying to solve
- Limited applications
- Limited flexibility
- Limited to b2evolution and a shared installation of Mediawiki
Advantages to the new hosting service
- Move certain more open, interactive services offsite
- Provide more flexibility and control to units and member volunteers
- More nimble software installation, customization, and upgrade
- Wider range of software options
- Scalability
Dreamhost gives us
- A lot of disk space and bandwidth that allows hosting of file uploads, podcasts, and video
- Automated installs and upgrades for a range of free, open source packages
- With some minor limitations, freedom to install and run a wide range of LAMP applications
- Optional scalability (for cost)
Other Dreamhost advantages
- Isolation of services on a per domain/per unit basis
- Ability to give out a range of powers and privileges to meet unit needs: application admin, ftp/shell access, or full blown Dreamhost panel control (more on this at next month’s meeting)
How to get started
Email helpdesk, not Matt
- Let us know what application you’d like to install (wiki, blog, bulletin board, etc.)
- Tell us where on the web you would like it to appear (http://yourdomain.ala.org/direction)
- If requesting a wiki, include the wiki security levels
Important data points
ALA staff member must request an application (just like with Sympa)
Application admin passwords should be changed and carefully guarded
Attend a wiki workshop

Question: is there an automated conversion process for migrating blogs and wikis to Dreamhost?
Answer: automated, not yet, but working on it; for wikis, have to export tables and then import them into the new location

Question: so URLs will change? What happens if someone clicks on links to our posts?
Answer: links would take them back to the old blog; can choose to leave old content there; URLs won’t translate from b2e to Wordpress

Question: timeframe for migration?
Answer: on an ad-hoc basis based on requests from units/divisions because ITTS can’t just arbitrarily move all of the content since URLs and skins will change

Note that if you have a Wordpress blog that Matt set up for you, it’s already on Dreamhost

Question: have you heard of Semantic Wiki and can we use it?
Answer: we have no exposure to it, but almost anything can be installed offsite; becomes a matter of priorities and resources to install software for one unit

Question: will past blog entries be migrated?
Answer: they can be using a special skin on b2e that lets you grab all of the text of your content, which you can then import into Wordpress

* Sympa upgrade (Rob)
Getting close – end of the month
Have a significantly improved landing page as a result
Someone (probably Rob) is going to have to go into the software and assign a category to every list
We have more than 1,000 lists, but only about 400-450 display on the “view all lists” page because the owners don’t make them visible
“view all lists” and the search box will be at the top of the page, with options for browsing by unit below these
Have freed up services on the Sympa server, too, so performance should improve

Question: if we want to have a read-only list with subscribers, will it be easier in Sympa? (members have asked for this)
Answer: yes, definitely; can also make your archives publicly viewable, which is another way for folks to follow the posts

Question: do “closed” lists show?
Answer: well, there’s “open” and “closed” and “visible” and “invisible” and it all depends on how the owner configured it; we’ll have to help our users understand what all of these terms mean

* Instant messaging (Jenny)
while IM was prohibited in the past, it no longer is
ITTS can install software for you, but suggested that staff might want to try using Meebo instead since it’s web-based and can be easier to use
just sign up for a free IM account with one of the big services (AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Google Talk, etc.) and then log in to Meebo using that info

4. Association 2.0 (Jenny)
* Online Communities
ITTS issued a RFP last week, with responses due yesterday; we received five proposals with a possible sixth one on the way
Will go through them this week and select a vendor fairly quickly
Dates have slipped a little because of the RFP, but still hoping to beta test in late March or early April
Target is still to have first phase live is still Annual

Question: will we be connecting the new Communities to iMIS
Answer: that is certainly the intent; the question is how, but there is a whole Drupal community dedicated to figuring out that connection, so it’s not just us working on this

Question: are web edits of information being synchronized back into iMIS? is this working now?
Answer: yes

* ALA Staff wiki – http://wikis.ala.org/alastaff/
we are currently locking down the staff wiki so that only staff can view and edit it
slight delay while we connect the wiki’s authentication system with our network so that staff can just use their network logins and passwords (instead of creating new ones) – should be done this week
once done, staff should feel free to post whatever they want there

ITTS has moved the publicly-oriented tech support help for blogs, wikis, podcasting, etc. to a new Tech Support wiki at http://techsupport.ala.org/
will be fleshing this out more in the coming months

Questions: how do we get to all of the staff wikis?
Answer: there is a link to the staff wiki in the lefthand navigation of the KM system; from there, we can create a cheat sheet on the staff wiki that links to any others

Question: how do we clean people up off the network and remove their logins?
Answer: send a request to helpdesk and we’ll take care of it

* ALA Universe page – http://netvibes.com/ala
if you want to try to stay current with what’s happening with ALA overall, feel free to visit the ALA Universe page that updates automatically
you can also create a free account on this site and customize this page to also show your unit/division’s blog(s) or wiki(s)

5. Training (Louise)
* iMIS
Will be adding iMIS refreshers for the Handbook process; will not make them mandatory in order to get your Handbook pages in
Documents are in the KM but will post them from the wikis, too
Trying to find a way to make it easier to search the KM system for them by file type

* Collage
“Collage-a-Rama” fest – all Collage, all the time training at some point in the near future
Learning Collage wiki has been revamped (http://wikis.ala.org/learningcollage/) and should be easier to use
Louise will send out a request to the Collage information list asking people to let her know what they’d like to see added to the site

Noted the need for instructions on how to ftp and add logo for wikis on Dreamhost

6. Next meeting: April 1, 2008 (no fooling!) in the Carnegie Room
Don’t forget you can track news from ITTS on our blog, which has just moved to http://itts.ala.org/update/

Posted by Jenny under ITTS Update meetings | No Comments »

At today’s ITTS Update meeting, Matt is going to do an intro overview of the services available to ALA-affiliated units on our Dreamhost-based hosting service. Here’s a PDF version of the slides he’ll be showing. If you have questions, please feel free to ask them in the comments.

Notes from the meeting to follow.

Posted by Jenny under ITTS Update meetings | 1 Comment »

There was a backup of mail due to the outage earlier this week, causing some delays in delivery. One source is Yahoo. We have a large number of list subscribers using Yahoo accounts. One or more of those subscribers has, instead of choosing the unsubscribe option from list generated email, reported us to Yahoo as spammers. Yahoo is now temporarily rejecting our mail. The traffic was further increased by the messages Yahoo sends to inform us of the rejection.

We have contacted Yahoo to explain that these emails were sent to subscribers of lists (such as AL Direct, which went out on Wednesday). We’ve received a reply, part of which is quoted below. According to Yahoo, the situation should be self-correcting: our email server retries sending messages. We are also investigating Yahoo’s best practices for bulk email, to attempt to lessen our resemblance to spam.

We’ll know more later today, now that the server has finished processing the backlog.

Tim Smith

From Yahoo:

“If you are seeing a 421 error code in your SMTP logs indicating that the messages you are trying to send are ‘temporarily deferred due to user complaints,’ this means that we have observed unusual traffic patterns from your IP address and have been getting considerable complaints from our users regarding emails from your server.

This is not a permanent error; your system may automatically re-try at a later time.”

Posted by Jenny under Email Issues | No Comments »

Email coming from the outside to ALA was down from 4:30 p.m. yesterday (2/13) until 8:24 a.m. this morning (2/14). A system change was made by our consultants for the Sympa upgrade (scheduled for later this month) that caused the outage to occur. The setting was corrected this morning at 8:24 a.m. No email was lost.

If you have any questions or concerns, please let us know.

Posted by Jenny under Email Issues | No Comments »

Today we’re officially releasing the RFP to migrate our current Online Communities service to Drupal. You can grab a PDF of it here. Proposals are due by February 18 because we have a short turn-around time on this project and we need to get moving on it.

There’s information in the RFP for contacting us if you have further questions. ALA staff and members who would like to help us publicize this RFP should feel free to link to this post.

More background on the project:

• See section 4.8 of our WAC Midwinter Report.
• A revamped Online Communities is one of the building blocks for a new version of “MyALA.” Read more about it here.

Posted by Jenny under Online Communities | No Comments »