20 Aug 07 ITTS Update Meeting – August 20, 2007
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Enhancements to current services (Sherri)
* Equipment Roll-out
* Complete – all of the laptops and desktops have been installed and the old units are being wiped clean and sent back* Outlook Migration – signed an agreement with “123 Together” on August 8 for Exchange/Outlook; they promise 100% uptime, which their references verified; working with a company called Quest on conversion tools from Groupwise; will convert ITTS the week of August 27 for testing; after successful migration for ITTS, will distribute a conversion plan and start training for staff
* Spacemaster implementation – an ad system for the CHOICE office; we are currently working on matching up the iMIS records and the CHOICE records for the last few years; have to clean these up before can go live; will do more testing when complete and then go live on new version, which will put info directly into iMIS and then accounting software
* New GiveALA donation form – working on a new method for this, a form to put info directly into iMIS; this will work for anything done through the Development Office, including for scholarships; hope to go live with this in December; will be able to get a lifetime history for the donor when this is live; uses a fundraising module for iMIS; will respect privacy requests, though
* iMIS Patch – Tim is currently working on a Zen application to roll out this patch to everyone; fixes a problem with payment in iMIS 10.6 patch
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Web Issues (Rob)
* Web Editorial Board activities – is working on another clean-up event for the website; looking at a different format to try for better results than we had at the spring session* Collage implementation & conversion process – continues; met with Duo last week to streamline the process and get things moving faster; have asked for better, cleaner conversions from them; ACRL has gone live, though, as has ASCLA; last pages to be done will be group pages; examining a few problems with accessing some ACRL pages; Pubs, Conference Services, & tagged pages (which ITTS will have to go through and convert) haven’t gone live yet; once you go live with your content, you have 30 days to find problems because after that time spent fixing issues is billable
* Website Redesign / Usability Makeover
* Wireframes – sent out URL with updated design a second time because had a little leftover time and money with the consultants; 1700 people have filled out the survey, although responses are now leveling off; will take it down Monday, August 27; they will analyze the results and send them to us before the end of the month; they are working on a proposal for the redesign, which we should receive any day now -
New Capabilities (Matt)
* Dreamhost – ITTS staff can install a new blog, wiki, or bulletin board for you on this service; you can use other software on it, but you would have to install it yourself
* Blogs – now have blogs going live on new hosting service; all new blogs are being installed on this service as WordPress blogs; currently working on conversion tools for the posts and comments, but templates/skins will not automatically port over; groups using WP elsewhere should be able to migrate to our WP service (contact Matt about this if you are interested in this); new blog and wiki requests take a couple of days to implement; will add a note about accessibility for comments to the “best practices” in the tech support at http://wikis.ala.org/alastaff/ .
* Wikis – have new wikis going online on new hosting service; all new wikis are going online on this service; new requests still go through ITTS, which installs Mediawiki, and then staff or member admin can take over
* Bulletin Boards – offering phpBB for bulletin boards on the new hosting service now
* Sympa – virus scanning of messages going through Sympa has been tweaked because there was an issue with this in which the server would slow down and back up 15,000 messages
* Upgrade – new version has loop filtering capabilities (can handle autoresponders!) and the ability to offer read-only lists
* Moodle – is live now at http://classes.ala.org/! RUSA has one online; Matt can give anyone “course creation powers” that will include the ability for you to add students yourself; will work to make registration automated, too, as eventually we want it to become part of iMIS; interface uses the defaults; experimenting with scripts that convert WebCT courses to Moodle; discussion about whether we should convert every course or just those we know are in use; documentation is available at http://docs.moogle.org/; proposal to get WebCT developers together to share information about Moodle (would help to have a standard way to orient users to classes); training? ITTS will look into this
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Association 2.0
* Member/staff survey on virtual workplace tools (to shape plans for Online Communities or alternate application) (Louise) – rolled this out with an email blast a couple of weeks ago; 246 responses so far, 85% from members; still accumulating the results, but 60% answered the questions about what they want from online tools
* Second Life meeting on August 24 at 2:30 p.m. in the Carnegie Room – members attending the Second Life Community Convention will be coming to ALA HQ in Chicago to talk with us about their experiences in-world and what ALA can do with its presence – please join us! this will be the meeting where we began talking about concrete steps for building up our presence in-world(Jenny)
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Training (Louise)
* Ongoing training sessions – seeking feedback about existing Collage training; survey should go out today in email
* Collage
* Collage Hand Holding Help — scheduled as time allows
* iMIS Membership for new hires and others who need it
* Online Communities Administrator sessions* Upcoming (September) sessions of classes not held often
* IMIS Meetings/Events, September 4 at 1:00 pm (this only happens a couple of times a year)
* Wiki Workshop, September 5 at 1:00 pm* Other training
* See schedule on KM, if class is not listed, request it* Ongoing projects:
* System set up of Collage project groups onto deploy folders, masterpages, and other resources
* Extending the Collage wiki
* Working on the ALA Staff wiki (formal launch in FY08)* Working on the planning for the Outlook rollout
* Working on iMIS and other digital training videos -
Keeping up with developments (Sherri)
* ITTS UPdate blog w/RSS Feed – http://blogs.ala.org/ittsupdate.php
* Wikis* Learning Collage – http://wikis.ala.org/learningcollage
* Web Planning – http://wikis.ala.org/webplanning -
Q&A / Wrap-Up
* Do Groupwise questions go into Track-It?
Answer: yes
