20 Nov 07 ITTS Update Meeting – November 19, 2007
Louise Gruenberg – Training
Outlook roll-out training Tues. – Thurs. every week except this (Thanksgiving) and next (SydneyPlus/KMS work). Schedule resumes first week of December and goes until everyone is converted to Outlook, 02/01/08.
Collage training continues in person and online as more units go live.
There will be iMIS training videos on the staff wiki shortly. People can use them as refreshers or to prepare for a class.
Many staff attended training on Moodle with an outside trainer. Everyone seemed pleased. We will be letting our WebCT license expire on 11/29.
Sherri Vanyek – Enhancements
Outlook conversion ongoing; about 100 converted so far. Some problems with search on older machines, which was resolved by installing a search utility program from Microsoft. In four rare cases, older machines needed to be re-imaged. We are currently testing a solution to the security settings for mail merge that require the sender to approve each message going out (could be thousands in some cases). The conversion schedule is on the staff wiki; plan is to be done 02/08.
We have developed a new “GiveALA” form that writes directly to iMIS and approves credit card charges in real time. Development Office staff are currently testing it; should go live in early December.
Automatic installment payments for dues are currently being tested and are expected to launch early December as well.
Spacemaster, the advertising sales module for Choice magazine is still under development. Once the people from Spacemaster had their data in our system, the Choice staff found problems with it. They are working to resolve the issues.
Rob Carlson – Web
The database purge completed over the weekend of November 2-4 was successful. It ran 39 hours and purged approximately 3 gigabytes of data from our database. This is important in speeding up deploys in Collage. It means, however, that not every version of every asset ever created will remain in the system. Collage will always retain the most recent and approved versions of a given asset, regardless of how old it may be. We plan to do a purge a month of the seventh month back, so we will always have current and historical versions of assets that were created in the past six months.
More than a dozen units/sections have gone live in Collage during the past two weeks. As we reach some of the smaller units, conversions are easier and faster. Plus we have more experience. Currently live are…
Divisions: AASL, ACRL & Choice, ALTA, ASCLA, LITA, PLA, RUSA, and YALSA.
Offices: Accreditation, Chapter Relations, Diversity, HRDR, International Relations, Library Advocacy, Public Programs, Research & Statistics, and the Washington Office.
Round Tables: EMIERT, FAFLRT, GLBTRT, IRRT, LHRT, LRRT, and SRRT.
Other: American Libraries Online, Headquarters Library, and I Love Libraries.
General ALA units are next. These are mostly the tagged pages from Active Matter, so there are lots of interdependent assets. We will need to tread carefully, but hope to have everything in Collage before the end of the calendar year.
Redesign of the ALA website continues apace. UserWorks is drafting the information architecture (IA) right now, as well as finishing up the content inventory. The IA will be sent to a selection of members for comments the week after Thanksgiving. Four graphic design proposals of four levels of content pages will be reviewed and presented to focus groups in December, and the consensus candidate will be presented for comments during Midwinter.
Matt Ivaliotes – Internet Applications
WebCT, as previously mentioned, is going away at the end of the month. Staff can go to classes.ala.org and register for an account. Let Matt know that you need course creation privileges. Early returns from people who have created courses in Moodle and those who attended the class last month are good. Moodle has an outstanding documentation wiki at moodle.org
Sympa is in the process of being upgraded and moved to a more powerful server. We are currently testing the new installation and planning how to migrate our hundreds of lists to the new server/version. The new version should clear up a couple of issues we’ve been having, such as read-only access to lists and replicating vacation messages.
We are currently testing the movement of weblogs from our internally-served b2evolution to Dreamhost-served WordPress. New blogs and wikis are all being created on Dreamhost now. Andy Bridges of the Washington Office found a solution for moving from b2e to WordPress, but user IDs and passwords don’t follow, nor does the b2e skin. Blog owners will have to select a new skin after the move to WordPress. Custom skins currently in use will have to be redesigned for use with WordPress.
Because Jenny Levine had a meeting conflict, we deferred discussion of Web 2.0 developments until the next meeting.
Charles Wilt asked about an ETA for the Sympa upgrade. Matt responded that the beginning of January looks likely. There are hundreds of lists to be converted.
Jonathan West asked if the Collage database purge would clear up the problem of old content still being picked up by search engines. Rob responded that that really isn’t a Collage issue, but rather an Active Matter issue. Active Matter never deleted content from the web server when it was removed from the CMS. That’s a manual step (send a list of to-be-deleted content to the help desk). Once a unit goes live in Collage their content is removed from the Active Matter web server, so the ALA Google search appliance should pick up the change. However, we have no way of stopping Google (the Big Google) from caching old pages and allowing people to view them.
The next meeting is tentatively scheduled for Monday, December 17, 2007 at 2:00 p.m.
