The intensity of the migration workload has kept me from writing about how busy the team has been since we announced the first series of go-lives on October 28. Since then, all of the ALA Round Tables (with the exception of SRRT, whose members are recreating it in Drupal behind the scenes) have migrated from Collage to Drupal and gone-live. AASL, ACRL and ACRL Choice, ALTAFF, ASCLA, LITA, RUSA, and YALSA have joined early adopters PLA, ALSC, LLAMA and I Love Libraries. ALA Accredited Programs, Education & Careers, Membership and Professional Tools site sections have migrated.
Who’s left? About ALA, the ALA Offices area, and Programming & Exhibits are wrapped up and ready to go-live on January 3rd, when our vendor, Pixo (formerly OJC Technologies) and ALA ITTS migration team members Rob Berquist and Sean Bires return from their holidays. ALCTS is also expected to go-live either that week or the next.
After that we’ll be working on Conferences & Events, News & Press Center*, Online Learning, and the Advocacy area, followed by the introduction of the newly integrated Awards, Grants & Scholarships database. Offices, divisions and round tables that offer awards, grants and/or scholarships (and isn’t that most of them?) will be able to easily update the database, which will generate automatically updated web pages in each unit’s branding. We hope to have it ready to display information about the ALA honorees recognized at Midwinter Meeting. In February we will work with interested divisions and round tables to provide them with the same functionality.
All these plans are subject to change the closer we get to Midwinter Meeting. We’ve scheduled a hiatus on migrations just before, during and after Midwinter, because we know that even if we get migrations completed, people will be too busy to be trained by team member Sheila Joy.
There’s more to share, so I promise not to take so long to get the next post written.
Louise Gruenberg | Sr. Usability Officer
On Wednesday, October 19 we reached two truly significant milestones in the ALA Migration to Drupal project. We soft-launched the first phase of single-sign-on (read more, below) powered by Shibboleth and the PLA website in Drupal. Although the process hasn’t been without a few bumps, this Thursday we launched ALSC, ALSConnect Online, LLAMA and I Love Libraries. We owe a debt of thanks to the various vendors who helped us get to this point, but that’s going to be a separate blog post, when I have time to breathe.
We’ve analyzed the server activity and developed an alternative approach to use for the process that was taking the live site to its knees when new sites were being added . Our thanks go out to early adopter PLA, as they bore the brunt of it while we were trying to get the next batch of sites onto the live server this week. With any luck, we won’t see this behavior during subsequent migrations–a good thing as we have 5 down and about 55 to go.
There’s also a known bug that’s preventing the site caches from clearing immediately when new content is added or existing content is updated for unauthenticated users. In human-speak, that means that our early adopter editors are making changes that won’t be seen right away by anyone who’s not logged in. The fix for the bug will be rolled out early next week during our next round of updates.
About 5 to 10 staff and vendors working on the migration have go-live responsibilities. The flurry of emails when we were taking four sites live in quick succession was overwhelming. For future go-lives, we’ll be using a chat session to keep everyone in touch in real time, and asking our site reviewers to send information directly to me rather than Redmine during go-lives, so I can act as a gatekeeper and pass along only the problems that the team hasn’t already noticed.
It’s also better if we allow ourselves at least an hour between site migrations to take care of anything that requires immediate attention on the newly migrated site, and to make sure we have the Shibboleth login in place before we drop the rules into place that make the site visible and direct traffic to it.
Now that we’ve learned from our early adopter migrations, it’s time to talk about what, or who’s next.
Next week we’ll be taking all the round tables, AASL, ALTAFF, ASCLA, LITA and RUSA into review, with go-lives staggered on the 8th, 9th, and 10th of November. If you’re a reviewer, I’ll be sending updated information out about what to note in Redmine this weekend.
While single-sign-on will ultimately make it possible to to login to any ALA resource with the same username and password and to move seamlessly between various resources during the same browser session without having to re-enter information, it will take us time to get all the various resources shibbolized (set up in Shibboleth). For now, only the ala.org website, whether serving from Collage or Drupal, is shibbolized. To help you recognize them, resources using Shib have a login page that you can see if you click the Login link on ala.org. A member (or any site visitor with an account, such as a non-member who has registered for an event) can login on PLA, then move to ALA or ALSC, for example, either in the same tab or another tab.
Login Tip: When you move to another site in our multi-site Drupal installation, you won’t immediately see a logged in view. You must click on the Login link in the upper right, and it will acknowledge your earlier login in that browser by recognizing you.
Logout Alert: With shibbolized resources, when you logout, you have only logged out from the local resource of the tab you’re in. Even if your other tabs or windows aren’t open to ALA resources, you will still be logged in to ALA. Those logging in from public or shared computers should note that Shib will not completely log you out until you exit your browser by closing it.
For now, keep in mind that only the main ALA website, along with the division sub-sites and I Love Libraries have been shibbolized. As additional ALA resources are ready, we’ll announce them here and tag them with the Shibbolized Resource Announcement tag, so that there’s one place to track them all.
Thanks to Rob Berquist, ITTS’ Internet Administrator, who has really made all of these improvements possible. Yay, Rob!
Louise Gruenberg | ALA Sr. Usability Officer | Information Technology & Telecommunication Services
Tags: Shibbolized Resources
1. CMS Update (Louise)
Things are moving along
Everything will go into the review stage during the next few weeks
Showed the new versions of PLA, I Love Libraries, LLAMA, AASL, RUSA, ASCLA, LITA, YALSA (some of which still need some work) but are displaying at some level in the new system
Hope that all divisions will have first round of pages on the review site by the end of this week
Then we’ll start on the round tables, offices, and sections
Reviewers should begin hearing from Louise soon
Will take PLA live when Shibboleth is ready, hopefully next week
When your site is ready to go live, you do one last lookover with ITTS on Monday
Tuesday the site is frozen and the migration starts
Go live on Wednesday (can rollback to old site if things don’t go well)
Thursday you come to training (Friday if you can’t make Thursday)
Member volunteers will all eventually get trained, starting with iLinc webinars
Screenshot-based documentation and training will probably become available in December
We’ll be taking sites live on a rolling basis as they’re ready
Shibboleth is moving forward, with just one remaining hangup to get it working on the dev sites
2. Connect update (Jenny)
Showed the new “Suggestions” feature that will be coming soon
Connect Roadmap for FY12:
3. Service outage on Tuesday, September 22, 2011, 5:30-8:30 pm CDT – corrected date (Sherri)
Hopefully the following services will only be down for a few hours early Wednesday evening
Staff: if you’re already logged in to the network, you’ll be able to keep working after 5:30 pm CDT; otherwise you won’t be able to log in during the outage
We’ll put up a message on the public sites when this happens so that users will see a meaningful message
We’re really starting to get excited about this migration. The scripts are getting fine-tuned.
The first test site (PLA) will go-live in early September, once we’ve got single sign on set up. Meanwhile, all primary site reviewers have been provided with instructions for logging into the development servers, and for adding issues to Redmine.
I’ll be in touch to let reviewers know when their sites are ready to be looked over. If you’re a reviewer and haven’t heard from me, patience! Your site’s not ready, but it will be, I promise.
Louise Gruenberg | ALA Sr. Usability Officer
Yesterday, unit directors received proposed dates for their division, round table, office or topical site areas’ migration reviews. What’s a migration review? It’s a walkthrough of the migrated site to determine whether it’s ready to go-live.
Site reviewers compare the migrated site on the development server to the current site. They get to have a lot of fun, poking around, clicking links, downloading files, filling out forms, making bug reports if they notice problems, kicking the tires and slamming the doors. (Just kidding about those last two.)
Because we can’t migrate everyone at once, reviews are scheduled to begin in early July and continue through the end of August. Those who requested early adoption status were scheduled for early July.
Round table and division section member-volunteers who work on the website and intend to be involved with their site review should check with their staff liaisons to get the scheduled review date.
There is some flexibility with review dates as long as the request for a change is made by July 1.
Louise Gruenberg
Sr. Usability Officer
The draft migration schedule is being developed based on the size, condition (accessibility violations, broken links), cross-site linking, and training requirement for staff and member-volunteers, with final adjustments to be made based on unit vacation scheduling for site reviewers.
Despite the proximity to Annual Conference, with 60 distinct look-and-feel subsites, about 10 will have to be migrated every week between the end of June and mid-August. We hope to have a one week turnaround on most subsites, with longer scheduled for ACRL. If your unit wants to be an early adopter and you have not already done so, contact Louise Gruenberg.ITTS will use the Selenium IDE Firefox plugin to run a test script that verifies left navigation links, selected content snippets, and right nav pods to evaluate the migration before handing over a subsite to staff to review. Each unit will get a login for one person to a bug tracker site for reporting migration-specific problems. (Note that migration does not magically repair broken links … anything broken before migration will still be broken afterwards.)
Units should let Louise know who their site reviewer(s) will be, and alert her to any scheduled vacation time that would interfere with a quick turnaround on the review.
Jenny showed the new “follow a group” feature that was quietly released a couple of weeks ago. Once a help document is ready, we’ll formally announce this new option, which lets you subscribe to email updates of public content only from groups you’re not a member of.
Next Jenny showed new features in the Conference Scheduler. Current enhancements include:
Please be sure to check your unit’s sessions in the Scheduler and let Jenny know if you need any details changed.
Our production servers for the migration to Drupal are up and running. Our vendor is working on test migrations for our early adopter test cases: I Love Libraries, the Public Library Association, and the Issues & Advocacy section of the website.
When the test migrations are successfully completed, we will adjust the final timeline based on what we accomplished, and it will be published.
Stay tuned!
Louise Gruenberg | Sr. Usability Officer
I am delighted to report that the upgrade to our association management system was successful. A team led by Tim Smith, Assistant Director of ITTS began the work on Friday March 18 at 5:00 PM and completed at about 11:00 PM on Saturday. Jeff Dong, our Database Adminstrator was essential to the upgrade’s preparation and implementation.
Staff access to the database required in-person visits to their computers to properly remove the previous version and install the new one. Member and Customer Service and Accounting were updated by Monday morning and all other staff who needed access were updated by Friday, March 25.
This upgrade will make it possible for us to move forward on a number of initiatives. The most immediate impact is improved security procedures for password resets. The underlying infrastructure change makes more web services possible, which will enable us to proceed with improvements to the website and ALA Connect, and eventually, our e-commerce system.
Sherri Vanyek
Director, ITTS