22 Jan 13 ITTS News Meeting – January 15, 2013

1. Blog & Wiki Migrations (Rob)

The blog and wiki migration from Dreamhost to ALA servers has been put on the backburner due to other projects right now
We did a test moving the ITTS News blog, which was successful
We’ll work on this project after Midwinter
We have more than 80 blogs and more than 70 wikis, so this will be a long process because each site needs a little work in order to get it ready for migration
Rob will work with units individually because all of a unit’s sites on a single domain must be moved at once
wikis.ala.org will be the last site moved because it has 50 wikis on it
Moodle will remain hosted externally because we need additional support for it; we’re investigating specialty Moodle hosting services now

2. ALA Connect (Jenny)

Drupal 7 Upgrade
We’ve postponed the upgrade until the week of February 11th so that we can ensure proper testing and not run into any problems right before Midwinter
The change should be pretty seamless to users – the interface is the same, the functionality is the same, etc., so no major documentation or training should be necessary
Two things will be different, though:

Chats will work a little differently because that module was re-written by the author
Individual chats will now work like every other content type, so you’ll be able to create an individual chat from the “Add” button
You’ll also be able to categorize your chats using your group’s existing subject headings and chat transcripts will be searchable
Also, chats will appear on the group home page, so chats occurring now should be easier to find because they’ll appear as the new content at the top of the page

Email notifications will also change in Drupal 7 and hopefully will get easier to read
Because we’re using our own Drupal module now, we can format the notifications however we want (especially for digest versions)
In the weeks after the Drupal 7 launch, we’ll work on reformatting these emails
We want feedback about what users would like to see change with notifications, so we’ll do a survey of both members and staff to ask for suggestions

Connect-iMIS sync issue

Members and staff have reported enough problems with Connect rosters that we know there is some kind of an issue with the synchronization between iMIS and Connect
Since nothing has changed on either side recently and the problems appear to be random, it’s been very difficult to troubleshoot the problem
In February, we plan to pull together a group to work on resolving the issue
In the meantime, we’ve put every active committee member in the overnight sync in order to re-synchronize the rosters going into Midwinter
We also turned on email notifications from committees for every committee member as part of the re-synchronization
We believe that this will solve the problem short-term until we can implement a long-term fix, but it’s important for all staff liaisons to check their rosters to make sure they’re updated
Please report any problems to Jenny via Track-It so that we can continue logging issues and find the pattern

3. Reminder to access remote resources prior to leaving for Midwinter conference (Louise and Pam)

A reminder that the document for accessing remote resources can be found on http://.ala.org/support

ITTS has moved the old support wiki into ala.org now that the ALA website is in Drupal 7
Pam has been working on updating the content and adding new information
The one thing to note is that there are pages that only staff can view; if you have a member account, you won’t be able to see the staff-only page
The “staff resources” area includes the “remote resources” page that can be very useful if you’re going to Midwinter
Note that you can’t test your NetStorage access to the LAN from inside the building – it only works externally

4. Review of New Hire Web Form (Louise)

We’ve moved the “New Hire” form to th3 “staff resources” section on the Support site (http://ala.org/support)
The great thing about this new form is that portions of it can be sent to whichever unit needs that information

Use this form for:

• Employee name change
• New Hire
• Status change
• Unit transfer
• Termination

The form walks you through the various options for each type of request
Note that it isn’t quite ready to go live yet but will be soon

Question: When will the Outlook Address Book be cleaned up?
Answer: Not sure who has access to maintain that and authority to change it. We need a way to kludge together the Outlook Address Book, the KM staff directory, and the ala.org Contact Us list. Mary G. will look into who is responsible for what to sort this out because at least one of them needs to be reliably updated. Discussion about ways to do this, and we’ll try to work on this after Midwinter.