We made it a strategic direction for Drupal 7 to begin consolidating as many small sites into their parent units as possible. We knew the first issue we would have to face is how to divide up the authoring responsibilities while maintaining ownership for different parts of a site. It turns out one of the reasons we currently have so many sites is because different people are responsible for content creation and wanted to make sure other people would not be able to modify their work. While this problem could easily be solved by just getting some agreements between the various authors on a larger site, we wanted to be able to assure people that we could prevent this possibility through Drupal permissions. We also knew that people wanted the ability for their sites to have some distinctiveness. While all of our Drupal sites adhere to the branding guidelines set forth by Web Communications, there is still room for sites to provide certain characteristics unique to their department or unit. We set out to find a solution for this.

What we came up with is a Drupal module called “Organic Groups”. The organic part does not mean that the groups were grown with abundant amounts of compost, but rather that they are flexible enough so that groups can be configured in a variety of different ways. For example we knew that colleges would need to build groups for their schools, departments, and programs whereas administrative sites would have a variety of working units that will need groups. After some testing we were confident that the Organic Groups module was going to suit our needs and so we started the work of communicating with people about our plan, and get some sites on board.

Central Web Services is a devision of Media Services which is in turn part of Information Services. There are a number of other units under IS including Enterprise Computing Services, Network Servies, and Technology Support services. When we began the task of updating the IS site using Drupal 7 it was agreed that we would consolidate a number of separate websites into the IS site using Organic Groups. The IS site is organized around the services that we provide. Each service is a group. Each group is also part of a service category. We are still in the process of converting all of this to Organic Groups but it looks like its going to work very well.

On the academic side of things we also have been working with the College of Liberal Arts to upgrade and consolidate their sites. We currently have the parent college site in Drupal 7 and are working with them to migrate the departments one a time from the old Drupal 6 sites. For a college the groups map nicely to departments which group into schools. Each department can have it’s own set of rotating features, highlights, directory listing etc. The department and school name also show up as the site name along with the college. Departments can have their own content editors, or and editor can work for several departments. There can also be college wide editors who can help with all of the departments if that is the way they want it.

Department name becomes the main site name, while the College and School names are combined above, with each linking to its respective front page.

Once we have completed CLA and IS we will begin working with other departments to consolidate and upgrade sites to Drupal 7 at an accelerated pace. The end result will be better websites for everybody.

It all started with a simple question, “Can CWS help us build a website that our student body can use to vote with in our April elections?”

The question, posed by ASOSU Organizing Coordinator, Drew Desilet, came to CWS in mid-February.  “When it came time to look at building or buying a new voting system for the student government elections, it was clear we had two options. We could choose to buy an outside product that came pre-made to someone else’s standards and needs, or we could work with our own CWS partners on campus to build us something to suit our needs.” he explains.

It should be clearly understood that the delivery of a complex, finished website or web application within a two-month timespan is a mighty tall order.  Additionally, there were a few tricky specifications that the site needed to meet, one of which includes the ability to limit the voting population to a specific segment of the OSU community, namely, Corvallis campus students.

Ultimately, the answer given to ASOSU was “Yes, we can.”

It did take a few extraordinary elements to get it up and running on such a short time-line, though:

• Great customers who provided exceptionally clear specifications
• A rockstar programmer who didn’t miss a step from the beginning to the end of the project
• A diligent project manager who smoothly coordinated all those extra things that threaten to derail a web-development project
• The OSU Drupal profile, combined with the Election module, a special contributed module that can be found at drupal.org

“We’re very pleased with the way this project played out.” states Jean Waters, CWS project manager.  “Using the Election module really helped us get this project up and out in such a short time.  In fact, there are still some really nice features that came with it that we haven’t even had a chance to fully examine yet.”

The Election module is based on a new Drupal 7 concept known as “Entity”.  This is still a fairly new concept to the Drupal team here at CWS, but team member Ricky Middaugh was up to the task. “It was a unique challenge, having to work on something in Drupal that I didn’t know a lot about.” comments Middaugh.  “But I’m really pleased that we were able to provide something useful to OSU.”

And the ASOSU provisioned gift just keeps on giving, explains Jos Accapadi, Associate Director of CWS. “Thanks to ASOSU’s willingness to experiment with us, the groundwork has been done, and now we’ll be able to quickly spin up sites for other political organizations here on campus.”

Desilet agrees. “We’re already working with CWS to make system improvements for future years – mobile capability, streamlined candidate entry, candidate profile pages, and a few other minor changes – the voting system has worked out very well for our needs in the ASOSU, and it’s our hope and plan to continue using it for years to come. It’s a system other groups on the OSU campus, or really even the entire Drupal user base, can use for a voting system in the future. It would be nice to see this used across the university for any type of voting, and make it as common to ONID users as BlackBoard is now, or Gmail is to come.”

The new voting site has already passed the Primary election test, during the week of April 9th – 12th.  “So far we’ve had 2,118 voters run through the system without any hiccups of which to speak. Modifications for us between our first Primary election and our General election were minor, and largely administrative based. Therefore the tool the students will use will look and feel the same as the first time they used it just weeks before, however it will work even better for us as election administrators.” says Desilet.

The site will be ready for use for the General election, starting Sunday, April 21st, at 10 p.m. and running through April 26th.  Voting will be open to Corvallis campus students.  To get there, just go to http://asosu.oregonstate.edu/elections and click the big vote button.

• Links, images and navigation, these are the cornerstones of a good site. We have some ‘best practices’ items you should check before pushing your site live.
• Menus – part of the navigation system your visitors depend on in order to find relevant content on your site.
• Brand Identity Guidelines for OSU web content. Does your site measure up to University expectations, we’ll show you how to find out.
• Do you have contact information? It can be very aggravating if a user doesn’t have a way to reach out to someone in order to have a question or concern addressed.
• What do you need to do after your site goes live? Yes there are things you should check after your site is moved to production.

All of these items and others are covered in detail at http://oregonstate.edu/cws/training/book/drupal-deep-dive/osu-drupal-site-procedures/drupal-deployment-checklist.

We want to let you all know that we are actively working to get Drupal 7 tested, documented, and functional for the needs of OSU.  Well, why can’t I just get it now, it’s just a download, you ask?  The answer is, while if you were hosting on your own ISP this would be the case, the OSU infrastructure is such that we have to ensure security, reliability as well as integrations with other solutions, such as authentication, themes and modules in use by OSU CWS Drupal sites.  We have a number of concurrent activities happening to make progress toward rolling this out for the University, including actively working on the theme necessary for Drupal 7 (yes we have to rewrite the theme to work for new Drupal versions).  This is in partnership with the rock-star team over in Web Communications.

Now more importantly, what we are trying to do with Drupal 7 is reduce our site footprint and number of individual sites.  Can you believe we have over 400 sites?  That becomes a maintenance and support headache.  With Drupal 7, there will be a new feature called Organic Groups.  This will allow us to have a smaller subset of sites, and areas and departments within the same site but still allow the finer grained control that some of you desire.  With Organic Groups, you will be able to take control of the portion of the site that is your relevant content, and have control so others cannot access that portion of the site as a Drupal administrator to modify something in error.  This is where we want to go and what makes sense for Oregon State University.

So when will this be done?  With Organic Groups, we are in the pilot stage with Information Services, and then we are going to ensure we have it done right by piloting the College of Liberal Arts.  Doing this we will ensure we understand the technology well enough to teach, document, and support it going forward so people are not left out on their own to figure things out.

Individual main colleges in working with Web Communications can look at Drupal 7 with the Doug Fir Theme (the theme that we have available for Drupal 7), and then incorporate changes for Organic Groups as we roll that out.  Science and Liberal Arts main college sites are already in Drupal 7.

Departments however, we will not be rolling out with Drupal 7 at this time, as they are to be incorporated into Organic Groups, working with your colleges, once we roll out Organic Groups.

For those sites that are in Drupal 6 and want to look like the main college sites that are using Drupal 7 Doug Fir, we are working on a version of Doug Fir for Drupal 6.

What is Doug Fir?  So besides being an evergreen confier species, Doug Fir is an OSU responsive Drupal theme.  This means that the site resizes depending on the device that you are on.  Liberal Arts is a good site to see using this theme.

For us it is imperative that we do this right and do not add to the overhead and support it would take to enable OSU.  This is why you might hear us say that we are not providing Drupal 7 to individual sites at this time.

Our rough timeline as of now is:

• Spring and Summer to test and roll out Organic Groups.
• Winter:  Migrate Drupal 6 sites to Drupal 7
• 2014 Drupal 6 moves to maintenance fixes only
• 2015 End of Life (EOL) Drupal 6

With all of this we are re-architecting the infrastructure, and then we will have Drupal 8 on the Horizon.

We hope this information helps you to be aware of the progress we are making.

The new version of MediaSpace, OSU’s open source and cloud-based media solution, integrates many requested features and some important new functionality, including privacy / access control, captioning, HTML5 support, and improved layout.

One of the best ways to understand the new features is to watch the video in MediaSpace about the new version.

Pros

• More space in the office
• Easier to talk to one another
• Collaboration among different areas within the department is easier
• The office appears brighter and more inviting
• Seeing who’s in the office at a glance

Cons

• Nosier at times
• No cubicle walls to hang things on
• Spontaneous drop-ins by visitors can cause more disruption then previously

Although there was some hesitation on taking down the cubicles, we all agree that the change in the work environment has helped strengthen the team dynamic.

Responsive really means responsive web design.  The goal behind responsive web design is to have the design of a given web page be adjusted dependent on the size of the screen.  So on a phone, the look and feel changes to be more of a mobile experience where reading a full web page doesn’t necessarily make sense.

The theme is a two column theme, with only a main sidebar, and the bottom contact area as available areas to put widgets in.  Remember, not all widgets will look good in different areas so you will have to see what works and doesn’t.

Who can use OSU Responsive?  Responsive is available for everyone, however, there are some things to note.  The use of the OSU logo or tag is restricted to certain use.  The theme will display the tag or not based on the Organization Type as specified by the table below.

Student Organizations are governed by the policies of Student Leadership and Involvement.  If you are a student group and do not know which type of organization you are, please visit the Student Leadership and Involvement site.

What do you need to do to use it?

1.  If you are switching over from an existing theme, and you switch it immediately, it might seem that your site is broken in layout.  It isn’t.  It is simply that the widgets need to be removed and put back into the areas available for it.  So we recommend first removing all the widgets in use from the sidebars.

2.  Go to Appearance -> Themes in your WordPress dashboard, and select the OSU Responsive theme.

3.  Put your widgets back into the sidebar.

4.  Deactivate the Sociable Skyscraper plugin if you are using it.  Use of this inserts a thin horizontal line and makes the theme look broken.  Go to Skyscraper Options in the Select Sociable Plugin expanded menu to deactivate.

And that’s it.  Good blogging to you all.

Accessibility and Brand Guidelines

As part of the OSU Responsive use, the use of a different background image or color must adhere to OSU’s policies regarding Accessibility and Brand.  Any failure to do so may cause your blog to be disabled.  The net takeaway here is don’t change it if you don’t understand the policies, which is why we at Central Web Services, take care of these things for you in creating the default theme.  However, do remember within your articles, accessibility policies still apply if this is used in any official capacity for students, staff, or faculty or OSU.

• Keep track of the new student events
• Get up-to-date info through social media sites like Twitter and Facebook
• Information about the assortment of food options  open on campus at the time
• Connect week FAQs
• Connect week and new student news

What did the lead student developer, Nicole Phelps, have to say on the release of her first official app? “The OSU Connect app is a great way for students to get involved at OSU’s Connect week. Its theme is ‘Connect the Dots’, so I see it as an allegory for how each new student comes to the school with a blank slate, ready to connect their own dots.” You’ve connected the dots your whole life; from connecting the dots to discover the picture on the page to connecting the dots between classes to earn your diploma. Now you can use the app to help you stay connected at OSU while you earn your degree. It’s a connection to important up-to-date information on what’s going on and where to be right on your phone. This app provides a searchable campus map for the term (or multiple terms if you have luck like mine) that you have a class in a building like Wiegand Hall and you have no idea where it may be. Its list of the open food establishments on campus keep you informed and on time for meals. I wish I would have had an app like this during my first year on campus to save me from learning the dining center hours the hard way and showing up too late for a meal. Save yourself from the disappointment of missing new student events, and meals, and check out the app for Android and iOS!

The performance of the EvalS application is now ready for primetime use.  The team worked hard, in conjunction with help from Enterprise Computing, to make changes to the code to improve upon the speed of the application.  Locally, you should see a significan improvement.  What took over 30 seconds to load before now takes a second or two on bringing up a person’s evaluation.  The initial load of the application is about 4 seconds, and still a little slow for our liking, so the team is looking at how to make it better.  Half a world away, in Malaysia, I can access the EvalS system and begin entering in results, and on a slow-wi fi connection, it takes about 15 seconds to load.  Not too bad.

The official notification went out on October 19th, by Jacque Rudolph.  If you haven’t read the email from the inform list, you should.  A kudos to the HR and Business Center team for all the hard work put into it.  I found out more than I imagined about the process, and there are a lot of nuances to consider, with bargaining agreements, and other particulars to work with.  Along the way, we hope we improved the process as well.

So how did it begin?  Well it all began with a request for development of an electronic time reporting system, funded by the Provost.  As Bob Nettles and I discussed, the decision was to ultimately look at a vendor system for the time reporting piece, as there are good systems already out there.  So we couldn’t just sit around and develop nothing, and discussing with Jacque Rudolph and Bob Nettles, we said why don’t we tackle some of the other paper processes, and the evaluation process came to mind, due to its specific nature.  With approval from the Provost, we set off in discussions and Agile development.  We didn’t wait until all the details were there, otherwise it would have taken significantly longer.  The Agile method allows for more rapid development, while gathering the particulars.  We did show and tells along the way, and worked out many of the specifics.

The development team of  Lead Developer Jose Cedeno with some assistance from Kenneth Lett, Mauricio Cordoba on styling, and Joan Lu, the software architect responsible for the overall technical design, put in a lot of hours, working weekends and then some to bring it together.  We didn’t have the staff of a Google or a Microsoft, or my former company IBM, to implement this, but the talent of the two helped bring this to life.  I put in a little time, myself on the original concept of the User Interface design, and Mauricio filled in the rest, so we do hope you find it as a good and modern interface.  There’s still some things we can do to make it better, but we have to save some things for the next few releases, don’t we?

For those who don’t know what it takes to develop portlets, the little apps in a portal, send us a note, and we’ll fill you in.  It does take some knowledge of Portal development, along with java programming expertise.  So it’s not just for anyone to develop in.

This is one of the steps Central Web is taking in Greening OSU.  So we encourage everyone to start using it.  For the Classified IT and Professional Faculty, we will be working toward your electronic evaluations next, so as I always say, stay tuned.   Sincerely, Jos Accapadi, Associate Director

It’s here and it wasn’t an April Fool’s joke.  On April 1st, under the Oregon State University iOS Enterprise License, Central Web Services and Web Communications released the Beta version of the iOSU iPhone Application.

Current features:

• Campus Map
• Find People
• Photo Tour
• Link to Library mobile sites
• Wallpapers
• News
• Link to m.oregonstate.edu mobile site
• Key contact numbers
• OSU’s Twitter feed
• and a Feedback form.

There are still some issues, known in the software world as bugs, to work out.  While we did some preliminary testing across various iOS devices, we have not run through every permutation on how a user interacts with their app, and as such we do expect to discover more.  Well in fact, users have already been using the Feedback portion of the app to tell us some of the things they are seeing as problematic.

We are also keenly interested in the views of students, and aspects that make their lives easier using a mobile platform.  So if you are a student, do let us know what you think, and what you’d like to see!

Visit the the following site on your iOS device to download (and remember, you will have to login with your ONID id and password):

http://oregonstate.edu/main/mobile/iosu

Stay tuned and sign up for first notifications here:

http://oregonstate.edu/main/mobile