Overview

What follows is a report on the state of notable web applications and sites in use at Middlebury including the College website, the Middlebury instance of WordPress (i.e. sites.middlebury.edu) and a variety of key web applications that provide services widely used by faculty, students and staff.

Box Office

• Addition of separate billing and shipping addresses when ordering tickets or gift items from the box office, especially useful for parents purchasing items for students.
• Improved the user interface to make purchasing as a returning customer and identifying seat locations in the seating chart simpler.

CAS – Single Sign On

The Central Authentication System (CAS) was introduced last year and allows you to move between many of our web applications after you’ve signed in once. GO and the main college website were already using CAS this time last year but since then it’s been added to many other applications, including:

• Course Catalog
• MediaWiki
• MiddMedia
• WordPress

Course Catalog

Over the past two years we developed the Course Catalog application at catalog.middlebury.edu to serve as a clearing house for accessing course information on the web due to the limitations on searching for this information via BannerWeb. The Course Catalog application allows users to search for courses based on a wide variety of criteria (including keyword searching) and properly displays and links-together cross-listed courses. The Course Catalog application also feeds course information to the department pages and faculty profiles in the main Drupal site.

New for this year, the Course Catalog has been extended to add a Schedule Planning tool that allows students to bookmark courses they are interested in, then group them together into weekly schedules to ensure that they do not have timing conflicts and that lab and discussion sections are chosen. These schedules can be printed or emailed to one’s advisor.

• Added the Schedule Planning tool.
• Users can now bookmark courses that they find interesting.
• Updated the theme to match the new website. Added a custom theme for the MIIS catalog.
• The printed Catalog is now created via an export from the Course Catalog application rather than being copy-pasted from the site by hand.
• PDF snapshots of the Catalog are now automatically generated as course descriptions and requirements get edited over the year.
• Lots of small improvements to the display of course data in search results and while browsing.
• Can now search for courses by campus — needed for Language Schools that have more than one site.
• Greatly improved the speed of the application.
• Improved the feed of courses to faculty profiles to ensure that cross-listed courses are ordered properly.
• New admin forms that allow the Registrar to suppress incomplete information about upcoming terms during data-entry.

Drupal

• Alerts: Though it hasn’t been needed yet, there is now a special alert bar that will appear on the site in the case of a campus emergency.
• Athletics Database: Many improvements, including results automatically posted to Twitter and a site that tracks the live feeds for each event.
• Calendars: Added a content type to allow offices to embed promotional calendars of their events on their department page. Updated event calendar interface to make it easier to use and added Featured Events. Clicking on items in the calendar view open in the same window (preserves page continuity). Daily breakout of events is much more pleasing to look at.
• Editing: Upgraded the WYSIWYG editor to resolve issues in Safari and Internet Explorer as well as allow pasting from MS Word without needing to use the button.
• External Links: Links to external sites will now open in a new browser window or tab automatically, though editors can choose to override this for specific links.
• Locations: You can add geo-locational information to any piece of content on the site by expanding the Locations section when editing.
• Meta Tags: A description of the content is now automatically added to each node, improving search results. Editors can customize the description and keywords.
• MiddLab: Added a content type to allow offices to embed a sidebar feature to display MiddLab projects happening in their area.
• Previews: Added a “Preview Live Site” checkbox to the Edit Console and a “Preview” button to the editing form.
• Printing: A special stylesheet allows you to print just the content of the page including contact information in the Address area.
• Search: Converted the main site search engine to use a Google Custom Search Engine to improve results, increasing our index from 175,000 pages to over 360,000 pages. You can also ask us to create a custom search engine for your part of the site. This complements the large review of Search functionality we conducted immediately after the site launch.
• Sharing: Added sharing buttons to news articles to let you send emails to friends, or post the stories to Facebook and Twitter.
• Webform: Many new features including multi-page forms, validating responses, and email templates.
• Video: Videos from MiddMedia and YouTube now use the HTML5 player in supported browsers and devices allowing you to watch them on iPhones and iPads. You can now add YouTube playlists. We also now support the use of autoplay, autorewind, loop and image attributes in videos.
• LIS Pages: Problems with this Page? link on LIS pages allows you to report an issue with the content on a page such as a spelling error, incorrect information, a broken link, etc. The submissions are reviewed by our newly assigned content managers.

GO

The GO shortcut/permalink application has become quite central to the web infrastructure of the college since its launch several years ago. It eased the launch of the new site by allowing links in content to be easily updated en-mass. In the past year GO has become central to our search strategy as GO shortcuts are now provided as suggestions and automatic-redirects when you enter search terms on the main site.

• Totally new editing interface.
• Verbose, color coded, messages to indicate successful or unsuccessful completion of actions.
• Additional input validation to preserve shortcut integrity and prevent abuse.
• Ability for community to flag GO links as inappropriate.
• New “Info” pages for every shortcut allow everyone to see detailed information about the shortcut such as who maintains it, what its aliases are, and where it goes.
• All GO shortcuts are now shown publicly in the GOtionary (with the exception of a few internal shortcuts) to improve the transparency of the system.
• Enhanced admin interface for flag admins and the new super admin role.
• Can now switch between the Middlebury and  MIIS GOtionaries.

MiddMedia

• New “Midd” theme integrates more closely with the current Middlebury theme.
• Add to MiddTube button allows users to check off the videos they would like to batch add to MiddTube as video posts.
• We’ve upgraded to Flash Media Server 4, with a lot of new features that we’ll be rolling out and supporting in the coming months.

New Sites

We’ve been able to expand the Drupal and WordPress platforms to add a CMS experience for sites that were previously static HTML files and create new sites to show off and assist student research and projects.

• Davis United World College Scholars Program
• Projects for Peace
• MiddLab
• MiddSTART
• Middlebury College Museum of Art

SubjectsPlus

In December, we upgraded from version 0.7 to 0.9.  Changes include:

• Enhanced security.
• In addtion to Research by Subject, two new guide types are available: Research by Course and Research by Topic.
• Widget-based, drag-and-drop control panel for content creators.
• Multiple subject specialists (guide owners) now possible.
• Description field override.  This allows for a resource description to be customized for one or more guides, while still allowing the resource record to be shared among all the guides.  This cuts down on duplication of records and/or breaking others shared work.
• Cloning feature

What do we use this for, you ask?

• Databases A-Z list
• Research guides (access via sidebar at go/lib and go/subjectguides among other places.)
• globally adding EZproxy prefix for off-campus access.

When browsing the online catalog at go/catalog you can now log in and save courses that you find interesting. Look for “Save” links to the top-right of course descriptions. Courses can be saved either from the search view or from the detail views linked-to from department course listings.

This screen-cast gives an overview of the Schedule-Planner and how to use it:

Notable features:

• Save courses at any time as you come across interesting ones.
• Create one or more schedules for a term to see how different course selections might fit together.
• Ensures that discussion and lab sections are considered.
• Time-conflicts are highlighted.
• Schedules can be emailed to an adviser or anyone else.
• Schedules can be printed to aid in finding classrooms.

Please note that this tool is designed as a planning and advising aid — it does not register you for classes. Also, it does not have access to individual student records and hence does not check that prerequisites have been met.

Try it out at go/catalog.

Mike Schuster
- Several Revisions to Room Draw SSB forms and lots of testing
- Added new student search dropdown box and removed boxes used by students to enter group member IDs.
- Modified procedures so as each student is selected, several eligibility checks are made.
- Modified message text displayed when students are ineligible.
- Modified WebTailor Infotext for links.
- Added logic to allow the group representative to remove group members when they’ve accidentally selected one.
- Created a database view of instructors to be used by new online catalog web page.
- Modified web directory script to correctly select on leave graduate students during winter term.
- Created database tables that will be used by custom Monterey web admissions applications forms.
- Assisted the registrar’s office with running the Term Student Type Update program(SHRTYPE) and the Learner Curriculum Conversion Program(SOPLCCV).
- After the registrar’s office runs SHRTYPE for a particular term, I create a population selection in Banner and run SOPLCCV with that popsel.
- Reviewed Clearinghouse Self-Service Authentication documentation and sample code.

Liz Whitaker-Freitas
- Supporting Hyperion BI+ for functional & technical users

Ian McBride (Full list at: https://www.yammer.com/users/imcbride)
- Completed MiddMedia plugin for WordPress
- Assisted with completion of RFP for Web Makeover
- Created conference registration form for VCC
- Developed payment form for Print Management
- Modified Athletics Recruiting application to remove Primary Sport
- Designed database sync script for the Course Catalog
- Launched CSO and Judicial Boards sites
- Upgraded Key Survey to version 7.1

Travis Stafford
- Troubleshooting cForms issue
- Testing cForms 10.3
- Two cforms trainings (Chemistry Department, Institutional Planning and Diversity)
- Finished first wave of BLM implementation (is now live) as well as fixed various bugs
- List Manager Configuration for newsletters / MiddCMS Newsletter support
- General support and Heat tickets

Rob Pekor
- Re-aligned parent Donor codes for “Feb” students.
- Removed obsolete region codes related to “CA Mailing”.
- Enhanced existing “pledge installment” view.
- Investigate poor query execution between databases (production and non-production).
- Created table to hold local data for the Harris Online Community project.
- Sent sample dataset to Harris thus enabling them to begin on data mapping on their side of the implementation project.
- Continued to fine tune the web pages for Phonathon segment creation
- Created new indicator for “young Alumni” (alumni for only 1-10 years) for the Banner List Manager project.
- Create stewardship project codes for Athletics (ATHSTW) and the Axinn Center (AXNSTW)
- Rewrote of slow performing fiscal data view for CA

Chris Norris
Staffing
- Transition planning for organizational re-structuring with DAS staff, Area Directors, and workgroup leaders
Project Work
- Reviewed Phoenix BIA summary presentation
- Drafted spec for remote DR web presence
- Revised Banner-ListManager project requirements with DAS staff
- Revised Broadcast Email Newsletter request document
- Configured four new Broadcast Email Newsletter editions with DAS staff
- Completed work on 2008 Summary Web Statistics for Web Makeover project
- Completed work on Stakeholder Reports for Web Makeover project
- Completed work on GSA (Google Search) for MIIS sites
- Began configuration and setup of Google Apps for Education (alpha instance)
Meetings
- Participated in Web Makeover project team meetings
- Met with HR staff regarding OpenHire “internal job site” project
- Met with Brett Wilhelm regarding departure considerations
- Met with members of the web subcommittee of the Sexual Assault Oversight Committee regarding a new web presence
- Participated in College Advancement Operations team meetings
- Participated in Harris online community project team meetings
- Participated in Pay for Print project team meetings
- Participated in MIIS technology team meeting
- Participated in College Data Workshop with IR, Faculty, and other LIS staff
- Conducted final DAS staff check-in meetings
Systems Administration
- Ongoing monitoring and problem resolution of online services
- Configured new GO rewrite rules
- Ongoing tuning of GSA to improve search results
- Renewals of College-owned domain names
- Transferred UWAC domains to College-managed account
Help, Support, Training, Workshops
- Updated Middlebury’s United Way web presence (campaign stats)
- Provided support for Broadcast Email Newsletters, CMS editing, BLWC Submission Manager, HEAT tix, and various ad-hoc help calls
- Conducted a Broadcast Email Newsletter training with Young Alumni staff
- Conducted a Broadcast Email (advanced) workshop for CA staff
Vendor Related Activities
- Participated in Sun-Guard/SCT Banner DBA weekly status calls
- Participated in Velaris Hyperion SysAdmin weekly status calls
- Participated in Google Apps for Education project team call with Google
- Transitioned Hyperion SysAdmin vendor (Velaris) relationship managment to Jeff Rehbach
- Provided IMA (eCommerce) details for Harris online community project