Tag Archives: email

Controller

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Stakeholder: Cindy Wemette

Web Makeover Contact:  Jai Shankar

  • Ability to customize web page, fonts, pictures, colors
  • Secure access links – place to put information for audit committee or external auditors.
  • Drop and Drag capabilities
  • Pull drop menus
  • Secure log in to own web page
  • Pop up of most recent visited sites
  • On line service – fill in forms; ability to email fill in forms
  • Search box
  • A – Z menu
  • Ability to post power point presentations or videos for training
  • Blog
  • Communications pop up vs. sending all staff all faculty emails
  • Current events section – Up coming events
  • Streaming data across top or bottom of page, example: financial news or ticker symbols

Business Services

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Stakeholder: Tom Corbin

Web Makeover Contact:  Jai Shankar

E-commerce group:

  • Web site is critical to generate revenue
  • Web site to be used for “advertising” and “marketing” (since policy prohibits advertising in paper form on campus)
    — must be a priority to “self-promote” to drive business
    — also: can we include links to corporate sites in future?
  • Book store
    -The Bookstore should not lose the Bookstore link on the bottom of the homepage since at least 35% of the ecommerce Bookstore traffic comes through that method, and depending on the time of year it might even be more.  If you were to move that Bookstore link to the top of the Middlebury homepage, I would have no objection to a better location
  • That nothing coming from the Web Makeover Team affects the hosted solutions and Bookstore websites in a negative way, other than perhaps header and footer updates coming from changes to the look and feel of the College Web.
  • – Link on all web pages is desired
    – Bookstore can assist in implementing any new branding to general look, and especially header/footer areas of website.
  • Build cross-links among auxiliary services and other web sites
    Examples:
    — an ad in the Addison Independent online links to a season pass order form; on the same page as the order form are up-to-day/minute links to golf course conditions (if it’s October), to athletic events, to book store for purchasing apparel, etc.
    — Snow Bowl page might have links to 51 Main for après-ski specials
    — Bread Loaf School of English site should have obvious links to book store for purchases
    — Events at CFA, McCullough, Mead should have links to Grille, 51 Main (including specials)
  • Make links/relationships easy to develop, including to/from MBS and CBORD
    – Athletics
    – Student fund raisers; gift systems
    – 51 Main
    – Facebook
    – Pro-shop
  • New service ideas
    – sign up for T times on golf course
  • Make site richer in graphics (less “business” like)
  • Allow “pop-ups” for special offerings (e.g., Grille, Bookstore, etc.)
  • Make site compatible with mobile devices – focus significant effort on this for future
    – Grille orders
    – Book orders (as leave class)
    – Snow updates
  • Guest/visitor access
    – have pages for those interested in arts or sports (and related links to e-commerce sites)
    – allow them to build “customized” pages of information they’re most interested in

Information group

  • For students, employees, web should promote “self-service” in finding info (e.g., tax info)
  • — Easy to create & update FAQs
    — Links among different “sites” (areas on campus) (not just what’s in your own dept)
    — Search results need to be relevant & prioritized appropriately
  • Need Policies/Procedures that can be accessed/updated readily; consistently formatted
  • Dining
    — Need much more flexible design for display of calendars, menus
    — Website should display meal offerings, in a way that differentiates Middlebury from other Colleges
    — Current navigation hides too many sites
    — Relevant search results needed
  • General design – need different look & feel for different areas / functions
  • Hard to edit/update policies, procedures, documents (and web site in general)
    — interface is confusing; need simple editing functionality (esp. when just update info once a year)
    —- how can we make this efficient to get departmental input, review, approval?
    — need way to display calendar/schedule of events (such as safety training sessions)
    If things are lacking from the web site, how/who determines where they go?
  • Forms design / formatting / printing is critical  (Reprographics; Faculty housing; Snow Bowl; Golf Course)
    — Need to be able to extract information that’s important and copy/move to other applications
    — Need to be able to edit/update forms without depending on web services
    — Make easier for departments/users to create & update form fields/text
    — Forms navigation should be intuitive (“back” button on browser should work, for example)
  • Need College Policies & Procedures Web site
    — some may be open to public viewing, others limited to designated users (similar to Emergency pages)
  • Need Data Warehouse (web interface, drawing on Hyperion/Banner info)
    — Example: RPI
  • Web support – need clarity, timeliness, information online that is easy to find for web support
    — make clear how to get support & what to do if feel support is “cut off”
    — if we think something is a “bug” how do we know if it’s been fixed?
    — will there be a way to make suggestions for improvements? For new functionality?
    — shouldn’t take 10 days to get a response to an inquiry of “I’m new; how do I create a web site for my dept?”

Payment and Procurement

  • On Line training functionality
  • Secure access to certain items on the web site (e.g. tax exemption certificates)
  • On-line org chart capability for major College divisions – access might be issue although no sure why; even with 15 years employment and exposure to most of the College areas, with recent changes, growth, etc I find locating the go-to person difficult; such capability should be easily editable by designated area/department staff. Similar structure for Faculty.
  • Intuitive ease of navigation coupled with robust search capability on categories & keywords
  • Well segregated info for College employees which is not relevant or is confidential relative to other constituencies. As part of a web redesign, all areas of the College should have to create a certain minimum presence on the site, fulfilling parameters established by the redesign committees.
  • Ideally, links to peer groups / departments at our peer benchmark institutions – this could be postable by Midd employees with clearance, probably managerial level but could be broader.
  • Move MiddPoints to the Web and expand its scope………..this could be the forum for idea interchange and staff / faculty / student sharing of experiences / interests / memberships / life in our multi-community ‘region’.
  • Move College Magazine to the website in abbreviated form?
  • Improve functionality of e-mail if possible: example – address an e-mail ad hoc to a large distribution group and then be able to save those addressees for later reuse without having to first define the group within the “contacts” lists and then extract that laboriously created group for e-mails

Health & Safety

  • Video on our web page.  E.g. “Every Minute Counts”
  • Ability to edit my training and policies/procedures on the web page and have its availability more user friendly.

Retail Operations

  • Would be nice to be able to either have a rss type window on the front (home) page that consolidates the many.  Campus emails and distributions that occur and not have these go to email.  Doing so would also create some cross over between Faculty/Staff/Students.  I know of much information that the students get which is applicable to staff and the other way around however the information is not currently sent to all these constituents.
  • Currently there is access to wiki work groups however the use and training (familiarity) with this service tool is low.  Additionally, finding the links if not bookmarked can be difficult.   Perhaps a drop down page of common tools & campus electronic resources would encourage more use.
  • Also would be nice to have all blogs etc indexed.  There used to be a listing of blogs but that has gone the way of the wind.
  • Photo share would be ideal for ex. Currently one must dig and link externally to Erin Quinn’s  photo’s of sports teams when this should be more easily accessed.  Likewise if pictures of events could some how be posted along with or archived linked to the events calendar this would be cool.  Theater productions, concerts, lectures etc. would be able to be highlighted by more than a listing.
  • Currently, use of word press and the campus web pages really does not allow for easy tracking of hits and use.  I find I get more information out of the Youtube statistics than I can on my more official Middlebury sites.
  • Additionally if we could adopt some pages that allow for discussion board type of conversations.  Professors currently do so for classes but access to such for information/discussions/creative development is limited to creating a blog which may or may not achieve its purpose.  This could perhaps be individualized similar to a face book wall or could be open forums similar to a craigslist or the dreaded Midd confessional.  I realize concern for abuse might exist so some discussion around this may need to occur.  However from a work load and communications point it would be more efficient for people who work off shifts/days.  Additionally, it may reduce turnaround time on projects as the communications avoid multiple emails – reply alls – forwards and of course trying to find time for a sit down meeting.
  • You can currently use an LL Bean order catalogue on line as though you have a paper copy on screen in front of you.  Might make sense to reduce the number of print magazines (Also, Middlebury, etc.) by putting these in such a format. .

Snow Bowl

  • Create a user friendly site that is a esthetically appealing and easy to navigate for the general public.
  • Create a more commercial look to the Snow Bowl website.  The Snow Bowl   is competing with areas such as Dartmouth Skiway  www.dartmouthskiway.com
  • Snow news, (daily conditions report) updated automatically on the Home page with links to snow school and rental shop.
  • Place Middlebury College Banner across the top of page and allow the Snow Bowl free area for graphic design below the banner.  A creative look with colors, pictures and possible paid advertising.
  • Ability to announce calendar of events.  (spongecell.com) is one idea.
  • Develop Face Book (in progress), link to snow news and link to Home page.
  • Ability to track our statistics: an essential marketing tool to determine where our guests are coming from.
  • Website visibility within the search engines. i.e.  A family from Boston that would like to ski in the Mid Vermont area should be able to type in mid Vermont skiing and the Snow Bowl would rank high on Google.
  • Increase S/B visibility on College website.
  • Staff directory with pictures & contact information
  • Customer feed back ; blog
  • Ability to have video on our new website

RIKERT SKI TOURING CENTER

  • Online J-Term registration
  • Auto update daily conditions report on Home Page
  • Snow News capabilities

SKI & SNOWBOARD SHOP:

  • Ability to list product photos and prices.
  • Rate schedule.
  • Calendar of events, sales, early season specials  (spongecell.com)
  • J-Term specials that would interact with Face Book.
  • Paid advertising.
  • Allow flexibility and creativity in designing the rental page to establish competition with other rental shops i.e. Alpine Shop.
  • Include safety information, no helmet rental.
  • Easy access to update pictures and images to keep the site fresh.
  • Data management system.
  • E-Mail data base, distribution lists.
  • Sale of soft goods/retail items (online store front).

SNOW SCHOOL

  • A site that would appeal to the general public with an emphasis on family skiing.
  • Market our philosophy and mission
  • Attractive, creative site that will be on par with other Snow Schools in our area.
  • Ability to promote private lessons, Tag-along- series and Regular program series.
  • Calendar of event.
  • Develop” staff” page to present the range of talents and the uniqueness of Middlebury Snow School instructors.
  • Ability for guests to write reviews of their experience.
  • Creative text, graphics and pictures updated as often as needed
  • Text that will include keywords for optimal engine search.
  • Increase visibility on SkiVermont.com, snowcountry.com
  • Data management: ski and snowboard rosters created from online registration information.
  • E-mail data base.
  • Ability to track our statistics, important marketing tool to determine where our guests are coming from.

Sponsored Research Office

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Jim Ralph, Dean of Faculty Development and Research

Franci Farnsworth, Coordinator of Sponsored Research

Alison Darrow, Science Grants and Writing Facilitator

Our website serves several constituents:

  • the Controller’s office: we host their grant-related policies and information
  • faculty seeking grants: we supply tips, data, institutional policies & guidelines, forms, etc. to help guide proposal writing and application
  • Advancement’s office of Corporate and Foundation Relations: we share some policies and procedures, which are hosted at our site
  • the Dean of Faculty Development and Research: our site announces faculty grants and annual reports of grants awarded, a key way to celebrate faculty successes

We are a two-person office that reports to the DFDR; both of us maintain and update the site. Out offices are spread throughout campus (the Library, Bi Hall, Old Chapel), so sharing information electronically is crucial. The current site is an artifact of dumping old paper-based documents online in order to have at least some web resource and then not having the time to update or redesign. As a result, the site doesn’t invite active engagement and participation and is static and text-heavy. Faculty currently underuse our site, probably because it’s easier to just call us than it is to find and use information at our site. Revision and redesign is now ongoing, but a lot of what we do is still email-driven.

What we hope for from a new site:

  • an easier and more intuitive way to add linked pages, to help break up long blocks of text a way to add pop-ups, drop-down menus, etc., to keep users from having to navigate to other pages for short bits of supporting or related information
  • an easier way to “hide” and control access to sensitive and confidential content
  • ability to assign levels of access for stuff the office shares: currently we use Google docs for our department “whiteboard”
  • access for many users (including faculty and student workers) to edit the site and notify us easily so we can approve content before publishing it
  • dynamic linking to other departments’ information, through Banner and other means, so that redundant updates aren’t necessary
  • a platform-neutral system
  • ability to edit the site remotely

Features that would improve efficiency and help our workflow:

  • customized user profiles
  • a shared calendar
  • an anual grants-deadline calendar with a way to let faculty subscribe to alerts and reminders (currently we have to spam them)
  • a way to let faculty notify us that they plan to apply for specific grants
  • ability to dynamically link to and from faculty CVs and other content required for proposal writing (Institutional Research data especially; links with the library’s thesis archive; central database for faculty publications/achievements; faculty pages; career-path info for science alums, etc.)

Types of interactivity that would help our office communicate more effectively:

  • drop-down menus and pop-up windows so we don’t need to link to new pages – would flatten and simplify navigation considerably
  • an index of terms & acronyms (offices, agencies, etc)
  • dynamic timelines, checklists, and other forms that could be filled out online
  • calculators, worksheets, spreadsheets with College and funding rates and percentages built in
  • dynamic comments (e.g., user-contribute FAQ)
  • feeds of sponsored & relevant events, such as guideline updates, workshops
    & seminars
  • integrated links to Banner information
  • dynamic link updating, so that if material shared with another department is moved, the link on our page still works (or we’re notified to fix it)

Examples of functionality, design, and features from other colleges or industries that we like and admire:

  • Google docs: clean, simple, fast, super-easy to use and share
  • Google calendar: ditto
  • Boston University: clean, uncluttered design, yet there’s a lot going on; really like the tabbed navigation on the Home page and the way each tab slides aside to launch a video, interactive map, etc. (and that user has the option to interact or not).
  • The Daily Beast: the Cheat Sheet is a great feature

Current functionality of the Middlebury site and CMS:

    Editing is OK but clunky and subject to unexpected results; especially formatting carrying over when you cut & paste. It would be helpful to be able to see formatting tags (toggle on and off) so we could find and fix weirdness. Currently sometimes have to delete and redo because we can’t figure out how to fix the formatting.
    When Save refreshes the screen, it puts you at the top of the page: very annoying to have to scroll back down! Would be easier if it refreshed to where you left off.
    Hyperlink Mgr is great, very easy to use. Same with uploading documents.
    Really hate the way the right sidebar either doesn’t reflect the page titles or creates redundancy – not certain what creates this problem – editing page titles after they’re created? If so, the sidebar should reflect any changes to the page titles dynamically. Right now, we’re not even sure the sidebar can be changed, once created.
    More flexibility with fonts and text size would be nice.

Schools Abroad

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Form of contact: Meeting with Coordinators and Senior Staff

Stakeholder: Liz Ross and Jeff Cason

WebRedo Contact: Jamie Northrup

Website: http://www.middlebury.edu/academics/sa

Brief:

Requirements:

  • Easier navigation- drop downs
  • some interactive features like discussion/blog/wiki
  • a ‘discussion’ where students can post, but the postings are only viewed by administrator.
  • We currently have on-line application for non-Midd students applying to Schools Abroad.  It will be very help for advisors/faculty to be able to submit references electronically as well; currently they can just download a PDF and then send it to us.
  • Possibly create a system so that study abroad advisors at other institutions can track students’ applications to see what stage in the process they are in.
  • Being able to send emails to batches of students (Midd/NonMidd/Term Abroad would be handy, though we can access this info now with FMP, or Excel sheets for those of us who keep Banner records in Excel
  • Ability to upload and maintain forms on the www site
  • Option for text-only loading; useful for students abroad in minimal connection environments (e.g. Russia)
  • Directory – improvement would be to search the directory/website directly from the homepage rather than having to click on the link to the directory page.   Also it’s good that there is a drop-down menu for departments, but “student” would be a choice.  And now that it’s been upgraded, the results are shown below (on my screen/browser) the search screen, so you have to scroll to see the results, when really, once I’ve search, that part of the screen could go away.
  • Segue: the text formatting is terrible (it reformats however it likes and doesn’t allow you to change the formatting once on the interface).  This means that unless you’re typing everything from scratch on Segue, the formatting is screwy.  Also, the “son of segue” version, which lacks the quiz function, makes it less useful.
  • Event registration: I like the automatic reply that tells you your event has been submitted successfully, and I like the on-line calendar/room availability feature-it saves a lot of back and forth. On-line forms, such as Events Scheduling, is useful and works well.
  • Student Worker job posting: VERY easy to use-I wouldn’t change a thing, but there has got to be a way to electronically submit a student payroll authorization form.
  • KeySurvey-This seems to be working well, now that we have a departmental account and can steal from one another’s surveys.  The inability to run a report by respondent and hide the email (making them cease to be anonymous) can be problematic.
  • CMS.  I especially like the ability to “replace” old documents.  It’s recently been proven problematic when we link to a server (on-line application, for example) without the “go” url-and then the server we’ve linked to is off-line.  It’s difficult to know what he “go” addresses are and when to use them if we haven’t created them.  The other problems I have are the bulleted lists (if you remove a bulleted list, I can never get that final bullet to delete) and the multiple pastings of text (instead of inserting a new paragraph, often it will insert it twice-and you can’t always just go in and delete the second one).  Much better in this version than the past is the ability to change the size of an existing table and align pictures/wrap text. It would be nice if the Resource Manager saved resources in either alphabetical or chronological order…some type of searchable order (any order really) would be nice rather than the apparent randomization it uses now.
  • Being able to submit grades online (Blackboard has this functionality)

Office of Institutional Planning and Diversity (OIPD)

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Stakeholder: Jennifer Herrera
Website: http://www.middlebury.edu/campuslife/diversity
WebRedo Contact: Ryan Kellett / Pooja Shahani

General: OIPD has a variety of separate constituencies embedded within this larger area. International Student & Scholar Services has their own Stakeholder report. ADA (http://www.middlebury.edu/campuslife/diversity/ada/) and Institutional Research (http://www.middlebury.edu/administration/instres/) are included in this report.

Requirements:

  • Maintain support for the recently completed IPD flash site (highly branded, front-end site) (http://sandcat.middlebury.edu/comm/OIPD/)
  • Events Scheduling: IPD requests a better way to push events information for Cafecito hours and other diversity-related events to internal audiences, in particular students. This can be accomplished through a news feed (RSS). When an event changes, IPD requests an automatic event notification that alerts people to the change. IPD is willing to reduce email blasts if events feed is effective.
  • Forms: a dynamic customizable form that can be used by students to apply for co-sponsorship funding. There needs to be a better way and interface for accessing the data collected from these forms because it’s hard to understand the datafields that come back through email currently. Form should be more easily accessible by students.
  • CMS: Easier, better, and more-flexible CMS. Spellcheck within CMS?
  • Website font too small. Easier way to increase font size.
  • Sharing: IPD requests ability to share relavent articles from around the web with visitors of the site.
  • ADA Office:
    • The webpage must be meaningfully accessible e.g. work with screen readers and have tags that truly describe photos and the like.
    • Some people have had trouble “noticing” the page links to the left of my current site… they actually think that the only information for the ADA Office is on the first page that comes up. Can we make the links more obvious? Perhaps list the links on the actual page instead of to the right or left of it?
    • The ADA Policy is fairly long so it is helpful to be able to click on a section link and be directed to that section… that is currently the set-up and I’d like to make sure it stays that way.
  • Institutional Research: As you might expect, we do a lot of reporting on our website-it is a place where external folks, such as colleagues at our peer schools, find details they need about Middlebury and where our staff and faculty can find info they may need in their work. At a basic level, we need the site to have a place for all the items there currently, such as Factbooks, CDSs, National Surveys, etc. We need a place for posting just things for internal viewing (also similar to what we have now). My hope is that the IR site would continue to be an easily accessible, clear place to find data and reports that external and internal “customers” need.

    In terms of wishes, one enhancement to the internal part of the site may be dedicated to Self-Study/Re-accreditation work (depending on how it is decided to set things up for this campus-wide work). Other enhancements may be to post or link to some of the items Jenn Nuceder works on, for example with regard to MIIS reports.