Just a quick note… in the process of working with Alex on the test install of the new blog server version, I thought of a solution to the bug that was dumping people back to the login screen when trying to post a blog entry. I just tried it, and it works!
General update
I’ve been busy again (who isn’t, these days?) And likely to be more so until we can hire someone to replace Shaun Gatherum, who will be missed around here.
The web conversion is moving along, mostly in the hands of individual people in various departments. I’m working on a way to make the new template function on our database server; right now, a lot of our database applications like the faculty/staff directory and the account lookup system still use the old template. I can make the new template work for non-secure connections to the database, but not secure ones as yet. This may not be fixable until the database server upgrade, but we’ll see.
My other big project at the moment is trying to automate Windows domain user creation. You may or may not know that your WOU network usernamer and password actually apply to two different accounts; there’s the Windows Domain account, which you use to log into your computer and access network drives, and there’s also your LDAP account, which provides access to your email, and your blog, and secure folders on the website, and the forums, and most anything else on any of our servers.
The LDAP account is created automatically, but until recently we have had to create the matching domain account by hand, which is a pain. However, I recently found a way to automate at least part of the process, and am looking to automate the whole thing soon. This probably won’t make much difference to anyone outside UCS, except that it might free up more of our time to help you.
Site security
We’re changing some of our web shortcuts (such as https://wou.edu/blogadmin and https://wou.edu/newmail) to use the https protocol.
This is the same protocol that is used for financial transactions on websites such as PayPal and Amazon; it means that all information you send is encrypted so that it cannot be intercepted en route.
However, this seems to have exposed a bug in our blog server; when you go to post an entry, the system returns you to the login page. If this happens, you can change the “http:” in the page address to “https:” and you should be good to go. (You may have to do this twice when posting a blog entry.)
I’m working on a fix for this, though it might wait until I get the blog server software updated.
FAQ: Communicating with University Computing
Hello, everyone–
After a year-long hiatus, the Friday FAQs are back! In case you weren’t here when we last sent these out, the basic idea is that we take one technical topic per week and work through it in as non-technical a manner as possible. For more information, including why we call these documents “FAQs”, please see the FAQ archive at “https://wou.edu/faq. Some of you, of course, are reading this on paper; since we wanted as many people as possible to see this particular FAQ, we are sending it out by multiple methods.
This week’s topic is communication with UCS; how you talk to us, and how we talk to you. At the end is a link to a survey so you can give us feedback.
I have a question for UCS. What is the best way to make sure I get a response?
That depends on the question.
– If you have a new problem to report, or want an update on an existing problem, please contact the Service Request Desk (AKA the help desk or the SRD) at ucshelpdesk@wou.edu or extension 88925.
– If it’s about something where you’re already working directly with someone in UCS, you can ask that person about it; however you may get a faster response by contacting the Service Request Desk. This ensures that your request is sent to an alternate person if the primary technician is not available right away. This is especially important with student workers, who are not on duty full-time.
– If it’s a general question about technology, or about UCS policies or practices, feel free to send it to me at faq@wou.edu; I will do my best to answer questions either individually or in one of these FAQ documents, and if I can’t answer a question, I will refer it to someone who can.
– If it’s about a virus, or email spam, or spyware, or fraud, or any other such nastiness, send it to virusinfo@wou.edu. That also happens to be me, but those questions might not always be my job, so please use the virusinfo address so your question gets to the right person.
– If you’re not sure where to send a question, the Service Request Desk will be happy to help you! When in doubt, just call 88925.
Why should I contact the Service Request Desk instead of directly calling a UCS worker I know?
The Service Request Desk is the best way to make sure your request gets to the right person as quickly as possible. We sometimes rearrange job responsibilities among our staff, so (for instance) the person you talked to about an email list last year may not be the correct person to call now. The people answering the Service Request line can make sure your request gets to the right person. If that person is not available, the SRD can often find someone else to solve the problem.
Going through the SRD also means that your request is documented. We are all human, and sometimes forget to write down things we are told over the phone or in face-to-face conversation, so having documentation helps remove the human-error factor.
Why is it called the “Service Request Desk” anyway?
We used to call it the Help Desk, but we found that created some unrealistic expectations. The Service Request Desk exists to take your service requests and direct them to the person who can help you; we can’t possibly train all our student workers to provide direct help for every situation.
What happens to my request once I give it to the Service Request Desk?
The worker (generally a student) who takes your request will enter it into our Service Request System, and assign it to a technician, who will immediately be emailed a notification message. Wherever they are on campus, the tech can log into the Service Request system and take action. Once the request is handled, the tech records that fact, and may include any notes on the issue to help other techs who may have to deal with similar issues in the future.
The Service Request System also lets us track how well we are doing. These statistics are available publicly at “https://wou.edu/servicerequeststats.
OK, so what about your communications with us?
Right now, our main method of communicating with faculty, staff, and students is through the allfacstaff@wou.edu and students@wou.edu email lists. We use this both for urgent messages, such as emergency server maintenance or scam warnings, as well as for more routine communications, such as announcements of planned upgrades; basically anything we need to announce to a large part of the WOU community will go out on one or both of these email lists. We recognize that this does not necessarily work for everybody, especially considering the amount of traffic on those lists, but we have not found any obviously better alternatives. We are always open to suggestions, though!
What about all these blog posts I see links to in my email? Am I supposed to be reading all those UCS staff blogs?
Everyone on campus has a blog, if they care to use it; most UCS staff use ours to talk about what we are working on, and sometimes to explain technical issues or policies. An example from Bill’s blog may be found at “https://wou.edu/~kernanb/blogs/archives/2006/09/faq_-_frequentl.html. However, you need not feel obligated to follow everybody’s blog. Whenever any critical information is posted in a blog, there will be an announcement with a link to that post, so that everyone will have a chance to see it.
What about other means of communication, like the wiki server and forums server?
Both the wiki and forums servers are open to any member of the WOU community. Currently, they are used by several departments for various purposes; if UCS puts anything there that is critical for the whole campus community to know about, we will notify you via email.
What if I don’t read my mailing lists? Shouldn’t you make more of an effort to get critical information to me another way?
Well, we are sending this one out on paper as well as by email list and blog, so you can see it even if you don’t read the email lists. However, don’t expect all communications from UCS to come this way. If email lists just plain don’t work for you, and you feel UCS should use another channel to communicate with you, now is your chance to tell us so. We’re looking over our communication practices to make them as effective as possible, so if you want a change, please fill out our survey and let us know!
Ideally we will settle on one or two communication methods for critical information, and then we will clearly state what they are. It will then be the responsibility of everyone on campus to pay attention to announcements made via those methods; that will ensure that everybody knows what they need to know and is caught by surprise as seldom as possible. Of course, some surprises are inevitable when dealing with technology; but when we have any advance notice of something important, we will do our best to pass it along when it can still make a difference.
So what about that survey you mentioned?
Now for the survey. This is mainly intended for faculty and staff, since we’ve gotten the most feedback from those groups, but students may respond as well. If you are reading this on paper, it should have come with the survey; if you are reading this online, you can get the survey in Microsoft Word format via this link:
https://wou.edu/~crowej/FacStaffSurvey.doc
This is a printable Microsoft Word document; if it does not load when you click the link, try right-clicking it and choosing “Save As…” or whatever equivalent your browser or email program offers.
That’s all for this week! Upcoming FAQ topics will include phishing and scams, the use of the Thin Clients, and the new website system. Feel free to suggest additional topics by emailing me at faq@wou.edu; I also recommend checking the FAQ archives at “https://wou.edu/faq to see if your question has already been answered.
Thanks for your time and attention,
—-Ron
Improving Communication
Recently we’ve been getting some feedback that UCS needs to improve communications with others on campus, particularly the faculty.
As part of this effort, I’ll be starting up the Friday FAQs again, after a hiatus of about a year. They are a good bit of work, but I don’t mind doing it if it helps things run more smoothly.
The FAQs will also be posted here on my blog, so that anyone who wishes may comment publicly. Naturally, private comments can also be addressed to me at faq@wou.edu.
Also, the week after they are sent out, each FAQ will be posted on the UCS website (which desperately needs to be revamped, but that’s a different topic.)
The first FAQ will be about communicating with UCS, and how it can be done most effectively, and also about the various channels UCS uses to communicate with the rest of campus. We’ll include a link to a survey, which will also be distributed on paper, so that you can help shape our communications practices.
The main thing is that we want to help everybody here. We’re a service department; without the rest of campus, and especially without students, there would be no point to our existence.
So if there’s a problem, we want to know about it. If anyone perceives that UCS is being a roadblock, we want to know about it; sometimes what seems to be a roadblock is actually necessary for reasons that are not obvious, but other times it is the result of miscommunication or misunderstanding that can be cleared up with a bit of honest communication and creative problem solving.
Another update on the web conversion
Things are rolling along. As you’ve no doubt noticed, more and more pages are going live with the new design. Things will slow down a bit as our student helpers have fewer hours to work, but you will keep seeing progress.
The next big issue is training the web editors in various departments to use the new system. The main differences from the old system are as follows:
- You create new pages using a web form. The new system depends on PHP code to load in the external files that contain all the header and footer design elements, but we don’t want to force everybody to learn a new language. So we’ve designed a web form where you just input the title and location of the page, and some search engine keywords, and choose a side menu, and then hit submit; this creates the page and inserts all the necessary PHP code. From that point, you can edit the page without needing to know any PHP (or even any HTML, if you’re using Contribute.)
- You need a special setup in Dreamweaver or Contribute to edit anything visually. If you are a code geek, you can use any text editor to change your webpage by editing the raw code, but most people probably aren’t that hard-core, even if they had the time on their hands to learn to code. You can use Macromedia Dreamweaver or Contribute to visually edit pages, though either one will require some initial setup by UCS (though we are working on making instructions available on the web and through the TRC.)
- You need to be consistent with visual styles. The new system provides a menu of visual styles that look good with the new template. This makes it easy to add and update content and make it look nice; the flipside of this is that you won’t be able to use huge green blinking italics to highlight important information. (Note that personal sites on the P: drive are exempt from this; you can do whatever you want there.)
- You are expected to keep your web pages up-to-date.In the old days, we were pretty lax about keeping everything updated, and requiring other departments to do the same on their own pages. Those days are done. With the new simplicity of Contribute, there is no excuse for pages to get stale. Most web editors will have responsibility for only a few pages, and tools to edit them easily, so you will be able to stay on top of things.
On top of all that, the biggest benefit of this massive update is that the next update will be much easier. We will be able to totally redesign the site without forcing everybody to update all their files all at once; since most of the design elements come from external files in a central location, we can just update those files and BAM! the whole site changes without you having to lift a finger. If we discover a problem with the new design, it will be easy to fix, unlike the previous template.
It will take us a lot of time and energy to get to that point, but the effort is already paying off. Once this is done, we’ll have a site that will make other universities green with envy. More to the point, it will show that WOU is not stuck behind the times, which will directly translate to higher enrollment, which benefits everybody here.
Vacation
Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention I’m going to be on vacation next week; we’re heading for the historic city of Deadwood, South Dakota, in the heart of the Black Hills. We’ve been looking forward to this for months!
I’ll be back on September 5th. In the mean time, refer web conversion questions to Stewart Gilbert, and all other questions to the UCS Service Request Desk.
Major progress on the web conversion
So, again I’ve been too busy to blog much. The web conversion project is moving along nicely, but is eating up almost all my time. If any of you are waiting on me to do something and I haven’t responded in some time, please feel free to bug me again. I know I’ve made some people wait too long for stuff; I apologize for that. Of course, these days we all know what it’s like to be understaffed; people have been understanding, for which I’m grateful.
Anyway, we’ve made major headway on phase one of the process, which is creating the rough-draft PHP files. I have five UCS students working on this, who all deserve mention for their hard work: Jonathan Guillen, Ronni Luchterhand, Mark Lyons, Michael Orr, and Courtney Wehner. Read on for more about the project…
The page creation system (AKA “websmith”) is just about ready to go. We’ve got a few people using it on a test basis already. In the new system you don’t create pages by copying an existing one; you go to websmith and enter in a few details like the page location, the title, the search engine keywords, and so on; you also get to choose which set of side links you want, and what basic template you want for the page. The page is then created for you in the location you specified. (Naturally, you can only create pages in a location you have X: drive access to; there’s no way anybody can break the whole site if they make a mistake.)
And tonight I’m working on the script to search out and change links in the whole website. This will be a vital part of phase two, where (after departments have given their approval) we move the HTML files in a given area into an archive folder, and make the PHP files into the real website.
We can’t do this all at once, naturally enough; it will go piece by piece, and will take months. But progress will be steady; you may have already seen the changes in the Admissions and Financial Aid pages, and many others of use to prospective students. More pages will be converted in the next weeks and months, until the entire site is converted. We hope to train people in each department to work on their own web pages in the new system, which will help things move faster.
Note that personal web pages in your P: drive (formerly known as public_html) will not be affected at all. As the process nears completion, we will offer help to anyone who wants to use the new system for their P: drive website, but nobody will be required to convert those pages.
If you have personal pages on the X: drive, we strongly encourage you to move them to the P: drive. Eventually, all pages on the X: drive should be in the new system; if you don’t want your personal pages converted, they will need to be moved to the P: drive. However, there’s no fixed deadline for this; we are avoiding personal folders that we find on the X: drive for now. When the time comes (probably several months from now), we will ask for your decision; if you want to move the pages to the P: drive, we will help you with that; if you don’t, we will help you convert them to the new system.
Anyway, that’s all for now. I have miles to go before I sleep, and I need to quit writing and get back to work.
Web conversion underway
Wow. Once again, it’s been a long time between entries, but this time I have a valid excuse. I’ve been working my tailbones off now that the website conversion has finally moved out of the preparation stages and into full swing!
The first stage involves creating new versions of pages on the WOU website. These new pages end in .php instead of .html or .htm, because they are written in the PHP language. You may be relieved to know that PHP can have HTML freely mixed in with it, so you won’t have to learn a new language to work with these pages.
These pages will eventually become the real pages on the website, but for now, the original HTML pages are still there and are not being changed. Each department will be able to look at the new PHP pages and approve or change them before we make them live, and the HTML pages will still be kept in an archive folder for reference, at least for the first while.
The first parts of the website to be fully converted will be the admissions process pages, in other words those that prospective students need to see during the admissions process. The home page will also be updated; you’ve seen its new look for months now, and that won’t change much, but we have a lot to do “under the hood”, so to speak.
Stay tuned for more info!
Wiki server security
OK, user registration on the wiki server now requires a valid WOU login. I got a little sick of spammers crapping on our server, so this should lock them out.
If you have any trouble registering, please let me know at twikiadmin@wou.edu.
Oh, and I probably shouldn’t mention this until I have it working, but I think I see a fix for the long-standing problem of the missing email notification of changes. With luck, that’ll be taken care of soon.