SAC5: Migra(tio)n Headaches ?

[Intro Music]

Announcer: You’re listening to one in a series of presentations from the 2008 HighEdWeb Conference in Springfield, Missouri.

Keith Slayden: My name is Keith Slayden. I currently work in HR with Ithaca College but that being said I have over 15 years of web experience, I mean I�ve been coding webpages since HTML 1.0 on an old Webstar computer. I do a lot of different things with a lot of different websites and HR at Ithaca College is a little unique because I had the extra web experience. The general idea at Ithaca College was there was a central web group and that central web group would handle all of the really complicated requests of web development and then they would form out this custom Content Management System that they build in-house for -� and users like faculty and the people who didn�t want anything really complicated.

It was just a simple, what you see is what you get webpage, type in your text, hit submit and off it goes to a webpage. In HR, our needs were a little more complicated are current website has over 400 pages. We do a lot of content. We have a lot of different very specialized areas. So obviously we have bigger need. What I wanted to talk about today was, when I first got to this position about four years ago they had a static website with a little bit of JAVA script menus thrown in. Not a whole lot, they weren�t really getting a lot of eyeballs driving to this site and I said, I�ve got to do something with this. I took it and moved it forward to a customized PHP solution where I did a lot of code snippets, little tiny pieces of code that I can reuse throughout the whole entire websites that it wasn�t just each static page being a static page by itself.

�And from that, over the - two years ago Ithaca College fought in to the Luminis Content Management System working with marketing communications. The academic side of the house was brought in to the Luminis Content Management System and I�ve fought for the last year to get the administrative side of the house into the Luminis Content Management System and we just went live with our site HR on the Labor Day weekend. So this is kind of a road map of what we did, what we should have done, what should you not do.

There are a lot of questions that you need to think about when you�re going through this whole process and in the handouts I did put some of that stuff together. It�s comes up, there we go. Questions such as; what is driving your change? Is this purely - there�s this really new Wizbang gadget I want to add to the website and that�s this - is that really a good reason to migrate to a new technology? No. It�s not. Think about your audience, think about the content that you have internally that you want to get out, get out there. That goes on to the next question, what are the things that I have to work with right now? What technologies do I have? What resources do I have as far as hardware and greyware, your staff? Do I need additional resources for this new technology I want to roll out? How will I get them?

Do I have a really good idea of what the whole content of my site is? Can I really grok what is the driving motivation for people to come to visit my site? Do I have a clear timeline and goals, set goal live date? Is it a moving target? I hope not. Have I defined all of the players in this project? Two of those stakeholders, the people who are going to be helping with the content, people who are going to be helping build it. Is there a plan and place for testing? Some. Those are just the few questions to get you started. When I think about moving a website technologically, I tend to put group websites in to different kinds categories.

I�ve got different types of sites; static site is just all straight HTML. There�s not really any dynamic content on that site. It�s maybe a little bit of JAVA script just to do some things. Partially dynamic is a step up from that with partially dynamic, you�ve got JAVA script maybe some other code in there that gives these are a little more interactivity. Fully dynamic, that�s where you bring in things like PHP Pearls, CGI and that�s where you really start getting into acronyms. And that also involves what I call nonlinear storage and retrieval and that means it�s not a PH that�s just sitting there with the content on that page.

The content could actually be located in some other areas and then finally is the managed version of a site and that�s fully implemented Content Management System with version control over different files with a fully implemented database Content Management System and its also got access controls so you can define who�s allowed to look at different parts of your site and who�s allow to edit different parts of your site. Then there�s also the content and what the kind of content that you want to deliver will also drive how you�re going to migrate and what you�re going to do. Is it just plain text and data which is what a static site is most like? Do you have media videos, audio files, things like that? Are there downloads, PDF documents, Word documents, Excel?

I actually start with the pretty low tech and analysis tool which is a concept map. A concept map is a top down approach at looking at what all of your content is. You come up with these sort of content bubbles. So for instance, at Ithaca College HR we�ve got benefits, we�ve got compensation, payroll, human resource information and those are sort of top level areas of content and I did a little demo here of - it�s almost like having an easel and a pen and paper. Are we going to play? Yeah.

So I�m literally drawing circles. So I�ve got my homepage, that�s where I�m going to be pushing a lot of the content from the site that I want to have. One large area might be a benefits, another large area is HR information over there. We�ve got the compensation. Like I said this is pretty low tech. And I make out three several iterations of this.

So it benefits a smaller content area is our IC choice benefits and documentation, that�s what the DLX is and then there�s just other benefits and the circles are related to each other in terms of size too as far as how much content there is and throughout I would this several times and each time I do it I might just tear that piece of paper off, crumple it up and start over again. And this is my first step of figuring out what�s related to what. So I know individual choice benefits relate to their compensations wants to go up to the homepage, the HR Information.

I want to have some representation on the homepage and this is a way of mapping out how are the users going to be driven to different parts of the site.

The other thing - so that�s from the top down. Now I also think about from the bottom up. I did an analysis of everything that we had on the existing website when I was going from the custom PHP solution to the Luminis Content Management System. So I made myself a map of every directory below HR on the web server.

Didn�t have a subdirectory, was it currently in use? What was I going to be doing with that directory? What was I going to remap it to a different area on the website? And if I was, was there a new directory name for it? And I took that and then I created a topic map. So starting at the very top, what are the top level areas? So there�s a contact information employed benefit, forms and requests, information for new employees, news and events, employed development, student employment. So all these different areas and then - bullets - some of the employed benefits, there was the wellness program, employs self service, individual choice. So I did this process and came up with close to 500 individual items. Now that�s either a webpage, or a document to be downloaded, or a video.

It�s a distinct piece of information and that�s from the bottom going up. So once I�ve done that, I have a pretty good idea of what�s ahead of me to move it into the Content Management System because I can then create the hierarchy and the structure inside the Content Management System that I�m going to stuff all of the stuff into and when I got to that point, it looks something like this. So I had both documents and web pages and who is the person who is going to be responsible for it, what directory was it, what was the level of sort if it was in our document repository and then second level, third level and then here is my actual filenames, the fie type and then the actual document title.

So, I haven�t actually done anything in the Content Management System yet. This is all preplanning, so that I know exactly what I can do so that when I get the information or when I get the access and everything setup I can just go ahead and push it all in. That�s under the content, under the constituents you have the people that you already know or visiting your website but think about those people. I know this is sounds kind of paradoxical but you have to think about the people that you don�t know are visiting your website. Think outside of the box and think about your content and what is driving your content because the people who are going to be looking at your website could change depending on what content you�ll offer. �

Iterative actually applies all over the place. It�s a process that you have to keep revisiting over and over again especially when you�re doing testing of your site, usability testing and like I said, when I did the concept map I went through that several times and even with the inventory of the site, I would do it once, put it away for a few days, come back to it, revisit it. See if there was anything new or fresh that I could come up with. That�s one of my favorites. Beware of website by committee. It�s great to have this group of constituents who are really interested in your website, the stakeholders. But it�s not a good idea to have them all involved in creating the website. There is a line between the design and pushing that site forward and the people who update the content on a day to day basis and you really should separate that because it just drags the process out and decisions take forever to be made.

And under constituents too, another population to think about is - I�m making sure you sign the Section 508 compliant which is all the ADA requirements and there�s a website out there. It�s actually just section508.gov which is a great place to start. So next we thought about the constituents but who is responsible for the actual creation and maintenance of this site. There�s a different functional content area within HR alone we have, seven different areas of distinct content. There�s back and maintenance which in our case is handled by ITS. Day to day updates depending on how much information is there, most of that is handled by myself.

And then when we�ve actually finished the migration usability and post assessment, that�s using you�re analytics and finding out if what you had predicted through all of your analysis is actually coming true. Tools and timeline know before you go. By that I mean, do not make this a moving target. Have that lines set in the future and go ahead and build in extra time because you know stuff is going to happen. That�s given, so just try build in that extra time. We began talking to our ITS group in the fall of 2007. I had my first look at the inside of the Content Management System in January and we went live of the Labor Day weekend and keep it simple.

The more complicated, the more involve, and it�ll just slow you down again. Now, this is an inventory paradigm shift by that I mean, you�re going from just that static website with your HTML, nothing else to something that�s got additional complexity to it and you�ve really got to think about how that�s going to affect your upgrades, maintenance and everything else. You may have a new organizational scheme; part of what drove this website change was that our HR organization underwent an organizational change.

And content chunking with many news and topics. One of the things I learned in Psychology is; try to keep your menus, navigation, functions, and things like that to seven plus or minus two items, five minimum nine maximum.

That�s the best number that humans are in general capable of remembering in any given time. I mean think about phone numbers that�s seven digits. And training - is your website going to require users to get a little extra training. Hopefully not on the front end for the people who are looking at the site. But on the back end as far as�

The people who maybe putting content into the new Content Management System. Communication, I cannot stress enough communication. In our case, we had too many cooks in the kitchen. There was ITS who did the back end database and the maintenance of the Content Management System itself.�

We had marketing and communications who was driving templates, and look and feel, and some content control. There were all of the different functional content people who wanted their stuff on the front page... And myself is trying to manage all that stuff. So it�s really important to keep the communication channels open and just - we actually had meetings every other week but it wasn�t a meeting where everybody sat around for an hour and a half talking about everything.

There was a set agenda and we said; �here�s what we�ve got so far. What else can we change?� and then we finish it and go off and do that . That�s another key piece of this - that�s a part of the keep it simple idea and update, review, repeat. It�s that iterative process. So even before you go into the next version of your site you can do HTML markups just to give people in general the look and feel what the site�s going to be like.

You can even throw in a few links to go to some different pages and punch list, that�s one of my favorite things. Punch list is that list of everything that needs to be done on that site. It doesn�t matter how trivial or how big, whatever. Everything is in one spot so everybody can go in and take a look at it and when it�s done it�s off the list and I wanted to give you just a little bit of a dog and pony show.

So this is what it�s started out as - this was back in 2001. This actually not JAVA script it�s just static images. Every single one of those pages, each page was its own static page so even though there�s a menu on every page you have to copy that code to every single page on the site. So we moved up a little bit to JAVA script and this menu was all JAVA script pop ups and there was some dynamic image placement here and here. But again it was all static JAVA script and HTML so if you made a change to that JAVA script menu you have to copy and paste it to each page on the site.

So we moved up to PHP and with PHP each region - each div, if you will - became a separate chunk of code and even these little bubbles up here, it was just a call out to pull in this little snipped of code and the title and the URL were a parameter that were fed to the display and the same with this, there was actually not even a database behind this but a text file containing the title, the link title, URL and subtext just in the text file and then it was just all fed in through PHP and rendered on the fly. And even like this content bubble here I could take that area and put it on the re-enrolment page or put it on the front page, put it anywhere just by including that chunk of code anywhere I wanted to on the site.

�And then along came the Content Management System. So the template was driven by marketing communications, it�s the same template that was used across all of the academic areas and the homepage and this is through Luminis. Any questions, comments about our experience? Yeah.

Female audience: What did you use in terms of what Content Management System you implemented?

Keith Slayden: That was outside of the hand of HR. That was all done - Ithaca College has Student Information System from Banner and so it was just to give back on top of that the Luminis Content Management System.

Female audience: Was it easy?

Keith Slayden: Banner was harder than Luminis. The initial Banner foundation. Any other questions?

Luminis I like because of the ability to grant very fine control of who can see what for editing, things like that. Ithaca College has a unique situation because we started out several years ago with a custom CMS that was built for an immediate need and the web team actually took those little applications and use them as the front end for some of the content within Luminis. So the faculty and some of the staff on the front end who were editing pages never knew the difference. In fact that the database behind the scenes changed or that access control and all that stuff was now being handled by Luminis.

It just makes it a very complicated environment when you�re inside Luminis and it opens up this new editor and you can�t, you know, am I still in Luminis or am I over in this other editing engine, you know, so there�s that. Yeah.

Male audience: So, how would your idea compare to their saying HR is transitioning into Luminis with some of the other departments on campus?

Keith Slayden: �Well we�

Male audience: Either you get there or not.

Well it�s interesting one of the other presentations I was hearing about Rouge Departments, we are one of those and unfortunately I had not experience that they were willing to grant me that back end access to the system and that was actually part of what took the nine months from January to September was working that all out.

What am I allowed to do? What am I not allowed to do? How was that all going to work out? So, does that answer your question?

[Laughter]

Male audience: Mostly. The other half is okay I'm from the IT department. How can I convince them to my purpose with the kind of research the way you did?

[Laughter]

Keith Slayden: You know that�s a really good question. It�s all about buying and our Marketing Communications Department at Ithaca College did a huge job of rolling this whole thing out across all the academic departments and got buying that way. They went out and did dog and pony shows to every person trying to - and we also had buying from the upper level administration. So it helps to have that top down push.

[Laughter]

Any other questions?

Male audience: Would you have done it differently now that you are more funded?

Moderator: Can you repeat the question?

Keith Slayden: He wanted to know if there was anything I could do differently. I definitely would have project management. There was not enough project management partly because there was so many different players and we were also going through some leadership transitions at the time which didn�t help and the new leadership is really going to hold for this process and it�s pushing it but we - that was sort of a vacuum before. So in retrospect I would have taken more control and pushed more of it and try to keep them on deadlines and I mean, I already did lots of that with the IT group because I was ready to go with all of my analysis. I got everything ready and then I was just waiting for ITS to give me what I needed.

Anything else?

Well, thank you.

[Applause]

Announcer: For more presentations from the 2008 HighEdWeb Conference visit HighEdWeb.org/2008 or sign up for our podcast and feed at HighEdWeb.org/podcast.xml

[End of Music]