I have arrived at SUNY Wizard, somehow missing the snow storm that is dumping upwards of 2 feet worth of snow north of here. Hopefully it stays up there.

Here are my slides for the presentations I’m giving this week.

Enhancing the Course Catalog
https://docs.google.com/a/stonybrook.edu/presentation/d/1p-KHZ6TnEt-7PYprGqkpz7vW6m5M4fOWcqG2R_hWopo/edit?usp=sharing

Front End Dev Tools
https://docs.google.com/a/stonybrook.edu/presentation/d/1qV8QApeGtUi7HOmXjtTgcexGZw4eKNqcoos6GE98EbM/edit?usp=sharing

Not much to report yet, one thing that I thought was interesting was learning that SUNY ITEC is creating a security services group, but it sounds mainly like its to monitor their internal activities rather than general SUNY consulting.

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Wheres the Bus? Interactive Map @ Brockport

Brockport has a Mobile Technology Team: http://www.brockport.edu/motek/index.html
2 Years old, Based on Google Maps brockport.edu/map

The interactive map can be used for campus wide events like homecoming (brokport.edu/map/homecoming-2014-saturday)

Really loved this mornings keynote, the speaker made a clear cut, well supported argument for why organizations need to think about and embrace disruptive forces in the market. Higher Ed is ripe for major changes in this regard, even if we ignore the 800-pound gorilla that is online learning, there are numerous ways we can do a better job embracing the “disruptive” technologies that have made their way on campus in an effort to better to serve our students and faculty.

Area’s that I’m Personally excited about:
Web Publishing / Story Telling
– SB You and our Drupal offerings have huge potential to transform how we communicate our goals at an organizational, departmental and personal levels.

Course Catalog Enhancements
– We took a big step with Classie Syallabus, Classie Evals and Class Find but theres still so much more we can do to do a better job “selling” our courses and getting the right student in the right class so that they can be successful.

Community Building
– Yammer is one of those technologies that can immediately transform how we collaborate and share ideas with each other in a cross functional way. But very quickly the sheer amount of data (noise) being shared can choke out the ability to find content and area’s that interest an individual (what’s noise to me may be a symphony to you).

Looking outside of yammer theres so many ways we can collect community input and share it in a ways that allow for debate and positive institutional change

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The sessions today were interesting, Acquia discussed their new partner certification inititatives and I heard from other large (non-education) organizations and how they are solving their multi-site headaches. Its amazing how the same challenges affect us all. It really seems to come down to having a robust theme that enables effective story telling.

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Lunch was unique in that I managed to sit down with the CEO of Acquia, who prior to this conference I really didn’t know much about. I was impressed with how engaged he was in this conference and how much he values and appreciates the efforts of his team.

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I attended an afternoon session discussing the pillars of successful web implementations which outlined the key focus of most web initiatives: mobile, content, seo, advertising, email, automation, data & social and how your web platform is the foundation of the elements. I got some useful tools to checkout including http://www.vidyard.com/ and was reminded that I really need to take the time and upgrade our Google Analytics to the latest version.

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The closing keynote focused on Responsive Web Design and the tradeoffs in building Rich web experiences across all devices. It reinforced what I already felt, but its clear that I really need to look at creating a performance budget/goal.

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Overall I’m really glad I made the trek up here and probably the biggest take away is even in industry and organizations with seemingly large budgets team-sizes tend to be small (3-5 technical resources) but are supplemented by strong vendor partnerships.

Opening Engage Keynote was impressive, Acquia gave a brief outline of their platform strategy / direction, which was a rehash of DrupalCon Austin regarding the experience web.

We First
What really stood out was Simon Mainwaring from We First who outlined effective social strategies from major brands (Whole Foods, Cocoa Cola, Tom’s, etc.)
Very inspiring, more details to come.

Driving Faster with API’s
NBC Sports, PAC 12, Tesla Motors

Best Practices:
Make API’s — Put your code out there.
Document Them Apeir?
Scaling API’s with CDN’s
Versioning

Tesla API’s allow starting / stopping car
API First the new Mobile First?
Setting Content Free..
Tesla Releases 3x / Week
The entire ordering process goes through Drupal Site/Store

“Two-Pizza Teams”
Dog Food the API
Release often
Daily Meetings / SCRUM / Agile
Week Long Sprints

800 Sites: Pfizer
77,000 Employees
Viagra, Lipitor, Advil, Centrum…Hundreds of Brands
2012 -> IT acts as hosting company running dozens of different technologies. Chose Drupal/Open Source
2013 -> Decouple Agencies / Start Standardizing on Platform/Vendors
2014 -> Automatic Testing (Behat) / Enforcement of standards

Its really neat to hear how a large company like Pfizer deals with the same challenges that our instution has. Product / Regional groups have a lot of autonomy and control over platform selection. Wanting to get a better handle on this Wild West situation, their central IT group created a compelling platform (Acquia/Drupal) that was able to deliver a consistently great experience, reducing costs around 60% and delivering projects 30% faster. Groups still have control over direction, theme and content, but stay within the platform.

Content Strategy

http://www.gollner.ca/

Content Strategy Quad: Substance, Workflow Structure Governance

Substance:
What does it do for our users?
Why do we require this?
What are the editorial principles at play?
How will we measure success of this content?

Structure,
How do we prove out our models
Do we have a taxonomy? How will it be maintained?
How does content travel between our systems?

Workflow
Who are our authors and their skillsets? What are their pain points? Whats working for them?
How do we know where content can or should be acquired?

Governance
What are our priority programs and why
Where is the center of content decisions
Whos connecting the dots?
How do we assign and measure accountability?

Data management
audience planning
content management + tagging
content decisioning
channel + messaging
cross platform communication
measurement + optimization

Rahel Bailie Intentional Design Content Strategy Maturity Model

Goals, Strategys, Tactics

Establish a common lexicon
Know what you need.
Schedule time to think — activity is not productivity
Talk to front lines
Prioritize

I just attended my first Coffee with Cole jam session this morning. I, of course somehow managed to be fashionably late, but still had plenty of opportunity to sit in and listen to a great discussion.

Hearing first hand, the viewpoints and challenges, not from Cole (I’ve been fortunate enough to already listen in on and have some great conversations with him), but from the other attendee’s really drives home the need for all of us within IT at Stony Brook to make time to better communicate both within our teams and externally with our users.

It’s easy at times to feel both indispensable but invisible at Stony Brook — the work each of us does keeping the lights on in our respective organizations prevents us from spending the right amount of time reflecting on and broadcasting our achievements to the wider community.

The best conversations I’ve had about Stony Brook, that is those conversations that have inspired me or changed my perceptions occur in these types of informal gatherings; whether its over a cup of coffee, a pint of beer or a greasy cheeseburger while on a road trip to a conference;  the relaxed setting removes the position of power that comes with a person’s title (CIO, Director, Manager), helps cover the lines in the sand that we draw against each other and instead welcomes everyone as a peer. 

Expanding the reach of these conversations is imperative to “bending time”; enabling us to react faster and move our culture. Cole mentioned that he would love to record and share these conversations, which was the exact thought I had five minutes into the discussion, but also shared his fear that doing so would alter the types of conversations that he can have with the attendees.

The observer effect is quite substantial in those situations — recording and streaming these conversations would undermine the goal of getting “hard truth” out of these discussions.  

But knowledge and opinion sharing is critical to overcoming the roadblocks that processes and people tend to throw in the way to delay and avoid change. One option could be for DoIT to host a different type of session perhaps called “On the Record” where a moderator could help facilitate a discussion of the issues facing IT on campus among different university stakeholders (students, faculty, staff, and administrators). 

Platforms like Yammer and the various social media outlets can also play a critical role in engaging with the masses, disseminating information and collecting feedback in what is by its very nature a open and public channel.

The boxes that we put ourselves and (perhaps more importantly) that we put others in limit our ability to grow together, to accomplish more, to do it within our constraints and to do it faster. The more we take the time to invest in ourselves and in building relationships with each other the more we can accomplish.

In summary, if you haven’t signed up for Coffee With Cole, get on it. If you’re not a morning person or a coffee person, come join me and your IT friends for Beers with Rich, Thursday August 21st at 5pm — contact me for more details — better yet do both, I got science on my side.

The day started pretty early. They moved the main keynote to the morning this year. It was good hearing Dries speak on the future of the web and what potential role Drupal will play, especially with Drupal 8’s expanded focus on services/api’s. I then attended a session entitled “Don’t Let Crappy Content Ruin Your New Site” https://austin2014.drupal.org/session/dont-let-crappy-content-ruin-your-new-site — I thought the presenter did a great job and summarizing the issues we see in web design especially when having dozens of content contributors who’s goals, skills and desires are very disparate. I spent the remainder of the late morning and afternoon in smaller BoF sessions focusing mainly around front end development. Learned about tools for automated front end testing and was in an interesting discussion about the future of the major drupal themes. Its interesting to see the different personalities and opinions coming together in an attempt to streamline their processes and increase producitiy, it feels familiar to what I’m trying to push for at Stony. I got a chance to sit in on a pantheon presentation and will be meeting with them at 1:45 tomorrow to discuss some of their platforms advantages. I also sat and spoke with some of my Acquia contacts/friends and got answers to a few questions that have been bugging me. I have a meeting with Chris Hartigan at 9am Thursday. Made some more progress on setting up the North Eastern Higher Ed summit with Nancy @ Yale. Also got to speak with her and one of her technical guys Vincent during dinner.  I really like their approach and look forward to their session on Thursday. This has definitely been a rewarding conference thus far.

Super stoked about todays Higher Ed Summit. The event seems to be really well organized so far. About 150 people have showed up. Already saw some familiar faces from my work with NYC Camp.

http://edusummitdrupalconatx.drupalgardens.com/

On-boarding / training

One school has a staff of 25 students doing Drupal work with 1 full time staff member. Student workers create and manage content, make video’s and do photography for clients. Everyone else in room almost fell out of their chairs. Some paid, some independent study through CS/Web Design.

George Washington University
2 Hours Weekly Office Hours in a computer lab. Coupled with initial on-boarding training. Community building.

Tool to create website walk through’s http://walkhub.net/ Provides a way to collaborate on documentation.

Content Strategy

UT uses Google Docs as a platform to collaborate on content.
Lots of schools using Workbench / Workbench Access for controlling content.

http://voiceandtone.com/ Mailchimp writing style guide. Nice.

http://web.temple.edu/web-style-guide

Explore: CK Editor Show Blocks

Accessibility Blocker of the Month

Compliance Sherrif

bit.ly/DrupalEduContent

Accessibility

Great talk about accessibility tips for D7 and the future with D8 http://prezi.com/iqeia3wwunho/accessibility-challenges-workarounds-and-visions-of-drupa/

<a href=”tel:+15555555555″>Phone number links!</a>

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/juicy-studio-accessibility-too/

http://www.deque.com/products/worldspace/

Color Contrast
http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/contrastAnalyser

Kill carrousels — not accessibile.

Youtube accessibility controls

Lunch Discussion Lead by Chris Hartigan – Acquia

Met Sean Crowley from Acquia. Chris gave good talk about different challenges Universities face on the web.

Google Analytics FERPA issues?

BOF Content Strategy

Pair up copywriters with Subject matter experts to create good content.
Use students
ConFab

Some schools are taking a groundswell approach where content can be liked and then moves to the top/gets more promoted.

kill text format options

most schools not using overlay

panelizer

paranoia module

github drupal-security

ckeditor 4.0

New Job Role Communications Web Content

Dartmouth has 9 people in IT doing web development, Communications, IA, content production, support: dartmouth.edu/comp/about/departments/web-services

MIT all major sites are in drupal. Outsourcing hosting and themeing is fundamental to success.

Dartmouth just outlined our exact situation with PHP on their main web server and why they are using Acquia for drupal. Feels so familiar.

Northeastern Higher Ed Summit July 18th

Got to talk with Nancy Flowers and a few other NYC Camp attendee’s, seems to be strong interest in having a summit this summer — excited to keep the conversation going.

Summary and conclusion

Great summit the organizers did a great job, the event moved smoothly and lots of positive conversations. Looking forward to working with more of my higher ed comrades.

I was invited to sit in on WRT 304 student presentation / reflection today.

My Takeaways:

Steven Young “Blogfolio: Assignment from Hell” — students perspective changed from negative to positive over semester
– Writing samples provided through portfolio got him a job at ChallengePost

Jasmeen Ranu you.stonybrook.edu/jasmeenranu — viewing twitter as a potential source for building a professional network.
Blog commenting huge benefit

Eliza Hassan http://you.stonybrook.edu/elizahassan
Opportunity to expand on paper resume. Ability to really personalize your resume “make it you”
Twitter networking++

Sayid Yasin you.stonybrook.edu/sayidyasin
Balance between design and content
Took classes in html
Needed to refocus on content -> how do you make the world care about your site?
Media heavy — lots of nice graphics/images
Resume Heatmap
Plan to continue with site

Basile Galitsis you.stonybrook.edu/basilegalitsis
Class is best decision he made at Stony Brook

Follow-up / Discussion:

What were some of the technical challenges? How many of you have/have used Digications ePortfolio Service? Any comparisons?
Apples vs Oranges, Very Complimentary

How much time do you spend per week working / fighting WordPress?

Do you feel like you have a closer connection with your classmates in this class vs others?

How many of you see yourselves continuing with your portfolio’s post graduation?

Action Items:
Look into increasing SEO / “google-fu” — make student blogs more visible
Increase Support / Communication
Provide steps for accessing SB You Post graduation.

Fixed a few major issues I had with the theme including:

Navigation System no longer hard-coded, we now take advantage of Drupals Menu System
Footer regions no longer display if there is no content in them
The panel pane name is now added to the body class list
Search Box updated to take up less space
Menu Icon in phone/tablet modes works better
Cleaned up some of the template file html to make it easier to read and more maintainable

This work was “sponsored” by the SciEdPHD site (http://sciedphd.stonybrook.edu) but will certainly benefit all Unity users and sites.





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