Project wrap-up & survey

Now that the project is mostly complete, and all web sites have been migrated from Collage to echoCI, we'd like to get a better idea for improvements in users' experience with the new system.   

In the next few weeks, University employees will receive a link to a survey to provide feedback on echoCI. Anecdotally we've been receiving lots of positive feedback, and we believe this survey will verify these reports.

99.9% Complete...our Collage-free world

Daniel Martinez (CI Web Supervisor) and I are happy to report that as of 12pm today, Collage is no longer being used to serve any of the University's web content. The final pages (our myCI announcements) were deployed and are being published from EchoCI today, after completion of successful training with announcements editors on Monday.

Over the next few months, we will completely decommission the Collage server and archive the resulting databases and web content to retain historical records as necessary.

It's been a long journey, and we're glad to be at the end of our implementation rollout. Stay tuned for announcements regarding the upcoming echoCI satisfaction survey this fall.

99% complete!

Early this morning, migration of the University home page to EchoCI was completed. The team took the opportunity to roll out  updated rotating banner functionality as well.

This means that we are 99% done with our migration, and have 3 sites left to complete. Since the migration began, over 6500 web pages in over 2400 folders were converted, checked and migrated into EchoCI by the Web Services team. Kudos to the Web Services team for their diligence and hard work over the past year to complete this migration!

In fall 2011, we will issue a survey to EchoCI users to gauge their satisfaction with the new system; based on anecdotal feedback we've receive, we anticipate a significant improvement in satisfaction with EchoCI.

As a reminder, if you need help with EchoCI, please contact the A&IT Help Desk at helpdesk@csuci.edu or call 805-437-8587.

95% of web sites have been migrated

Almost done! As of today, 95% of web sites have been migrated into EchoCI. The 7 remaining sites have been scheduled for migration, and should be completed soon.

A minor issue today with logon to EchoCI has been resolved. Any issues with EchoCI logon should be referred to the A&IT Help Desk at helpdesk@csuci.edu or by phone at 805-437-8552.

New features in EchoCI

EchoCI now has the following new features available:

1. Multi-file ZIP upload: EchoCI users can now upload multiple documents or folders to EchoCI. Simply create a ZIP archive of the files on your desktop, click the "Upload" button, and set the "Upload Type" to Zip, and choose the ZIP archive from your desktop. EchoCI will upload and unpack all of the zipped files according to the folder structure in the ZIP archive. This feature is available in all EchoCI web sites. 
2. Dependency Manager: this long-awaited feature enables EchoCI to keep track of where your documents are located, and update any links to those documents in case they are renamed or moved, reducing the need to hunt for broken links. This feature is being selectively enabled on sites in EchoCI. 

Please contact Daniel Martinez with any questions about either of these two features.

88% of sites have been migrated

As of today, 88% of CI's web sites have been migrated to EchoCI. Of the remainder, 9% are scheduled to be completed in the next few weeks, and 3% remain to be scheduled. When complete, the Web Services team will have migrated a total of 136 web sites to EchoCI.

Anecdotal user feedback about EchoCI has been overwhelmingly positive. Once migration is completed, a survey of EchoCI users will be conducted to verify satisfaction with EchoCI, and to compare the results with the WCM Survey conducted between October and November 2009.

51% of sites migrated

Progress on the migration continues: as of today, 51% of our web sites have been migrated and are live in EchoCI. Later this week, this number will jump to 65%. 

Our analysis shows that remaining 50 sites (remaining 35% of all sites) fall into the following categories:

• 25 sites (50%) should be low-hanging fruit, resulting in easy and fast migration, and will be scheduled first should be scheduled first.
• 25 sites (50%) are difficult edge cases, because of technical reasons (such use of Collage components or use of custom web template designs) or the large amount of content in specific folders (such as those belonging to Student Affairs or IT) 

Completion of the migration is anticipated to occur towards the end of summer 2011; it is most likely that it will be completed before the start of fall 2011 classes. 

40% complete!

As the spring 2011 semester draws to a close, the Web Services team continues to make good progress. Here are some updated statistics on our migration efforts:

• 40% (58) of the web sites identified to be migrated have now been moved into EchoCI
• 57 users have attended training workshops for the use of EchoCI

Within the next 2 weeks, we estimate that we will approach 65% completion of the migration. The last 20% of the work will represent most of the edge cases, i.e., complex sites that will be most laborious to migrate.

We'll keep you apprised of our continued progress.

Site migration status & process; OmniUpdate conference

The migration is rolling along smoothly. The Web Services team has established a consistent workflow and schedule, and each migration phase is progressing more quickly as the team familiarizes itself with the EchoCI administrative interface.

Current estimates are that we have completed between 20-25% of the migration from Collage to EchoCI. Migrated pages and sites include:

• Top level pages (including Current Students, Future Students, Staff, Visitors, etc)
• 32 academic and administrative web sites

The 4th migration group will include 32 additional administrative web sites. The migration time turnaround for each group is typically 3 weeks total, according to the following example schedule:

Day 1: notification to the content owners of migration

Day 5: content locked from editing in Collage

Days 5-9: Web Services team migrates site content (using EchoCI migration tools) and performs manual  quality assurance testing and verification.

Day 8: EchoCI training workshop led by Web Services (required for content editors, optional for content owners) 

Days 10-13: 

• Review and sign off on migrated content by content owners
• enable edit access for content owners
• Launch sites
• Select and notify next group of owners 

To facilitate migration, we have requested that content owners actively notify us of approval to proceed. If no response is given, it is assumed that Web Services has approval to proceed with the migration. 

During the week of March 7, several members of the project team attended the annual OmniUpdate User Conference in Universal City, CA. In addition to participating in training, attendees were given a glimpse at the roadmap for the new features which are coming to EchoCI in 2011, including:

• Multi-file ZIP upload
• Dependency Manager (to keep track of links); and
• Publish to Facebook directly from EchoCI

Please contact Peter Mosinskis or Daniel Martinez for further information on these upcoming features, or comments/questions about the migration status or migration process.  

More sites live, more migration underway...

The English program web site is now live in EchoCI, and we're working on migrating a number of other web sites right now.

The web team completed the second half of our developer training with OmniUpdate last week, helping to shed new light on the inner workings of EchoCI. This new information will help the team make better strategic decisions about our implementation architecture.

We couldn't complete our migration in a timely way without our student assistants have been incredibly helpful in our migration efforts. They are becoming familiar with the migration tool and process, and we estimate that we should be able to migrate most small sub-sites under www.csuci.edu in 1 hour per site or less.

Based on our progress so far and due to the technical difficulties we've encountered with our implementation, we've had to update our estimated timeline. We now estimate that migration of existing sites will wrap up in June 2011. We hope to complete our evaluation of the implementation in early Fall 2011, when we take a look at how the overall satisfaction of our content editors and owners with EchoCI.