Echo CI is live!

We're happy to report that our first Web sites in Phase 1a of our migration went live on Friday, December 17. The Anthropology and Sociology are available to their owners for editing in Echo CI. It's taken us longer to get here than we expected because of some significant implementation speedbumps which have now been resolved.

The remaining Phase 1a sites are expected to go live in early January 2011. Migration work has already begun on Phase 1b sites, which along with the bulk of the University's web sites, will be migrated to Echo CI during the Spring 2011 semester.

We have a lot of content to migrate, and it's going to take some time to complete. According to our current experience, it will take about 1 hour or less (2 hours or more for larger sites) per unique site to migrate using the available tools and to perform the necessary quality assurance, and we estimate we have 200+ unique sites to migrate. With further migration experience we hope to reduce the time required.

Thanks to everyone for their continued patience and participation in this project, and happy holidays from the Echo CI team!

Phase 1 almost complete; about Phase 2

The product evaluations for Phase 1 are almost complete. The Core Team will meet again in early January to review and discuss the initial results and to select the vendors & products which will proceed to Phase 2.

In Phase 2, products which meet the Phase 1 criteria will be invited to present a demonstration of their product to the Core and Advisory group members.

A detailed demonstration agenda will be provided to vendors in advance, and CI participants will use a set of critera evaluate the vendor products. Each session will include a question and answer session.

Vendors who participate in Phase 2 will likely provide demonstrations via WebEx or similar technologies, though the Core Group can choose to have them come to campus to present their product demonstration.

Phase I Status

Phase I of the WCM Evaluation project is nearing completion.

The survey analysis is complete, and ~75% of the requirements comparison has been completed.

One challenge has been evaluating products that are open source. In many cases, you can't just contact a vendor to have your questions answered. Instead, you have to dig through documentation, demos, and user forums to get the answers. On a positive note, most of the time installing the software yourself (if you have the right server infrastructure available) is pretty trivial, so that has worked out as another easy approach to completing our evaluations.

Once the requirements evaluation for Phase I is completed, the Core group will meet to review the results and select a subset of products to participate in Phase II of the process: structured demos by the vendor for the Core Group and possibly Advisory Group members.