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.

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!

Echo CI is coming...

After much deliberation, we've chosen a name for our new web content management (WCM) service: Echo CI.

But what does it mean? We have several explanations for why we chose this name for our new system, ranging from serious to playful. You can decide which one makes the most sense (or which one you enjoy!)

1. The way Dolphins communicate: The name is a playful reference to our University mascot, the dolphin. Dolphins must communicate over short and long distances in an organized way. One way they accomplish this is through echolocation. By broadcasting sounds and listening to the results, dolphins use echolocation as a tool to navigate and understand the world that surrounds them. In a similar way, CI "Dolphins" need to communicate with each other and the world at large in an efficient and organized way.  Echo CI is a tool that enables our University community deliver its messages on the Web in a quick and meaningful way. As the University continues to grow, Echo CI will help our current and future Dolphins to navigate oceans of information by helping the University to deliver information in a consistent and flexible way.

2. Reflection: An echo is a reflection of the original information, a representation of source material. In the same way, Echo CI is a tool to make it easier to gather and reflect existing information about the University using the Web as a media. Echo CI does not create content on its own; rather, it reflects the information that members of the University put into it.

3. Defense of our future: one of our team members said the name reminded him of a SEGA video game called “Ecco the Dolphin, Defender of the Future”. Likewise, Echo CI is a tool to help to ensure our future success as a University. It should be no surprise that CI’s future depends on how effectively we communicate via the Web. In a recent survey, over 83% of current and prospective students said that the University web site is their primary means of obtaining information about the University. Echo CI is a tool to manage and sustain the explosive growth of content and information delivery methods; it helps us ensure that we are ready for what the future holds.

Echo CI will mean different things to different people, and that’s OK; in all cases, we are committed to creating a positive experience for all who will use Echo CI day-to-day, including web content writers, designers, developers, and all the users of the content that it helps our campus community to create.

Migration update

Due to the resolution of technical issues regarding our new server infrastructure, as well as the complexities of the content migration, a soft launch of the new web sites has been moved to next week. We anticipate that by Friday, October 29, all of the Phase 1 sites will be live in our new system. Once the sites are live, content editors and owners of Phase 1 sites will need to complete training in the new system before their access to edit their sites will be enabled.

The new production web servers are scheduled to go live this afternoon, starting approximately 4:00pm. We were not able to complete the migration to the new servers as planned on Friday, October 15 during our maintenance window because of technical issues with the server configuration which could not be resolved. However, in the meanwhile extensive testing has been completed to ensure these issues have been resolved, and we anticipate a smooth, glitch-free and instantaneous migration today.

WCM migration progress report; launch date change

Since the end of July, the WCM migration team has been actively working to prepare for the launch of the new web content management system.

Here's what we've accomplished so far:

• Creation of a template guide to describe the template functionality we expect in the new system. 
• Modification of our page template code (HTML, CSS, etc) to prepare for our migration
• Configuration and testing of a new set of servers which will host our production web sites (and will replace our existing production web servers for www.csuci.edu) 
• Development of new templates and template system in the new WCM in coordination with OmniUpdate
• Compiled a content ownership inventory of web site owners and editors to facilitate migration into the new system

As with any large, complex system implementation, we've run into a few snags along the way. We want to ensure that the new system launches as smoothly as possible; therefore the go-live date for the Phase 1 sites has been rescheduled for Tuesday, October 19. 

Thanks to all our project participants for their patience and cooperation. We are excited to have this new system available soon!