Higher Education Summit - NYC Camp 2013

Schedule for the the day

• 9:00-10:30 — Opening, Introductions, Identify BoF opportunities
• 10:30-11:00 — Yalesites (Nancy, Yale)
• 11:00-11:15 — Break
• 11:15-11:45 — BoF Tables
• 11:45-12:15 — Harvard Web Publishing and OpenScholar (Ethan, Harvard)
• 12:15-01:30 — Lunch
• 1:30-2:00 — Reconvene, Unconsortium (Zach, Stanford)
• 2:00-2:45 — Lightning Talks, BoF Tables
• 2:45-3:15 — Open Edu (ImageX Media)
• 3:15-3:30 — Break
• 3:30-4:00 — CCNMTL (Jonah, Columbia)
• 4:00-4:30 — Drupal websites and the people who break them (Aaron, Columbia)
• 4:30-5:00 — Reflection, Plus/Delta, takeaways

Yale

Provides three base themes based on Omega base theme, includes a yale 978 grid. HTML5 Starterkit, Omega tools Delta & Content Modules for alternatve homepages layouts. Clean design, with plenty of flexibility including accent colors and their own custom typeface.

They have an institutional github enterprise, NetApp and Jenkins while using Drush.

Offer support site with forum and lynda.com memebership.

Yale University has recently transformed the YaleSites service by upgrading the platform from Drupal 6 to 7 and providing additional features to make building a site on the University campus easier. While our first implementation of YaleSites was an incredible stretch for the University (it was the first widely available, centrally-supported CMS offering), most of the focus was on adoption and cost savings. We provided some features we thought the user community wanted – Image Galleries, Blogging, Calendar – but quickly realized there were other major issues that needed to be addressed to make it easier for non-technical faculty, students, and staff to build their websites.

The launch of Drupal 7 was a perfect opportunity to begin the process of revamping the YaleSites offering, utilizing the experience gained with Drupal 6 and improving upon the existing system to provide a platform that addressed the needs of all – even the non-technical site builders. In this session, we will talk about:

• D7 administrative interface: made it easier to manage content and administrative tasks.
• Omega base theme: 3 flexible and mobile ready Yale Templates using Omega as the base theme.
• Heavier use of Features module: to provide many of the common Content Types and Views – News listing, Rotating images, Calendar, Video listing, Photo Galleries – eliminating the need to manually build.
• D7 Profile/People listing: Faculty and Staff listings are now easier to create using the People Feature that uses CAS and prepopulates user data from LDAP when adding users.
• Improved file handling: Multiple files can be uploaded at one time, and better private file handling allows you to restrict downloading / viewing to a specific subset of users.
• Restricted access: Can create private files, or restrict access to a Content Type and/or a specific node.
• Yale-specific customizations, integrations and custom modules
• CAS/LDAP
• Bedework calendar
• Filelocker 2
• Github Enterprise and Jenkins for code management and deployment
• Improved infrastructure

Harvard Web Publishing & OpenScholar

The Harvard Web Publishing (HWP) group is a key pillar in Harvard's strategy around public websites for departments, projects, research centers, and faculty. Formed out of a strategic, collaborative effort between Harvard University Information Technology, the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and Harvard Public Affairs and Communications, HWP provides a low-cost yet powerful solution for Web publishing needs. Our integrated, self-service platform based on OpenScholar; visual design templates; and content strategy guides help Harvard community members create an effective, attractive website with minimal effort and cost.

In this talk, we will review the business case and demo the technology.

Ethan Kiczek, Director, Harvard Web Publishing Oren Robinson, Web Application Developer, Harvard

• http://hwp.harvard.edu
• http://openscholar.harvard.edu/
• https://groups.drupal.org/openscholar
• https://portland2013.drupal.org/session/openscholar-saas-platform

My Notes

Decentralized IT, Expensive, no consistency across sites, bad experiences, varying technologies, inconsistent support.

Web Publishing

Simplified service catalog. Clean, consistent designs, scalable, extensible.

Based on OpenScholar

Spins up quickly, maintainable by non-technical staff and features are distributed through an analogy of Apps & Widgets.

Cross-Site search is possible, Custom Domains, continuously enhanced by Harvard development team, IQSS and open source community.

Provides content strategy, best practices, and site quality monintoring.

Project management.

Classroom and online training; customized trainining is available.

Support is available, platform sites.