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OIT Strategic Direction: Web
Summary
Our fundamental goal is to help the University provide a better website. We have identified four areas that will need attention each year:
- Infrastructure
- Services
- Resources
- Development
Infrastructure
Provide a solid infrastructure for the university web that is built on open source, and is flexible, scalable and reliable.
Services
Improve existing services and add new services.
Resources
Improve the structure for providing web service to the campus by investing in people, tools, and processes.
Development
Build systems that are used by multiple departments, entire campus, or the general public.
Details
There are no timelines presented here, and no priorities established. These are simply statements of direction. They are tasks we recognize that need to be done. Some we can do on our own, some will require additional resources.
Infrastructure
Move to LAMP
Assess what will be needed to make this move, then make the actual change. This move will affect all of the pages on OIT web servers, and may have impact on non-OIT pages as well.
This project will occupy a significant portion of our available resources for the coming year.
DNS: encourage a move away from separate domain names and toward placing all under the boisestate.edu domain. For example: boisestate.edu/department rather than department.boisestate.edu.
Services: new
- Forums: Provide one or more services that allow asynchronous group discussions. The current tool is WebBoard; this will be replaced by something open source and probably PHP-based.
- Community software (social software): Provide a service that combines a variety of tools (wiki, blog, forum, file sharing) into a single user experience.
- Intranet: Create a place and a process for hosting University-only or department-only pages and files.
- Wiki: Install and offer a wiki for use by faculty and staff. Not clear whether this should be opened to students as well.
- Blogs: Install and offer a blog for use by departments. We have no plans for offering at the individual level; Google's Blogger can provide that.
- Site Management: Install a tool for easy administration of websites that allows users (departments) to manage their site and to add services to it.
- CMS: Content management, at the University or at the department level.
Services: existing
Google Search Appliance
- Create a custom 404 page for failed searches.
- Investigate using GSA tools to change the weighting of certain search results.
- Promote Google Sitemaps and Webmaster Tools to the user community.
- Find a way to provide data to departments from the reports the GSA creates.
- Help users improve the coding on their pages to produce better search results.
Improve the current campus maps, probably via a Google mashup.
Improve the campus phone directory
Resources
- Define mission and scope for a Web Service unit
- Expand Web Service staff
Processes
- Create a process for creation of new sites
- Create a Project Request form
- Create policies, procedures documents and publish them
- Improve management of rights on existing sites
Tools
- Find and implement tools for link checking
- Find and implement tools for orphan checking
- Find and implement tools for site monitoring
- Find and implement tools for page validation
Development
- File upload
- Electronic workflow
- Electronic signatures
- Manage news releases, newsletters, and other publications
- Image and media management
- University Calendar
About this document
This document will be revised each summer. The time frame for the direction is one to three years, though in certain cases it may be longer. This document is a statement of direction, not a project list. While it reflects OIT internal planning, not everything listed here will be done, and other projects will be undertaken that are not listed; the intent, however, is that most of our efforts will be focused on what appears here. In addition, this document is intended to help guide departments and business units around campus with their own web-related planning.