Thanks for all those who attended our monthly Web Meeting yesterday afternoon. Below is a summary of the items we discussed along with relevant links, a copy of the presentation, and a video recording.
Consolidating Communications
We didn't discuss this yesterday, but we are looking at ways to consolidate the way we communicate with the YSM web community. We're currently using a combination of Outlook calendar invites, Basecamp messages and Yammer. We'll continue using Outlook calendar invites for the monthly web meetings, but we're going to migrate other communications to the University's messaging and subscription service. Interested faculty and staff will be able to subscribe and unsubscribe to our messages at their leisure.
FY14 Web Budget
While we're well into FY14, the school's web budget is still in flux. At the moment, we're looking at a 51% cut to project funds for FY14. Obviously, this means some significant belt tightening; however, we're doing our best to fashion cuts that impact services as little as possible.
Funding is available to continue maintenance on the school's web systems, continue the Profile System rebuild project, and continue providing the same excellent level of support you've come to expect. That said, there are a few areas where you will notice some changes, including:
Increased Prices for Website Building
We've not increased website building prices at any point in the last five years; however, we need to raise more revenue to offset spending cuts. Effective immediately, the price to build a YSM/YSPH organization website is:
- Small project: $3,000
- Medium project: $6,000
- Large project: $12,000
Other Service Changes
- Reduced photography frequency: We're normally able to do up to 15 banner image photo shoots and seven faculty headshot photo shoots. In FY14, we'll need to reduce this number to ten banner image shoots and five headshot shoots.
- Reduction in New Development: We're putting on hold some of the new development projects we'd hoped to tackle in FY14, including a series of newsletter templates, a teaching/learning module, forums, and article commenting.
- Delayed System Enhancements: We'd planned to make significant enhancements to the school's Event Calendar, Resource Scheduler, and Form Building tools in FY14, but we're putting these on hold to focus resources on the Profile System rebuild.
FY15 and Beyond
The budget situation beyond FY14 is still an unknown, but we're working on creative ways to try to do more development with less money. We'll keep you updated as we learn more and solidfy plans.
New People and Organizations at YSM Website Launched
The replacement website for medfaculty.yale.edu was relaunched in late September as people.yale.edu, and it now contains all public-facing organizations in the profile system as well as profiles for the faculty and staff who are members of those organizations. This expanded website is a unique representation of the school and its people.
If you haven't updated your organization's profile, please take a few minutes to log into profile.yale.edu and use these instructions to make updates. The updated information will appear on the People website within 24-hours.
Profile System Rebuild
We've selected a new vendor to build the profile system (Adoptive) and plan to begin the project this month. While we expect the new system to take the better part of 12 months to complete, we'll keep you updated as we make progress. To date, we've working on the following:
- Detailed documentation on system functionality and structure: 95% complete
- Graphic design: 50% complete (see draft designs)
Preparing for the Transition
The new system will move away from custom keywords in the Patient Care and Research sections and begin using only standardized keyword lists. When we transition to the new system, faculty will no longer be able to edit their custom keywords. Now would be a great time to start training faculty to use the standardized keyword lists in their profiles. The more work we can do now to transition to the standard keywords, the easier the transition will be.
In addition, to help us with our data clean-up efforts, please do not create any new organizations in the profile system. If you need a new organization, please email your request to ysm.editor@yale.edu.
Recent Tridion and Website Updates
In the past month we've released the following Tridion updates and fixes:
- New Twitter displays
- External links from summary templates
- Faculty by Specialty list
- A-Z people listing with anchor links
- International Activity updates to a) link faculty names directly to their profile's Bio tab and b) correct mapping issues when faculty do not select a city when adding international activity
- Fixed the issue where multiple FAQ lists on one page were not working
Google Search Appliance Update
The University has recently updated the Google Search Appliance to a newer version. This should improve the search results on school websites. If you see odd or incorrect search results on your website, please report the issue to webmaster@yale.edu. Make sure you include a link to your search results page and identify the incorrect result.
Preserving Faculty Profiles Upon Death
The school's Profile System is not considered a "system of record" at Yale, and so there are many data elements in the profile system that are imported nightly from Yale's official system of record, Oracle. One of these elements is a person's "status" at the University. Once a person is no longer "active" in Oracle, their profile is deactivated and they are automatically removed from the profile system. This has the effect of removing the person from any membership lists and removing their profile from school websites. While this is an efficient process to remove faculty and staff who have left Yale, it also immediately removes anyone who dies.
As a web editor, if you want to preserve a faculty member's profile on your website, you have the ability to create a "manual profile" (see instructions here). If the profile has already been removed, the easiest way to recover the information is to use the Web Archive tool at http://archive.org/web/. Simply input your organization's URL and select the most recent date available when you know the profile was on your site, and then use the tool to navigate to the archived version of the profile. Copy the information into the manual profile and publish it. Email us at ysm.editor@yale.edu with any questions.
Flyerboard Update
We've hired a new programming team and they have begun work. There are currently 64 tasks in the queue, but we're hoping they'll get the new designs completed for a mid-November launch. We are finally making progress. We'll continue to keep you posted!
Final Faculty Headshot Photo Shoot for 2013
The next and last faculty headshot shoot in 2013 will take place on October 25. Faculty should sign up here.