This morning, the Tech Team released version 2017.50, which covers software development work completed from December 7-13, 2017.
Yale Medicine Website and Editing
Below is a list of updates that were made to YaleMedicine.org, along with the YM Publishing Tool used to edit condition articles, feature stories, and doctor bios:
| Type | Title | Description | Category |
|---|---|---|---|
| Incorrect error code reported for Concept Articles that haven't yet been published in SDL | Return 404 instead of 500 error if content is not published in SDL for Concept Article. | YM Website | |
| Limit "Related Doctors" to five with "view more" | To reduce clutter in the side column, limit "Related Doctors" to display up to five (instead of the 10 that currently display) and add a "View More" button to see the complete list. | YM Website | |
| Update age group labels on condition articles | Updated age group labels on condition articles to a friendlier phrase. In addition, we merged "child" and "adolescent" into "children" and changed "geriatrics" to "older adults". In the next release, we will make this statement lowercase. | YM Website | |
| If a Doctor's professional service starts and ends in the same year, display "(2017)" instead of "(2017 - 2017)" | If an activity was only one year, we changed the output to display the year only once. For example, "2017" instead of "2017-2017". | YM Website | |
| Implement history and redirect mechanism for slugs in YM app | Update the YM Website Application so that if a user changes a slug, the website will direct traffic to the old and new URL. We will display the history in | YM Website | |
| Story Type changes from Slideshow to Video when re-saving | The presence of slideshow content will now force the Type of a Story to be correctly set to Slideshow. | YM Publishing Tool (YMS) | |
| Exclude inactive users from Related Doctors algorithm results | Inactive doctors were occasionally displayed as Related Doctors. | YM Publishing Tool (YMS) | |
| Restore deleted YM Concept Article | Restored a concept article that was deleted: "Interventional Radiology Treatments for Liver Cancer." | YM Publishing Tool (YMS) | |
| Sync YMS database with SDL to populate Hero types | Sync Hero type between SDL and YMS database so that we can add a filter for the Production and Content teams to view reports of content that needs hero images. | YM Publishing Tool (YMS), YMS DB | |
| Store Hero type in YMS database | Store information about Article Hero type in YMS database. | YM Publishing Tool (YMS), YMS DB | |
| Add Joe Piccirillo to Kyruus import emails | Add the new managing editor for Yale Medicine to the monthly Kyruus import emails. | Notifications |
School of Medicine Websites
Below is a list of updates made to the T3 YSM websites:
| Type | Title | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Vimeo/YouTube Component creates blank space | Vimeo videos were appearing as a blank space instead of embedding a video player. | |
| Weekly Digest external announcements | External news articles can be added to the Announcements that appear on email newsletters (like Weekly Digest). | |
| Configure CI for Templates project | Configured Continuous Integration for T3 project. This automates deployments to the development environment, and makes it much easier and faster to deploy updates to production. | |
| Create build definitions in VSTS for T3 | Created build definitions and deployments steps in VSTS for each environment. | |
| Create vanity URL for P2med website | New DNS entry created with associated VUM rule for http://p2med.yale.edu added. | |
| Events linked in Weekly Digest do not display on site once they have passed | From the Weekly Digest email, when a link to an event that occurred in the past was clicked, the event details would not display. |
News and People Profile System
Below is a list of updates made to the system used to edit profiles for people and organizations, along with news, events, and clinical trials:
| Type | Title | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Put API pages behind CAS | Secure the API (data feeds) help pages behind Yale CAS security to prevent unauthorized access. | |
| Lock down feeds using API Key | This task is to secure our data feeds (which were public) so that an API key is needed in order to access. | |
| Update Web API Proxy generator to use API key | After introducing API Keys mechanism for YMS Service Feeds we needed to update the generated proxy code to make it easier for Proxy users to use the feeds. |
Event Calendar
| Type | Title | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Daily Calendar Email Notifications Not Sending | Users did not receive the daily "suggested event" email notification from December 7 - 12. This has been fixed. | |
| iCal feed returns all events regardless their status | Events that were only suggested or even rejected were appearing in iCal feeds for sharing YSM calendars. | |
| Enable non-US locations for calendar events | It is now possible to add a location outside of the United States to a calendar event. | |
| Add Option to reverse the order events are returned in the EventOccurrence list feed | Added sorting for lists of events that occurred in the past. | |
| Locations from Google for Non-Yale Location | Fields for entering a non-Yale location for a calendar event were too restrictive. | |
| Selecting RSVP contacts from Event Contacts is not clear | Improved the interface for adding RSVP contacts to calendar events. |
Accessibility
Below is a list of updates made to websites and systems to meet WCAG A and AA accessibility standards:
| Type | Title | Description | Category |
|---|---|---|---|
| Create Site Map for dev.yalemedicine.org | Create site map for dev.yalemedicine.org to include only targeted pages for Site Improve to crawl for accessibility testing purposes. | YM Website | |
| "About Us" label in Organization sub-nav needs to be renamed for Accessibility | We already have the label "About Us" in the main nav, so we can't use that label again in the Organization sub-nav. | YM Website | |
| Fix "Online" link URL on Access MyChart page | Added aria-label to links where linked text was not specific enough for screen readers. This previously wasn't possible as they were stripped out by SDL. | YM Website |
Infrastructure and Backend Systems
Much of the team's work is never seen, but important projects are ongoing to make sure our systems and websites are stable, highly available, and cost effective. We continue making major improvements to our infrastructure and work in this area will be ongoing into 2018.
| Type | Title | Description | Category |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deploy new search index code into production | This work completes the globalization for the search indexes. | Azure Search Index | |
| Implement system to replicate indexed data to globally distributed indexes | This task takes the code developed for a concept and makes it ready for production release. | Azure Search Index | |
| Globalize Search Indexes | Our search indexes were served from a single location in the USA. This task was to create globally redundant search indexes to improve application reliability. | Azure Search Index, YM Website | |
| Additional testing of Azure Failover Groups | Functionality of Azure's geo-redundant databases is not clear given the lack of Microsoft documentation, so we performed a series of tests to make decisions on future architecture. Results: We will stick with the geo-redundant feature but not the automatic failing over. Instead we will design our own failover mechanisms that are aligned with our needs given Microsoft's design does not meet our up-time requirements. | Infrastructure | |
| Investigate Dev environment setup for performance enhancement and cost reduction | This task reviews the current development environment to consider changes to make it easier to test using tools that are not available in the current development environment. Result: The development environment has too many dependencies in Azure to move to the development VM. Our best option is to move just the SQL database to the Dev environment for some testing that is tool specific. | Print Publications Websites, Profile.Yale.Edu (YMS Admin), T3 YSM Websites, YM Publishing Tool (YMS), YM Website, YMS DB, YMS DTO/Feeds | |
| Diagram Traffic Managers and App Services in Azure | Diagrams are the best way to understand the systems architecture. This task updated old diagrams and included new ones as the final step in making significant changes over the past few months. | Print Publications Websites, Profile.Yale.Edu (YMS Admin), T3 YSM Websites, YM Website | |
| Globalization Strategy Review | This is a review and discussion to determine what is complete and what is left to do along with testing strategies. Results: A new list of tickets has been generated to address finalizing the globalization strategy. | Profile.Yale.Edu (YMS Admin), SDL Content Delivery, T3 YSM Websites, YM Website | |
| SDL Test Environment setup | This added a new environment for SDL development that we can use without disrupting the work of the Minsk development team, whose work requires reliable SDL environments. Previously when we had to make changes, apply server patches and test, we had to interrupt their work and in some cases when patches or changes did not work, the disruption to their work could last for several days. | Profile.Yale.Edu (YMS Admin), SDL Content Delivery, SDL Content Manager, SDL Core Service, T3 YSM Websites, TOS | |
| Update connection strings for Geo-Redundant SQL Instances to use Failover Group | A connection string is a line of code used to create a connection from an application to a SQL database that includes the name of the server where SQL is located. Now that the databases are geo-redundant, we do not want to specify the string to use a server and instead we point it to a virtual group of servers that makeup the globally redundant data structure that is now in place. | SDL Content Delivery, YMS DB | |
| Complete data migration on SDL Test | Periodically we pull production data for SDL into development environments for testing, which is what this task completed. | SDL Content Manager |
New Projects
The team has begun work on three new projects: Media Library (this will introduce streaming video and audio storage to the Profile System for people, organizations, news and events), CV Builder (to generate faculty CVs from the profile system), and a rebuild of the Flyerboard, the school's digital signage system. While these projects will not launch until 2018, below is a list of tasks the team completed this week:
| Type | Title | Description | Project |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flyerboard website not responding to touch on rise player | On a Rise Player managed touchscreen, touching links that should open a pop-up rarely worked. This is the final updated needed before we can move the Flyerboard to the new Rise Player platform from Industry Weapon. This move will provide a more stable environment for our digital signage. | Flyerboard | |
| Configure React routing | Configure client-side routing for the Signage project | Flyerboard |