I was there ... honest

Here is some more proof that I attended the IWMW2010 in Sheffield.

Josef Lapka at IWMW10 from UKOLN on Vimeo.

Thumbs up for StudentNET portal at IWMW10

This year I signed up to do a presentation about the Canterbury Christ Church University student portal, StudentNET, in front of my peers and colleagues at the IWMW 2010. Although it was quite nerve-wracking, and it included a live demo, the nightmare of any presenter, it went very well.

My 20 minute talk was well received on Twitter and in subsequent interviews. Here is some of the feedback that our portal received ... (ego boost!)

Some feedback
"What has been the best bit this year so far?
All of it has been brilliant. By far the highlights were Sid and Paul Boag’s p5/p6 talks, however the StudentNet portal was a great technological demo. If pushed to select just a single highlight, I would go with Josef Lapkas StudentNet – to save me having to decide between Sid & Paul! The project management parallel session also deserves a mention."

Twitter feeback

liwazi any library related studentNet widgets exist ? such as reading lists, exampapers, amazon-like recommendation borrow system #iwmw10 #p8

spellerlive #iwmw10 #p8 CCCU - very nice job!

ostephens #iwmw10 #p8 think the UI of StudentNET looks nice - strength of building on something from outside the sector, non-corporate ?

PlanetClaire Brilliant talk there from Josef. Time to revisit the student portal project methinks. #iwmw10 #p8

mancypino Loving the Student Portal demo! #iwmw10 #p8

spellerlive #iwmw10 #p8 Contextural help for each widget - all works very smoothly.

webpackets #iwmw10 #p8 I like the studentnet portal - seems really well thought out, designed and most importantly usable for the students

spellerlive #iwmw10 #p8 Use of the campusM API to pull data in as future development - interesting - I'm looking at that too...

ostephens #iwmw10 #p8 the problem with this stuff is almost always getting access to the data - not building the code/widgets

PlanetClaire StudentNET looks fab! MIght have to pay a visit to Canterbury! #iwmw10 #p8

NIMRweb RT @liwazi studentNet - Canterbury Christ Church Univ is like CAMSIS in Cambridge Univ, but better #iwmw10 #p8

spellerlive #iwmw10 #p8 Comms widget to send personalised alerts - nicely done - even if it is all .NET :(

webpackets #iwmw10 #p8 Good to catch up on this project, attended the barcamp last year on the early stages of it.

PlanetClaire Who owns the student portal? Internal comms, web team, student services? #iwmw10 #p8

liwazi studentNet - student portal from Canterbury Christ Church Univ is like CAMSIS in Cambridge Univ, but better, much better #iwmw10 #p8

Useful links

View the presentation

Watch part of the presentation

Fitting development methodologies

It seems to me that with cutting resources the need for structured methodologies is more and more important. The use of the waterfall methodology seems the obvious choice, because it is designed to cut down on feature creap and allows for easy management, but others have a place too.

What have I learned about WCF?

WebNote's just around the corner

The. NET development team has completed the second phase of StudentNET WebNote. The WebNote is an area within the University's student portal that displays important messages to students, including reminders to do certain admin tasks.

We wanted to make this tool as flexible as possible so that massages could be sent to all students if necessary or just one individual, and anything in between.

So we have devised an admin tool that allows our staff to do just that. We have also de-coupled the different parts of the system. In the middle of it sits the messaging interface which has been deployed as a webservice and can be called by any application. This means that we can send automated messages as well.

The whole system will be handed over into production by the end of this month.

StudentNET V2 at IWMW2010

CCCU's student portal will be showcased at this years Institutional Web Management Workshop in Sheffield. Presenting to delegates from all over the UK I'll be giving a 20 mins presentation as part of 'Doing the day job'. For more information visit IWMW2010.

Park and Ride Application for staff

The web app development team have released a Park and Ride application for staff today. It's a simple but great new addition to CCCU's new Staff Services portal.

StudentNET Content

This paper describes how student content could be treated once removed from the external web. Its purpose is to start a discussion.

Option 1 - Full content integration into StudentNET V2

Similar to content administered by the i-zone content would be surfaced using the 'app area' in StudentNET V2.

i-zone content surfaced through StudentNET V2

The advantage of this approach is that it is in keeping with existing design and functionality.

Option 2 - Layered content integration into StudentNET V2

Following the original StudentNET vision, content would be surfaced using a conventional, layered web structure.

This layered content would be accessed through an 'A-Z app widget' from StudentNET V2. It could also be accessible through direct URLs.

E.G.: https://secure.canterbury.ac.uk/student/subject1/

The advantage with this approach is that it appears to be more scalable. It allows for more flexibility when having to cater for all CCCU's departments' needs.

Content structure

With either option the content structure needs to be carefully designed to allow for content to be reused in different areas of the web and in different media.

Content would be packaged up in logical subject sections. These subject sections may be informed by the more detailed content audit.

Content administration

With either option Contensis CMS would be used to administer content and support workflow rules.

Content rules will be important because content will be edited from staff across departments.

Change password online - Manage My Account

CCCU staff and students are now able to change their passwords online using a new application built by CIS with assistance from CS.

This is the first step in delivering a complete computing account self service online to all current staff and accepted and enrolled students. This will include the ability to unlock the account if it was locked and reset your password if it has been forgotten as well as keeping your secret questions and answers up to date.

So, if you have ever forgotten your password or locked your account, no need to worry. Soon you will be able to reset and change your University password and unlock your computing account online.

StudentNET V2 at UCISA

StudentNET V2 development has been chosen to be showcased at this year's UCISA 2010 Conference.

"UCISA represents the whole of higher education, and increasingly further education, in the provision and development of academic, management and administrative information systems."

UCISA Conference Programme

StudentNET V2 is Canterbury Christ Church University's new student portal, currently being rolled out gradually to its students, with a final release on March 1st 2010.

Three new apps for StudentNET

We have developed three new apps for StudentNET.

Photo Uploader

This application lets our students upload photos online. It validates the type of photo and allows the student to crop, rotate and resize the image. Once it has been uploaded, the file is saved to a University network drive for manual checks. A fairly simple application that helped us deliver on producing University ID cards (smartcards) for our students.

Status letter

To prove that students are studying with us they may need to ask our Registry Department to print status letters. This application is currently pending sign off and will replace manual processes. Students will be able to produce status letters in their own home.

Park and ride application

With restricted parking in the center of Canterbury, the University is offering park and ride schemes to students and staff. This application will calculate the distance between the user's home address and allow them to apply for a park and ride ticket according to that distance. Applications can be reviewed by issuing staff and approved.

StudentNET stress testing - it's not just about running the scripts ...

We have done some preliminary stress tests to see how StudentNET responds to high levels of usage. To start us off we created very simple test scripts that simulated a user logging on, loading the framework and logging off.

Creating test scripts using Visual Studio Team Foundation is a piece of cake, so at first we didn't stumble upon any problems. Within a few minutes of launching the wizard, the script was created in C# and we were ready to set up the first load test.

For an adequate load test we needed to have at least 4 agents that would be sending requests to our web servers; a controller that would be distributing the test load among the agents; a test client that executes the script. Now, considering we do not have a testing environment, let alone a testing lab, we had to make do with PCs of colleagues that were on holiday. So getting together 6 PCs was difficult enough.

Set up

Setting up the testing grid with staff PCs proved to be quite tricky. At first we had problems connecting the client (runs the scripts) to the controller (distributes the load). A few IPCONFIGS later we discovered that the two machines were on completely different IP ranges and were unable to resolve the machine name. Even though we were able to connect via IP, Visual Studio Team Foundation did not work, seemingly because the controller tried to contact the client with its name, which again did not resolve.

Secondly, running Virtual PC 2007 on our staff PCs meant that all 6 machines were too weak to generate a load that we would have wanted to test. It created a bottle neck of 300 requests to our web servers at any one time before the agents started to fail.

So we reduced the load of concurrent users to be able to run a few 5 hour tests to see whether the application was deteriorating in any way. Although this significantly reduced the load on our webfarm and resulted in minimal load balancing, we were able to fetch a few results that helped us improve the application.

Next steps

We're going back to the framework to improve its load and also to fix fundamental errors that cropped up during stress tests.

We are also going to look at the possibility of using a Virtual Environment to run 10-12 agents to increase the stress on our web servers.

StudentNET Pre-registration Portal launches

We have today launched Canterbury Christ Church University's StudentNET Pre-registration portal. It was launched to support the registration event for our students-to-be. Although it is a simple concept of collecting information about our students prior to their arrival, the developments required input from several departments from across the University.

Students are given the opportunity to complete various tasks within this portal, which include

• Confirm your place
• Upload your photo
• Submit your email address
• Activate your computing account
• Get your arrival instructions

The role of the portal was to bring seamlessly together several different systems which are used by our users to complete the tasks above, with a view to further integration next year.

The portal also utilises the University's knowledgebase system by presenting the students with top questions and answers that have been asked by others and also giving them an opportunity to query the knowledgebase should they have other questions about the registration event.

All in-house built applications within this portal, such as the photo upload facility, have web service driven context help fed by our Content Management System on each page to guide students through step-by-step. After several years experience of building online applications, we have found that it does not matter how intuitive you think your pages are, it is always better to guide your users with appropriate help.

All we can do now it has been launched, is to monitor the use of it and if necessary amend the help content and faqs.

StudentNET gets a facelift

From August 12th, StudentNET will receive a facelift. This development will bring all StudentNET applications one step closer towards the final product that will be launched in the late Autumn term.

Our designer has widened the layout to 960px to provide space for a flexible yet structural 12 column grid on the page. We have also freshened up the header by intensifying the StudentNET orange colour while matching it closely to our corporate colour palette. The footer has also seen some attention. It has been tidied up into clear, categorised columns with scope to add a large number of links.

From a development point of view, we have introduced forms authentication to fall in line with external IT products that our students use, such as WebMail and BlackBoard. We introduced context help for each page which is fed by our Content Management System and centralised common error pages which also allow for student feedback should an error occur.

We would love to hear any feedback you might have. So please leave a comment!

First mini barcamp experience

I held a barcamp session today. After 3 years of attending the IWMW, I finally plucked up the courrage to speak in front of my peers at this years IWMW at the University of Essex.

My session was about our development efforts towards delivering a new student portal at Canterbury Christ Church. The session, I think, was well received a few delegates have contacted me since wanting to be kept informed about our progress and student feedback.

You never know, we might be able to share the portal and collaborate on future widget developments.

StudentNET Pre-registration Portal is coming

We have just completed the first stage of the new Canterbury Christ Church University pre-registration portal. It currently lets prospective students log in and supply us with a working email address, so that we are able to guide them through pre-registration. This means that when they arrive at Christ Church, their induction and formal registration will run more smoothly than before.

The next steps of this development are crucial. We will expand our newly built FAQ system to this area and re-purpose and re-fresh most of our tired web content that is spread across our currently unmanaged website. It will also see the creation of packaged up content to support most if not all pre-registration steps that they need to take to successfully register at CCCU.

There will be a 'Uplod your photo' application so that students can provide us with their photo to get their uni cards, and just before they arrive at Christ Church, they will be able to activate their computing account from the comfort of their homes.

Google analytics is our choice

The webteam have written a discussion paper about the use of Google Analytics versus our current analytics software. Following research, consultation with our users and 'trial and error', we have come to the conclusion that it would be beneficial to the University to use Google Analytics as our primary analytics tool. The main reasons for this were, no cost and better usability.

We deemed the risk of the service from Google being unavailable minor enough to be acceptable and would varify its accuracy by comparing the results to our own server logs on a regular basis.

We were pleased when our 'Web Steering Group', the overarching group that makes decisions about the University's online development, accepted the paper.

Yes, like many, we too are selling our soul to the Google empire.

Another year, another IWMW

Not sure where the last year went, but it's here again. Only a few weeks until the IWMW2009 this time hosted by the University of Essex.

i-zone Online Service launches

No posts for a while...

The reason is that the entire team has been working very hard to provide our web users with new and highly advanced online FAQ service. This service complements the university's move to provide a unified help desk - i-zone - which will front all the university's support departments.

"Ask the i-zone" online has been a two months project that saw CIS collect and collate requirements, assist in the choice of software product to drive the search, install and deploy the knowledgebase in the university's environment, structure and input FAQ content, set up the university's CMS, and build a web front for the knowledgebase product.

Currently the i-zone online comprises of about 100 articles all relating to student support services. We anticipate a rapid but controlled growth of the number of articles over the next few months.

So, what next?

The provision of i-zone online content will be expanded to give targeted answers to our students though StudentNET and our staff through StaffNET.

In the mean time, the software will learn from its users' questions and their feedback to refine results. We will also be providing a way for our users to ask an expert should they be unable to find the appropriate answer to their question.

So once again, watch this space because a lot will be happening in this area of development. If you have any questions or comments about the i-zone just write them at the end of this post. We'll definitely get back to you.

New student homepage launched

After several weeks of development the webteam has delivered the new Canterbury Christ Church University student homepage. This new page has less links and an increased focus on important and actual messages.

Messages are administered by the university's communication team and combined with current university events listings.

It is another technological success for CIS as it moves forward with the implementation of the CMS (Content Management System). It also aims to standardise the design across CCCU's web presence.

Looking towards future developments the team have also integrated the jQuery library to provide an enhanced user experience. This way all main messages can be viewed in their entirety on the same page.

We are currently working on a poll control to provide our users other an interactive and friendly way of leaving feedback about new developments and general events.