Last week was a fantastic week weather-wise, not so fantastic a week for the Red Sox (who are doing well in Minnesota so far), but then we are back to “seasonal weather” again. Today is a big day at Wellesley where there are over 150 presentations by students in the Ruhlman Conference. I am very happy to say that we designed the application that the students and their advisors used during the submission and approval process – one of our PHP app connected via the My Wellesley portal. In the true spirit of collaboration, we shared the collected information with the CS department, who have developed an excellent online tool called RAPP, by which you can browse the program and create your own schedule. I plan to attend a few talks in the afternoon. I would love to attend a few in the morning on protein modeling to relive my years as a researcher in molecular modeling, but I have other commitments in the morning 🙁
The annual performance cycle is upon us and this provides us a great opportunity for reflections on how much we accomplished during the past year. It is a LOT and LTS staff should be proud of all of our collective accomplishments. It is also a time that we plan ahead for the upcoming year. As I have mentioned in the past, I was a skeptic of this whole process for a while mainly because we were all beginning to do this for the first time and didn’t do it right. I now am a believer because we have tools and mechanisms to help us manage these tasks better. Most criticisms come from the fact that goals go by the wayside because unexpected things happen during the year that takes away time from us to be able to achieve the goals. Whereas there is some truth to this, I believe this can be handled through constant communication, setting achievable and realistic goals (taking into consideration the time it takes to put out fires) and time management. If you are still a skeptic, talk to me!
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It was a very busy weekend for us that started last Friday (04/13) evening. That was Tamil New Year . Since we follow a lunar calendar, the exact dates when this happens fluctuates. We have actually stopped celebrating many of these holidays that were the source of real excitement when we were growing up. This time around, an association we belong to in CT had arranged for an evening of celebration. We attended the function and had a great time. We watched a “drama” by a famous group from India. A silly comedy that required a lot of local knowledge about Tamil Nadu where we all belong to. Thanks to the Web and internet, we keep up enough to be able to relate to all the jokes. Saturday was a beautiful day and I golfed with friends from Wesleyan and Sunday we drove all the way to Hanover, NH to visit our son, have a meal, catch up and return!
In between all of this, I was following the happenings on in the world and most notably, a piece in NY Times titled “Where your Money Goes?” where Jane Wellman, who was part of the Delta Project concerned with the cost of Higher Education, was discussing ways to curb the cost of Higher Ed. I was also following the tweets from many that I follow who were at the NITLE Summit. Particularly interesting were the tweets regarding the Digital Humanities. In my humble opinion, in both of these cases, the topic is of utmost importance, but key players are missing. We can have a lot of brainstorming and generate creative solutions and ideas whether it is about reducing the cost of higher education through the use of technologies or Digital Humanities projects, but without the faculty and students participating in these discussions, these are unlikely to go too far. This is why the discussions on Digital Media and Quantitative Analysis Initiative that were part of the Liberal Arts Learning in the Digital Age Symposium were great – participants were faculty and in one case a student. (more…)
I went to yet another SunGard (the software vendor for Banner) Executive Summit in Las Vegas from the 24-26th March (yes, a weekend included!) and yes, predictably, I was very disappointed. If you remember, I wrote about my last year experience at this event (again, very disappointed) in a blog post. So, you might ask why did I choose to go there this time around. It all had to do with the fact that we recently renewed our license for Banner and recently SunGard and another competitor Datatel merged. I wanted to find out what exactly this means to us. I am very familiar with Datatel, what its strengths & weaknesses are, so I was genuinely interested in knowing if the new entity’s plans are to pick the strengths of each product to produce a new one.
We did not hear much of anything on the merger nor did we hear much in the way of current product timelines. It was not just me! Some other CIOs, especially from small liberal arts colleges, who generally don’t come to the Summit came along for the same reasons I did and many expressed the same frustrations. Because no agenda is published ahead of time when you need to register, it is very hard to know what is going to happen in this gathering. I registered simply based on hope! I left early on Monday morning before the big announcement – that the combined entity will be called Ellucian. I talked to a few others who went to the Summit from Wellesley to see if they gained any new insight about the merger and product direction and the answer was No.
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Our Drupal installation went live on March 29. Drupal is replacing a web content management system called Bluenog. I made a determination when I began at Wellesley that this is yet another technology where we had to make a decision on what is best for us. The choice was either to stick with Bluenog and adapt ourselves and our needs to what the product demands or find a solution that better matches our needs. No single technology ever matches ALL of our needs, so the criteria was to choose something that covers MOST of our needs. We took a look at whether the current CMS is satisfying the needs of the College and it became apparent that in many areas, which I won’t go into detail here, we were struggling.
I had gone through the same exercise at Wesleyan and Pace in the recent past. At Wesleyan, we were very close to going with Drupal, except, it was not as mature four years ago as it is now. To the disappointment of a few open source fans, we chose a product called Cascade, which is still in use there. At Pace, the product in use was Hot Banana (I have no idea how they pick these names) which everyone was struggling with. Once, the product failed and the site was down. We called support in Canada and we were told that we will receive help for the next 10 minutes and if problem cannot be solved by then, we have to wait for the next morning! And at exactly 5 PM their time, the person said bye and hung up the phone! There was no Hot Banana “community” to seek help from. Thankfully, the company announced that they are stopping further development on Hot Banana (it generally means – “it is being put on life support and is being prepared for a slow death”). We looked at Drupal, WordPress and Joomla and after a careful evaluation, chose Drupal.
I used that evaluation as the basis for recommending that we move to Drupal for Wellesley. I should say that we received support from almost all quarters fairly quickly. We then began an implementation plan.
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