We just came back after spending a week in Research Triangle Park (RTP) area in North Carolina where my wife had a workshop. From there we drove to Hampton, VA to attend a friend’s daughter’s wedding reception. On the way, we stopped at the Dismal Swamp State Park. It was pretty hot there, but the RTP area is fabulous and provides a lot of opportunities to walk around. I also played a lot of golf, once paired with a grandfather and his 14-yr old grandson. The kid played awesome and was one under for the course – Raleigh Golf Association. If he goes on to become a pro, I can claim that I gave him some tips 🙂

I was thinking about where we were a year ago – right in the middle of Google transition while beginning our work on Drupal. I am very happy to see how through the excellent work that the LTS staff have put into these projects, we have achieved so much in such a short time. And, now,  we are being called on for advice.  At a Drupal gathering a couple of weeks back in Waltham, there were several interested parties who wanted to know about our Drupal implementation. They were collectively impressed by the speed at which we moved as well as the process we have established and the technological innovations we have brought to the table. I have fielded calls from at least six other institutions about our Google implementation, especially our LMS built on Google and LTS staff did a show and tell recently to a couple of other institutions. This is great progress.

Though I use my Droid phone for accessing the internet a lot, I have also seen a huge shift recently to Mobile friendly apps. Pretty much everything that I need to do such as banking, bill payment, editing google docs, can all be done relatively easily on the mobile device. We are increasingly hearing the term “Responsive Design“, which basically refers to a site that responds with the content in a way that it renders well in the device that is requesting content. This is also tied to the “Mobile First” strategy in that increasingly, the users are doing business from their Mobile devices and recognizing that and serving content that way is critical for future success. It is high time that our strategy includes this.

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