Posts Tagged ‘Drupal’
We can point to so many different success stories in the open source world. I have a long list of favorites, but some of the top ones are: Linux, Apache, Drupal, Moodle, Hadoop and R. I have personally benefited from all of this tremendously and at Wellesley we use Linux, Apache, Drupal and R. We also use Sakai, which is another open source software. I am taking a course titled “The Analytics Edge” from MIT and loving it. As a part of this, I am cracking away at R. It is such a brilliant system, which has matured so much in the past two years. I have been involved in data modeling in collaboration with my wife for quite some time and was looking at R to replace SAS for . The last time I seriously looked at it was 2 years ago, but ruled out on lot of counts. But, the progress in the past couple of years has been tremendous and along with R Studio, a GUI front end to it, it is awesome.
Along the similar lines, I wanted to talk about eduroam, another brilliant idea. It is one of those collaborations amongst higher ed that works great. As I have written several times before, collaboration in higher ed a lot of times is simply more talk than action. Here is one where it is a tangible collaboration that we can all point to and be proud of.
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Wellesley has had Luminis portal for quite some time. We began actively promoting its use in the past 4 years. However, this is a very challenging system to understand, implement and maintain. The origins of Luminis are in an open source portal called uPortal. Ellucian, whatever the company was called back then, decided to take a version of uPortal and implement it to work with Banner. This is the simple version of a long story.
Unfortunately, such techniques just don’t work as well as developing something that coexists with your software in a more integrated fashion. And it shows. I just spent a few weeks trying to unravel the mysteries of Luminis in order to get the information out so we can use it for our new portal and I was flabbergasted.
So, why a new portal? The version of Luminis we are currently running is being phased out & it is running on older operating systems that are not being upgraded. We spent considerable time and effort to look at what it would take to implement the upgraded version of Luminis, which in my opinion, is yet another mistake. Ellucian has decided to take LifeRay, a new open source portal, and branch it off to suit their needs. We estimated that the total resources required to implement and maintain the new Luminis portal is not worth it. We are not the only one who has come to this conclusion.
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Last week, on Monday, I attended an NSF panel to discuss a survey that is administered by NSF regarding High Performance Computing Clusters as a part of a larger survey. The discussion was around the utility of the current survey and the results of the survey and what can be done to improve the use of the data. It was interesting to hear that with the exception of one attendee, most of us are either non-users of the data or casual users of the data. There was one person who is a heavy user because she is involved in writing a research paper on this subject with an Economist. In my opinion, NSF should partner with EDUCAUSE Core Data Service (CDS). EDUCAUSE administers a detailed annual survey that is filled out by a large group of its members and it has also developed a fairly complex tool to consume the data by slicing and dicing the data. Why replicate the effort and especially when there is an overlap in questions. Besides, we all are being surveyed to death!
Since I talk about a “duality” issue below, I thought I would share a picture of a sculpture from our trip that I talked about in my last post. If you look carefully, you should see an elephant facing left and a bull facing right. Sculptures of this kind are all over the place in that area and seems to have been a favorite pastime or challenge for the sculptors during the 6th – 11th centuries!
On thursday, I went to Google in NY City to talk to Google Sites developers (along with representatives from two other educational institutions) about how we use Google Sites and the issues we face and of course, our own opinions on how they can improve the product. Given that this team had been listening to a wide variety of users for almost a week, they seemed genuinely interested and attentive to what we had to say. I am thankful to get the opportunity and I hope what I had to say was useful.
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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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This was yet another great summer for me and I am sure it is true for many of you. Now, the phase of getting ready for the start of the Fall semester begins. Gone are the days when this used to be the most stressful part of the support services, especially the technology side. The network bandwidth was never enough, students brought computers that would not easily connect to the network, registration systems were too slow because of the lack of compute power, so on and so forth. Most of these are non-issues, unless we want to make them into issues by introducing some unnecessary and overcautious administrivia in the middle.
All of our summer projects have gone really well, many of which I have already mentioned. Especially worth mentioning are Google Apps transition and Drupal. Given the relative enormity of these projects, we have made amazing progress in such a short time thanks to diligent and creative work by the respective teams. This in no way minimizes several other important projects we have completed, of course.
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We were supposed to travel to Charlotte, NC to meet with our dear friends there and spend the July 4th weekend, but on Friday morning I got the call saying that our flight was cancelled. The next flight they can book us was on Saturday, late afternoon. So, I took the option of canceling our plans and receive a refund. Well, the reservation was through Expedia for a United Flight, sort of. It is really a USAir flight. So, USAir person could not give me the refund. She could only add a note. I had to call Expedia. After 1 hour, they validated and agreed that I am eligible for a refund. I hope I will get it. Lesson learned: Whereas Expedia is fantastic in taking your money, they are not so good in giving back money that is legitimately yours. I guess one can change Expedia with any business name and the statement will hold true.
As a result of this cancellation, we had one of the most restful four days. I got an invite to join Google Plus, Google’s FaceBook. It looks and acts like Facebook with some nicer features, but also lacks some of the social networking tool integrations such as those with Twitter and Foursquare and such. They will come in due course. But, the very fact that Facebook was the earliest and that many millions are already familiar with it poses a huge problem for Google Plus or any other FB wannabes.
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Another week coming to an end. Time indeed flies. Several of us traveled to Amherst College to talk to them about Drupal, the web content management system. I thought it was a great meeting. One of the key pieces that we will need for Drupal is Amherst’s Monster Menus. Whereas I was very happy to see the UConn men win last week, UConn women’s loss was not a happy moment. These kinds of unpredictable moments always remind me of how vulnerable all of us are. No matter how good you are and no matter how well you plan, things don’t always go the way that you plan. No worries, there is always the next year or the next project. I also talked to the Friends of the Library on Tuesday about where LTS is headed in the years to come. It was really fun.
Talking about projects, project management and key performance indicators (KPI) seem to be everywhere. Demand for services is far more than the available resources. There are a few institutions that have adopted the project management methodologies and have been reasonably successful, but many are simply unable to. As I mentioned in an earlier post, KPIs are extremely important in conveying how an organization is performing at any given point in time, in comparison to the same time in previous years and how goals are met.
My own feelings about this can be cast as practical project management…
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I actually wanted to write a post on a regional CIO gathering organized by Gartner Associates on “Key Performance Indicators” (KPI) which was very interesting, but not much there to report. There are some really interesting ideas on how different CIOs measure the collective performances of their own organizations. Steve Laster, the CIO at Harvard Business School, gave some examples, some of the usual uptime stats for standard services such as email. However, a few other examples he provided were intriguing – time tracking by staff and “number of angry calls to the CIO per week”.
In the end, the question that was posed to the attendees by Laura Craft, who moderated the discussion, was “Can you think of IT metrics at the institutional level?” In other words, what are the KPIs for the institution itself and amongst them, which are IT related. This did not result in anything that I found useful, but there were some wild ideas. I told the attendees my experience at Pace, where KPIs were big. There the institutional KPIs were simply “# of admitted students by school, Yield, Financial Aid offered, Net Revenue”. Whereas IT plays an indirect support role in all these areas, none of these are affected by IT performance directly.
We in Library and Technology Services (LTS, the new IS) are continuing to work hard on many different projects and I would like to talk about some of these.
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