CFR Web Advisory Committee Minutes, August 19, 2008
Attending: Davis, Diemer, Morrison, Paul, West
Absent: Moskal, Piccola, Trudeau
1. The minutes from the 7/22 meeting were approved.
2. Jon told the committee that he and Alice are very busy with other projects that
have been taken on during lulls in the activity of redesigning the CFR website.
However, Jon will work with Bev to prioritize all database and web tasks and the
completion of the website redesign is on the top of the list. Also, Alice’s initial
appointment, which expires August 31, will not be extended or renewed. The good
news is that her work (for the website redesign and other projects) will be covered
by the appointment that was set up for her work on the CINTRAFOR website. That
appointment doesn’t end until May, 2009.
3. Marc reminded us that the trial period for Trumba (which has been extended for
us) will end August 31, so we need to present all calendaring options to the Dean as
soon as possible. If funding for Trumba is not authorized, we will initially use the
existing calendar system (written in the old version of ASP, with data stored in an
Access database) with minimal changes to pages to conform with our new design.
Then later we would convert to ASP.NET (and a SQL Server database), which would
be a very time-consuming and costly endeavor.
4. Jon reported that he is working on completing the conversion of the rest of the
ASP pages to ASP.NET. These are in the areas of Research and Grad Interests. Alice
is working with him to incorporate the design features of the new site.
5. Jon will be working with Cecilia to reconcile the new SQL Server database with
the existing Access database (for faculty and staff data, including research grants),
since there have been many changes since Jon migrated the data to SQL Server in
late June and early July. Because there were so many changes to the format of the
data, it will be easier to do manual comparisons and changes than to repeat the
numerous manual and automated steps the original conversion required.
6. CFR Tools: Alice will work with Bev on determining the critical administrative
pages to migrate right away to the new site, and Jon will do the same with Brad for
the Computer Resources pages.
7. Cecilia will complete her review of all the pages Alice has migrated so far, and
provide corrections and suggestions to Alice.
8. The committee agreed that we should go live with the redesigned site before
Autumn Quarter begins and before the graduate student orientation on Sept. 18th,
with enough time to get feedback from faculty and staff. The plan is to finish all the
remaining critical tasks (described above) and meet on Sept. 9th to make a final
decision on whether to go live on Sept. 10th.
NEXT MEETING: September 9th, 2pm in Anderson 107A