Technology Services has a standing maintenance window at 5pm every Friday evening. This window gives us the ability to make upgrades to software and hardware that allow the services we provide to be speedy, reliable and secure.

We thank you for your patience and understanding while we make these improvements.

Update (5:52 p.m.): Maintenance has been completed.

We’ve been exploring web-based content management as means to simplify the site maintenance process. We’ve sat through mind-numbing demonstrations and read countless websites and product reviews. To date, we have not found a system that is affordable, easy to use and offers the features we require. While we continue to work on bringing true content management to campus, we are transitioning from GoLive to a web page editor known as Adobe Contribute.

Contribute has a refined, intuitive user interface and will eliminate much of the confusion caused by GoLive. It eliminates the need to use GoLive’s “Site” and “FTP Browser” functionality and instead uses the well-known web browser as an editor’s primary page selection tool. Web Services will be able to configure, maintain and repair a department’s website without having to schedule meetings or forcing the editor to download newer files from the server. Editors will be able to maintain their website without having to endure hours of training or night terrors. All in all, Contribute is a much better tool.

We’re excited to offer this technology to the campus community. If you are responsible for maintaining your department’s website and would like to make the transition, send us an email and let us know. If you love GoLive or have a personal website, GoLive is the tool for you, and we’ll continue to support you.

With our move we made a leap in operating system versions (akin to moving from Windows NT to Vista), as well as Apache (the software that sends pages to your browser) and we also received much more hard drive space. These upgrades will enable us to better bridge the gap between what our visitors want to see and what we are technically able to provide them.

We have some exciting things planned and with this new technology, finally have the ability to see them to fruition. In the next few weeks we’ll be able to share one or two of projects with you. In the meantime, think about what your life would be like if you never had to use GoLive again.

The most prominent is paginated search results. In previous versions, results were limited to the first 100 people. Now, the entire search result is made available in shorter, faster rendering pages.

Choosing how to search has also changed. We moved the links to Basic and Advanced searching out of the page and into the permanent navigation tabs at the top of the page. This should allow for easier access to searching options.

We made some other minor changes to enhance usability and functionality, but we’ll let you find them on your own.

What’s next?

We will be adding the ability to search for students and employees from previous academic years. For those of you who slept through your ID mug shot and don’t want it to be preserved for all of eternity, you have until the end of the academic year to get it updated.

As always, if you have any suggestions or comments, please post them here.

Oh, and if you haven’t updated your web browser in a while, do yourself a favor and upgrade now.

Gribly

On Friday, December 1st, Web Services will be moving from a six-year old database system to the new SQL Server 2005 platform released by Microsoft last year. While this upgrade was largely motivated by Gustavus’ LiquidMatrix project, all other databases the current system hosts will be upgraded as well. The upgrade will offer increased performance, reliability, programmability and, thanks to our new database cluster, increased uptime. These advances will allow Web Services to offer better tools, increased web page response time and an overall better experience for those who visit our website.

This is exciting. We have been given the opportunity to take something that was well done and improve upon it. And I think we have. We’ve taken all the data from the printed version, added a search engine, the ability to print photo class rosters, the ability to update personal information and the ability to include more information about yourself than was available in the printed Gribly, like your mobile phone number or birthday.

Photos for Students

Another big step we’ve taken is given the student body the ability to see photos in search results. In the boring, old electronic Campus Directory, only college employees were given the ability to see photographs. Since one person can ruin a great thing for everyone, let’s hope no one abuses this privilege.

Printed Copies

For those of you who don’t feel you can let go of your printed copy just yet, you will have the opportunity to order a printed Gribly for a small fee. The printed copy will be available for pick-up October or November. For more information, contact the Department of College Relations.

If you are inclined to order a printed copy of the Gribly so you have an archival copy, the online Gribly will be archived each year for easy access in the future.

Send Us Feedback

If you haven’t yet seen the Gribly, or printed out your class roster, please check it out and send us any feedback. We’re always looking for ways to make things better.

When I sat down to take a look at our website statistics, I was pleasantly surprised to see a sizable increase in what we served in 2005. Gustavus experienced a 18.6% increase in visits (to 9.6M), a 14.6% increase in visitors (to 2.1M), and a 49% increase in page views (to 48.8M). Of course, these numbers don’t tell us what we’re doing right or wrong–only delving into individual page statistics and focus groups can hint at that–but it does let us know that an increasing number of people are relying on our services as a part of their everyday activities. It also tells us that the bar is being raised and in order to meet expectations, the Gustavus community must make an ever increasing investment in content to feed our audience’s growing appetite.

It looks like we have our work cut out for us. I wish I had a magic wand.