Just testing out the new Windows Live Writer, a new (beta) blogging client.  For all SU Communities bloggers, this is a blogging client that you may be interested in getting. 

One of the features of this particular client that I find interesting is that Windows Live Writer, upon configuring it with your blog, will download your site's CSS and will use these style definitions within the client itself.

This means that when you are composing your entry in the client it will look like it will when it is posted to your site.

Features such as spellcheck, Save Draft, and quick access to predefiened blog categories are a nice imporovment over the Web authoring interface.

I think that this is a pretty solid tool, on par with BlogJet, but without the licensing cost(for now anyway).

Despite not hearing from us on this blog for quite a while, we have been very busy working on various projects.  However, I wanted to post a quick item today that is more technical in nature.

For one of my projects I have been working with translucent elements.  Setting opacity on elements in CSS that works cross browser can be a bit of a chore, and I have found it difficult to find helpful documentation online that goes beyond  the basics of setting opacity on single elements.

While the CSS3 specification has support for opacity, many browsers already support it.  One problem that arises, however, is when you try to layer opaque and translucent items.

Say, for example, you have a page with a large background image.  As part of your design, you have an element that you would like to layer ontop of this background image, but you would like to have the overlaying element translucent so that the background image is still partially visible.  However, you might have additional elements such as text, images, text boxes, or buttons that you do *not* want to be translucent, but they need to appear within the translucent layer.

What many of the online articles about opacity don’t always make explicitly clear is that opacity is really a “postprocessing operation”.  What this means is that when opacity is applied to an element all of its child elements will inherit the opacity setting of its parent, even if you explicitly set the opacity of the child elements to equal 1.

While looking for a few examples of workarounds, I came upon this article from the Mozilla Developer Center.  I thought that it explained the fundamental problem very well, and also provided several examples of achieving the desired affect.  For anyone else who is thinking about introducing translucent layers to their design, you might want to bookmark this one!

Tuesday afternoon, OIT Web Services launched a new Web site for Student Development.

The site is powered by a custom content management tool that utilizes ASP.NET and a database back-end to dynamically generate and serve content to the end user.

Such systems are managed Web publishing solutions that are very different from traditional code-by-hand models.

This particular solution includes document and link management and support for n-tier site hierarchies.

This release also includes online contact and feedback forms that allow for managed channels for user-to-owner communications.

The application is managed by an easy-to-use administration panel that allows authorized users to use a series of forms and datagrids to visually manage content and assets without needing to manually interact with the Web server’s file system.

OIT Web Services is pleased to announce the integration of eServe in MySU, the Center for Service and Community Engagement's online system (also developed by OIT Web Services) to coordinate volunteer and service-learning opportunities for Seattle University students.

Students who are pursuing volunteer or service-learning opportunities can now add the eServe Student Dashboard to their MySU portal layout and have single-click access to their information without needing to login again.

Faculty can also add the eServe Faculty Dashboard to their MySU portal layouts.

The integration of eServe in the MySU student portal further exemplifies the power and flexibility of the new portal framework to bring information and tools that are important to students into a central location without requiring subsequent logins.

Tuesday evening OIT Web Services upgraded Community Server, the Web application that serves SU Communities, to the final release of Version 2 (build 2.0.60217.2664) of that software.

This version includes many fixes and improvements in the underlying application including issues with moderating forums and user management as well as feature enhancements.

One of the enhancements is an improved slide-show feature for online photo galleries (view sample here).

Utilizing SlideShowPro, a professional quality Flash slide-show interface, SU Communities authors can showcase their office, group, or club’s activities.  Each album within a gallery can be viewed as a slide-show.

We have also chosen at this time to implement a module that allows Google Maps to be embedded in the body of blog posts.  Utilizing an application programming interface (API) made available by Google, the module allows a blog author to embed a Google Map that can be configured to display in map view, satellite view, or hybrid view which overlays the street map over satellite imagery.  Blog authors can also specify an address to center the map on, the level of zoom, as well as the text message that appears when the pushpin in the center of the map is clicked.

[googlemap:address=901 12th Ave, Seattle, WA 98199:type=hybrid:zoom=17:label=Welcome to Seattle University!]

Blog authors also have the ability to reference items listed on Amazon.com using a module that utilizes Amazon’s API.

[amazon:type=Books:search=professional asp.net:results=5]

An author can specify the type of item to be returned, a key word or phrase that the API uses to parse items, and the number of results the module should return.  This is helpful for authors who write about a book, CD, DVD, or other item and wish to give their readers an opportunity to learn more about the item.

OIT Web Services looks forward to continuing to see SU Communities grow.  The number of blogs in SU Communities has been steadily increasing and other campus groups are expressing interest as well.  You can look forward to continued improvements over time as we work to make this online community a usable and effective means of bringing the Seattle University community together.

OIT Web Services is proud to announce the first implementation of podcast and vodcast support at Seattle University. As of February 28th, 2006, the MySU student portal natively supports podcast and vodcast feeds so students can subscribe to a wide selection of audio and video broadcasts on the Web.

Some of the exciting possibilities of podcast feeds are found at Seattle's very own independent public radio station, KEXP 90.3 FM. After logging in to MySU, students can listen to KEXP’s daily selection of noteworthy music. Other types of podcasts supported by MySU include news sound bites and current events commentary.

Boasting an initial, automatically updating library of 19 audio podcasts and 2 video vodcasts, MySU embraces these emerging mediums and Seattle University students can look forward to further growth and channel availability in the future. These exciting multimedia feeds are in addition to the 52 different RSS news channels already published within MySU.

Start exploring today!

OIT Web Services is pleased to announce the launch of MySU 2.0, Seattle University's Student Portal!

The new MySU provides a multitude of new features that will simplify the lives of students interacting with University web resources. It will also simplify and cleanup email inboxes across campus, as many University communications will now be targeted to the specific, necessary populations of students rather than sent by email to all students. For example, a Junior or Senior Undergraduate will not have to receive an announcement that only pertains to Freshmen.

A little over 8 months has passed since OIT first developed the specifications for a new student portal in conjunction with the Division of Student Development, ASSU, and the Grad Council. Much custom programming and graphic design work has been undertaken by OIT Web Services to ensure that each and every channel will be truly useful and expandable in the future, and that the portal embraces personalization through a collection of different skins.

We feel that we've delivered a platform geared for the future requirements, growth, and expectations of a portal environment at Seattle University. Students are well versed in internet technologies, such as blogging and podcasting, and use web tools in increasingly critical parts of their lives. MySU seeks to simplify those tools through single sign-on functionality, which means that once you login to the portal, you can have one-click access to all the other University tools and applications that previously required a second login.

Content syndication is another important realm in the modern web environment. The new MySU adopts RSS feeds as a core mechanism to include information from different sources, through both official published channels and by providing a custom RSS news feed reader that students can make their own for one-click access to news streams of interest.

Many of the new Seattle University web sites developed and redesigned by OIT Web Services include RSS features at their core. We want to ensure that any University information can be brought into a student's portal layout and arranged with other disparate information so students don't have to navigate through a myriad of different web sites to find out information as basic as scholarship deadlines, Cherry Street Market hours, and upcoming Seattle University events.

We invite you to take a test drive of the new MySU and let us know what you think! Click here to visit.

Tags: Web Portal, Seattle University

The upcoming release of MySU will include several new features including single sign-on (SSO) and personalization.  The MySU portal is also skinnable, and we have been putting the finishing touches on the initial offering of MySU skins before we launch.

Basically, a skin is a set of colors and images that make up the aesthetic and visual aspects of a User Interface design.  Modifying the skin changes the way the application looks and feels but leaves the core functionality unchanged.

People are different and have different tastes, and if MySU is really going to be *your* portal, then the look and feel should be something you like!

Initially, we’re launching with six themes. Half of them are focused on specific audiences (undergrad, grad, and law), and the other half are more topical (futuristic/techie, Redhawks, and "Hearts"). We’ve been working closely with Student Development, ASSU, and GSC on MySU so feedback from everyone will help us make sure the new portal works great and is truly useful.

So without further ado, here is a preview of the initial skin set for MySU v2.0!

(Default)



(Tech)



(Redhawks)



(Graduate)



(Hearts)



(Law)

In this next installment in our series about content management tools we cover the most elemental part of any Web site: the site map.

The site map is the frame that the rest of the Web site is built on.  Site maps define how your information is organized and how a user will move through that information using navigation elements that follow this structure.

Building your site map can be a difficult task because being able to visualize where information should be placed and building the pages to contain it requires the editor to juggle several things at once: What information do I have?  How does it fit together?  What pages have I created, and what ones don’t exist yet?  Is this page new or old?  Should this page be its own section?  Should this page go under this page or that page?

Invariably answering these questions is going to lead to reorganization of the site map by moving pages, adding pages, or deleting pages.  Making these kinds of changes in a traditional publishing environment where any of these tasks involve interacting directly with the production server’s file system can become a serious proposition for the average content editor.

To help address this, we developed a simple content management tool.

Where do I put all this information?!

A CMS allows for a central template to define the look and feel of a Web site and manages structural things like menus and other navigational aids.  This means that when a content editor needs to author a new page, they simply click a button to "add" a page, define where in the Site Map the page is to appear, and get busy adding content. 

This is in contrast to the first-generation, static HTML process of creating a new file, inserting all of the structural HTML markup that defines headers, menus, footers, etc. before content entry can even begin.

To give you an idea what this functionality looks like in our tool, take a look at this screenshot:

Pages can be managed by manipulating various properties.  For example, the first column in the data grid has a pair of icons that display a page's "status". 

A page can be given a status of "Active" or "In-Active", which is a way of telling the CMS whether you want the page to be public or private.  Public pages will appear in the Site Map and global navigation.  Private, or In-Active pages remain in the system but don't appear on the public site.

The second column is a toggle that will allow the content editor to choose to include or not-include the page in global navigation.  All pages display in the Site Map, but pages set to be hidden in the global navigation will only display in the Site Map.

All pages that are created in the CMS interface can be edited, deleted, and moved in the hierarchy.  Entering your content is done through an MS Word-like text editor that is both cross browser and cross platform (works in Internet Explorer and Firefox on Windows and Macintosh OS).

Some system pages such as the Home page cannot be deleted.  Some such as the Site Map cannot be directly edited as their functionality may be automated or managed through other interfaces throughout the system--in the case of the Site Map by manipulating pages using the page manager interface referenced earlier.

The real benefit here is that for a majority of the pages that need to be published—text pages with content formatted in the editor—this tool allows an editor to create a new page and have it placed in the hirearchy in about thirty seconds.  No file uploads.  No HTML.  For business objectives that require more interactivity or complex management, OIT Web Services can write custom code that will provide additional functionality.  These pages can then be added into the hierarchy and managed with everything else.

The traditional model takes more effort to create a page and integrate the page into the site map than it does to come up with the content that the page displays.  Not only is this an incentive to not publish information, but it means that the content editor has less time to work with the content itself lowering both volume and quality.

By making “updating the Web site” more user friendly, the goal is to make people want to update their Web site whenever they have something important to share rather than waiting until it *has* to be done.

What feature are we working on now?

Currently we are working on improving several features, one of which is digital image management.  This is usually a unique challenge because it entails keeping track of where images are stored, what they're called, and how the content editor organizes them administratively.  In addition, there is also the challenge of keeping track of where images are referenced and displayed throughout the site.

The solution to this is to centrally manage all digital images and then reference this central repository on the page level.

This divides the tasks into two distinct and easy to manage processes: managing what images you have and managing where you use the images.

Tackling the issue of managing what images you have, we developed an image manager in the CMS administration panel that allows a content editor to categorize and upload digital images. 

Once in the system, the images can be "added" to pages so that a single image can appear on multiple pages, and the same set of multiple images can appear on multiple pages in a custom order defined on the individual page level.

Put more simply, once you have uploaded an image you can re-use the image as many times as you want and the CMS will manage all of the HTML.  You can even have the same pictures appear on different pages in different order.  You just select the picture you want and tell the system where you want it and it does everything else.

Plus, if you delete an image, the system will automatically remove any references to the image within the CMS.

A managed digital image library is a more effective and time saving method for putting images on the Web.  While its not a full-featured gallery (though we do offer this through the SU Communities site), it addressees the immediate need to add images to content in a managed, deliberate manner.

What other features are there?

This is just one of several features we have developed and improved.  We also have built functionality for document management, link management, contact forms (submitting to email and/or a database), and other more customized and user specific needs like a scholarship database or building/room directory.

For each project we take on there are common needs, but there invariably are unique business requirements that are addressed through custom development where appropriate.

In the future we will delve deeper into some of these other features, or new features, that we have custom built.

OIT Web Services takes on dozens of projects every year ranging from business and data applications to office and departmental Web sites. 

In our last post we touched on a few of these at a high level, but in the next several posts we would like to go into a little more detail about a particular kind of project that we take on: Web site development.

What is Content Management?

Planning, building, and maintaining a Web site for most offices and departments at Seattle University is a time consuming and difficult task.  There are organizational, logistical, and technical challenges.

The traditional method of publishing has been to author static HTML pages from scratch in programs like Dreamweaver of FrontPage.  This process requires direct interaction with the server's file system as well as intermediate to advanced knowledge of HTML and design concepts, graphic design capability, and the ability to manually manage dozens or hundreds of individual files.

These issues can pose significant challenges to the uninitiated.  As the greater World Wide Web established itself and grew, new systems and technical solutions were developed to address the problems associated with this first-generation approach to publishing content to the Web.

The solution is Content Management (CM).  The concept here is that all of these pieces of information--text, documents, images, links--and the processes by which they are manged/implemented should be organized and managed efficiently so as to bring order to a process that can become chaotic and unmanageable.

Content Management in practice is a Content Management System (CMS).  There are many different CMS solutions, however they all share the same basic concepts: systematically and, to the extent possible, automatically manage multiple instances of shared content through a centralized system.

In short: bring some order and intuition into the way you build and maintain your Web site!

The benefits are immediate because the burden of maintaining the infrastrcutre (HTML) and design (graphics/styles) is taken off of the content editor and placed on the CMS.  This means that content editors, whose primary duties often are *not* Web development, can spend more time writing and publishing content and less time learning HTML under deadline.

A better managed CM solution streamlines planning, development, and maintenance by providing a visual representation of content and a graphical user interface (GUI) for managing it.

Developing a Simple CMS Tool: What it is

OIT Web Services is very aware of the lengths that many content editors at Seattle University go to try to get information published to the Web.  In order to try to alleviate some of the burden and improve the Web at the same time, we began developing small, targeted custom content management applications for offices and departments in lieu of a standard, enterprise university wide CMS solution. 

Large teams of developers can spend many years building powerful, extensible frameworks for managing content at the enterprise level, however the immediate needs of many editors on the department level can be addressed using small, functional applications that are narrow in scope but effective at achieving basic goals.

These immediate needs center around organizing and managing the site map, digital images, and documents (MS Word files, PDF files, etc.).

Our next few posts will go into more detail about how these three areas are addressed and why a managed solution improves not only the content management process but the final product that the public interacts with.

What it is not 

Our simple CMS is not enterprise software, and is not a true CMS in that it lacks work flow or the ability to assign authorized users certain areas of responsibility.  This solution has developed out of an immediate need to address basic, common issues that significantly hinder the development of a meaningful, accurate Web at SU.

With each new project we have been able to improve upon our code and offer better or new features.  This has allowed smaller offices and departments who use our applications to take advantage of the benefits of CM while reducing the ammount of time they need to spend entering or updating information.  While these efforts are only designed to move the ball forward so far, they have been very effective at realizing their purpose.

Stay tuned as this series is continued!

With the launch of the new SU Communities Web site, Seattle University has stepped into an emerging realm: blogging.  "Blog" is a bit of a buzz word and its real use and possibilities are being defined on a near-daily basis, but for many blogging lives in the nebulous cloud of techno-babble devoid of any real meaning or use.  As with any emerging technology or medium, it is natural to question whether it is useful or necessary or what the best way to capitalize on it may be.

So what’s the point to a blog, anyway?

Dictionary.com defines a blog (deriviative of Web Log) as “an online diary, a personal chronological log of thoughts published on a Web page”.  This is a good start, however as blogging has evolved from its origin as a “diary”, groups and organizations have expanded the original single-author anything goes model into a more structured (read: intentional) means for communicating thoughts, ideas, and other information that otherwise might not be published.

Blogging material for institutional blogs has value because the fluid, daily nature of a blog lends itself to the kind of content that doesn’t easily fit into a traditional Web publishing model.  Blogs are intriguing because they offer a venue for hard-to-catagorize content  that is nevertheless important to the institution’s function but has historically been absent from the institution’s dialogue with the public.

Therefore, in an institutional blog the real point is to allow the reader a window into the daily goings on in a way that has not been previously known.

What this blog is meant to accomplish:

The World Wide Web is a complicated place.  There are many intersecting fields and imperatives that define how, what, why, and when information is published and consumed.  There are technical, organizational, conceptual, and chronological factors that impact the fabric that defines the WWW as we all know it.  This blog will serve as a window into the Web’s evolution here at SU.  Not only will you be able to know what we’re doing, but hopefully we’ll be able to give you a wider perspective into the how’s, why’s, and when’s behind the online experience you see when you open your browser.

This means you can look forward to reading information about upcoming projects as they progress through the project lifecycle (project initiation, requirements analysis, design, implementation, reflection).  You can also look forward to posts about the underlying concepts, theory, and strategy that helps guide the decisions that we as developers make when building the tools, applications, and Web sites we deliver to the university.  You can also expect to be able to become an active voice in the process as this blog is not only a medium for us to speak to you, but for you to speak to us.  Questions, comments, or ideas we hear from you may be the genesis of future blog posts, discussion threads (OIT Web Services also maintains a discussion forum), or even future projects.

Who we are:

As this blog is very new and this is only the second post, I also wanted to take a moment to start building on some background so you have some context.  My name is Charles Wesley and I am the Web Master.  I am a 2004 graduate of SU (Bachelor’s in English Literature) and have been an employee of SunGard Collegis ever since.  I am a member of a three-person team that comprises OIT Web Services, an office that is part of the Administrative Computing group in OIT (Office of Information Technology).  I focus primarily on working with the campus community to maintain, build, and expand Web sites.  Some of my recent projects include new Web sites for the Sullivan Leadership Award, Facilities Services, the Student Health Center, and Student Financial Services.  I am also participating in design and development for the new release of MySU, the online student portal (see previous post).

Other members of the team include Ryan Thompson, Web Developer, and Eric Larsen, Senior Web Developer and OIT Web Services Team Lead.

Eric is the developer of many of the heavy-duty Web applications that allow the university to leverage institutional data in new and meaningful ways.  The flagship application in this area is SUDDS (SU Data Delivery System).  You can look forward to learning more about how this application can be used to better your office or department’s mission as well as what kinds of improvements you can expect to see in the future.

Eric and I will be the primary authors for this blog and we look forward to contributing to the blogging community here at SU.

Be sure to create an account if you would like to submit comments to blog posts or threads in the discussion forum.  Posts are moderated however I will try my best to make sure comments are approved quickly to keep the tempo during lively discussions.

Once you have an account, you can opt-in for email notifications for when this blog or any other SU blog is updated.  The blog also provides an RSS feed, so those of you who would like to follow us using that technology are more than welcome to do so.

OIT Web Services is finalizing the development of a comprehensive portal environment for students to replace and expand the existing MySU portal. The new portal implementation will provide single sign-on capabilities with major applications and systems related to students. Additionally, the new portal will target announcements and news to specific academic levels or classes, and provide a robust personalization framework allowing students to customize their layout’s appearance and content.

Following are a few screenshots showing the new look and feel of MySU:

  

The new MySU will provide one-click, single sign-on access to University resources:

• Angel
• OWA Web Mail
• SUOnline
• Campus Card/Meal Plan Balances

We look forward to launching the new MySU student portal and providing students with the best platform possible for future growth.

- The OIT Web Services Team