Here is a screenshot of the upcoming replacement for MyRC with the Roanoke College branding in place. The new portal will be released on January 5, 20105.

Features include:

• Integrated view of Outlook calendar and class schedule
• Blackboard
• Webadvisor
• My ToDo list
• Weather
• Password Change
• Daily Announcements
• Team Sites
• College News, Sports News & Dining Menu
• Personal & College bookmarks

Much information is coming soon!

We have just launched a new look for Web Announcer, which is now being called the “Daily e-mail.” This look is a continuation of the redesign of enews and now there is now a consistent look between the two. It contains all of the same information, just with a different layout. We will also have news stories from the college home page, or RC News Blog inside the Daily e-mail. Only new announcements will appear in the email, however to see all announcements, just click “View More” at the top right of the announcements section.

The Daily e-mail home page has also gotten a face lift to match the template associated with other internal applications like Maroon Passport and Student Evaluations.

We hope you like the look of the new Daily e-mail. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

The web development group began working this summer on a new Portal to replace MyRC. After looking at several options we choose to go with Datatel’s Active Campus Portal, which is based on Microsoft Sharepoint Services.

The benefits of this new portal will be:

• Better integration of Datatel course information
• Custom sites for each course – with links to Blackboard
• Integration of email, calendar and tasks
• Team sites for collaboration on projects and documents
• Links to all WebAdvisor functions
• Campus news, local weather and much more!

We are planning to test and demo the new Portal throughout the Fall term and make the new Portal live before the Spring 2010 semester begins.

Here is a screen shot of what Active Campus Portal looks like.:

At the eduWeb conference Twitter has reached total penetration. Nearly everyone raised their hand when asked if they were on Twitter in a session I went to (of course, it was a session about Twitter). Many of my peers still report that upper management and other stake holders don’t “get it.” And 70% of higher ed people set up institutional Twitter accounts without seeking permission of the higher ups (presumably because it was to hard to explain to them).

The trend for Twitter in higher ed (and other businesses) is to maintain a conversation with customers and stakeholders. Colleges and Universities are going to need to find the resources to staff Twitter accounts to engage these users.

Higher-ed use of Facebook is also surging. With many seeking to protect their brand with vanity URL’s and grabbing up groups for the class of 2013, 14, 15 and beyond. Higher levels of integration with events, login and information is also needed. Several schools are already using Facebook Connect. Many schools have or would like to have closed groups for accepted students. I think getting someone from Facebook at an event like this would be fantastic! They need to remember their core audience.

And finally, why not overtly mentioned, MySpace is still discussed. It is apparently used quite a bit in certain demographics, It seems like the “mommy invasion” of Facebook and MySpace’s refocus on music has upgraded it from deathwatch to merely critical. I will be watching closely to see if MySpace or another network begins to pick up traffic from the college bound audience.

I am in Chicago at the EduWeb Conference. The fine folks at Ingeniux sponsored the opening reception. I got to spend some time with Jim, Nathan and Andrew chatting about Roanoke’s experiences with Ingeniux and the future of the Ingeniux CMS.

I suggested that they have some user group meetings, and they told me they are doing the first one in Chicago while they are in town this week, They mentioned that they wanted to do one in the Virginia area since they have Lynchburg, Washington & Lee, and Randolph College all as customers (in addition to Roanoke). I volunteered Roanoke as a host right away.I can’t wait to hear more from them.

The discussion spilled over into dinner where we had some great Sushi in downtown Chicago. (Full disclosure, no I did no actually eat Sushi)

I pumped Nathan for details on Ingeniux 6.5 and got him to “leak” the following nuggets:

• 6.5 has an all new publishing monitor that gives more verbose status updates and better performance (but what will I look at when I want to take a late afternoon nap? The old publish monitor had such a tranquil and meditative charm)
• 6.5 will finally do away with the Active-X client, and now be full on Ajax. This means the new Admin client is included!
• Ingeniux has purchased the new version of Peersync for all of their clients, and we are entitled to load the new version. Hopefully, this will solve any lingering Peersync issues that we have.

We also discussed integrating Coldfusion into the CMS. But I have spent so many years not doing it, I am still getting my heard around the benefits vs. the effort now. Nathan told us the way we are doing it now is the “pro” way anyhow!

I got quite a bit out of the time I spent with them (totally worth the trip to Chicago), and am looking forward to using some of our 360 development hours to talk about topics like Taxonomy, SEO, and integration with the Google Analytics API.

I was also super excited to see Roanoke featured prominently in the Ingeniux ad.

Tonight I performed an upgrade to the Ingeniux Content Management Server for the main college site. We are now now running version 6.0 Service Release 5. The big news is that Ingeniux CMS now supports Internet Explorer 8.0. And the “remember me” feature seems to work now!

Here are the official release notes from Ingeniux.com

Ingeniux CMS 6.0 SR5 Highlights:

• Official Internet Explorer 8 Support
• TinyMCE WYSIWYG Editor Upgrade
• Dojo Framework Upgrade
• New CMS Custom Hook Feature
• Additions to the "Get Element Values" Feature for Enumeration and MultiSelect Elements
• Publish Monitor Access from Overview Dashboard
• IGX Info Cookie Update
• Structured URL Folder Names Configuration
• Run-Time Transform Override Configuration
• Custom ComExecute "Properties" Dialog Support
• "Go To Bar" Improvements
• More than 40 updates in total

Starting with the June issue we are introducing a new simpler design for the monthly Roanoke College eNews. We will be reduce eNews from five versions to one. Also, we will be doing a better job of re-using existing website and blog content. Look for the new version in your inbox around mid-June.

Check out a sample layout below. And be sure to leave your thoughts in the comments.

We got the final comps from New City and approved them yesterday. These designs will be implemented by ICS Sidearm, and the new site will go live in August.

Here they are. Put your thoughts in the comments.

Home Page Design

Sport Page

Generic Page

One of my Twitter friends, Rachel Reuben, was recently asking about our experience with Picasa and  I emailed her my pros and cons.  I decided to post that information here, as it might be helpful to others.  We had Extensis Portfolio right when I started working here and nobody particularly liked it.  We tried several different types of software and ended up settling with Picasa.

Here’s how we use Picasa
We use it to manage our 200,000 + college photos.  We have about 10 people using it – 6 in PR, 1 in sports, 1 in alumni and 1 in community relations.  We only have it accessible to marketing people.  We have both PC and Mac users.  Picasa came out with a Mac version several months ago and until then, our Mac people were using Adobe Bridge.

The images are simply stored in any network folder or folders and then you tell Picasa to look for photos in a particular location.

Pros for Picasa

• It’s free!
• EASY to use, extremely user-friendly
• Tagging (Keywording) is really easy (way easier than most software)
• When you add a tag, it writes it to the metadata of the file – IPTC, instead of to an internal database
• Picasa recognizes and can keyword video too
• Search is FANTASTIC – really fast, finds based on file name, folder name or keywords. (Of course, this is a Google product after all.)
• Any number of people can use it. (It is not server-based, but everyone’s folder locations point to the same location on the server.)
• We use Picasa Web Albums to do online event photo galleries and it’s so easy.  Takes 5 seconds to make an online gallery.   Yea, it’s not on our site, but we don’t care.  We just link to the Picasa gallery from our site.
• You can also create Albums inside of Picasa.  I have several for pictures I like or use frequently.  (However this is not shared between other users.  To combat this issue, if we need to create a “lightbox” of photos for multiple people to see, I just keyword them all with something very specific.  Like if we’re searching for photos for our viewbook update, I might keyword all of the possibilities with “vb09update”   Then, any user can search that and see them.  Then, you just have to keep track of these code words you have used.)
• Easy to email photos, resize, etc.
• You can install a Facebook and Flickr plug-in for it to send photos directly to either. Again, very easy.

Cons

• When there are new photos, they have to “import.”  Picasa does have an internal database for the display of the photos.   This really isn’t a problem until for some strange reason, all the sudden nothing is displaying in Picasa and it’s reindexing all of the photos.  This has only happened to me one time, but it was a pain.  It takes 24-36 hours to index all 200,000 of our photos.  I suspect that this might be due to loss of network connectivity, because Picasa will not work properly on my laptop as connection is on and off.  Also, this is not a problem for me, but apparently our Director of IT complains about it being a bandwidth hog because of this indexing on multiple computers.
• The non-shared album issue mentioned above.
• When keywording tifs, Picasa does not write the info to the metadata.

Overall, we love it! And, if we decide we don’t, we can easily switch.

What does everyone else use?

Here’s some photos and a video from behind the scenes at our latest video shoot of the Roanoke College Choir at St. Andrew’s Catholic Church in Roanoke.

Our videographer, Steve Mason, used the jib for this shoot and we got some amazing sweeping shots.  I can’t wait to see the footage.