SmartSite Project Monthly meetings, Sept 4, 2007

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Project Monthly meeting

September 4, 2007

Meeting Notes

Readiness for Fall 2007 Rollout: Kirk

The new Executive Director (Chief technical person) of the Sakai Foundation, Michael Korcuska, visited Davis and with Kirk and Liz.  He wants Kirk to work with him on QTI write up.  He also wants Foundation to hire a designer. 

In readiness for the Fall, the team has agreed to make changes to default list of tools. We Want only the most advanced tools.  This doesn't mean the others will be unavailable.  We're just assuming that people needn't be confused with some of the more difficult tools immediately. 

There was a question from faculty about migrating GradeBooks from MyUCDavis.  This is not possible.  How long will Gradebooks be available in My?  This is a question for the MyUCDavis Oversight Committee.

One of the other campuses has a Course evaluation tools.  Here at UCDavis, 3 dept want to beta test this.  We may run a Sandbox server for this. 

Susan Keane in BIS, wants to use Samigo in support of a course for which there are many lab assignments.  However, Samigo will not work for the complexity of work she wants. SCORM is a more appropriate.  Do this by Winter 2008 for her.

IT Express doing a great job all now.  The large issues with support have been solved.  We're fine tuning all now.

Kirk reported on our efforts to recruit a new trainer.  The effort has resulted in a good pool.  Interviews are underway now.

RAC Update: Patrick

The Data Center is making progress with getting SmartSite into the  RAC environment.  The test database will be up by tomorrow.  It will have a copy of Prod database.

Recent Upgrades for the Fall 2007 Rollout: Sandra --   We've had two major application upgrades over the summer getting ready for the Fall 2007 roll out.  We have also purchased 2 additional application servers.  We should have a total of 5 application servers in production by Fall 2007.

It's our goal to also be in the RAC database environment for the Fall roll out.

One of our latest changes was the re-establish our interface with Online Grade Submission in MyUCDavis.  We will send email to faculty using SmartSite for SSII to encourage them to use this feature.  We could also invite faculty to a drop in session on GradeBook.

New Training Schedule for the Fall: Steve 

New Training Schedule for Fall 2007.  Steve gave us a handout of the Fall schedule.  There will be a new series primarily aimed at faculty users. He will also repeat popular classes.

ET Partners are available to anyone who drops in.  Contrary to the past, ET Partners do not establish long term relationships with faculty anymore.
 
When do Communications need dates for the training sessions?  All the dates are set yet.  The training schedule will be put in an insert in a brochure by sept 26, 2007.  Steve is getting rooms scheduled all now. 

Programming issues: Thomas

Mike Wenk doing load testing with Silk Performer.  The programmers are documenting their progress with Silk Performer in Confluence. There are other application patches for Hibernate.  Michigan has updated the JDBC driver to the latest one.  We will want to do this also, soon.

We have one more upgrade we just received from the Foundation.  We want to move this to prod prior to Fall 2007.  Not sure we'll have time to QA all this though.  There are some performance improvements.  We currently have this upgrade running on Sakai-dev.  Lisa and Thomas will coordinate move this to SmartSite Test. 

Extension Services: Brian Donnelly

We have completed coding to add Open Campus Students to our database and show them in a separate role called Open Campus students in Sakai  Instructors will see in site info.  We hope to have this tested soon and into production by Fall 2007.

Faculty Mentoring Faculty: Andy Jones

This year we're adopting a hybrid approach.  We'll have faculty presentations as before.  They like this.  But also we'll include more mentoring as we did earlier since there will be many new users of SmartSite this Fall 2007 and want them to have opportunity to talk with veterans.  Our meeting time will be Fridays at noon.  Bring your own food.  First a presentation and then the mentoring a la new tools, new users, faculty questions, etc.  Maybe have IT Express issues presented here for discussion.

We're still on target to have our faculty drop-in sessions on September 26, 2007 from 1 - 5pm.

QA Updates

  There were no issues.  Lisa was on vacation the week prior.

IT Express: Pete Peterson

We now have a good work flow in Jira.  We've been trained in SmartSite by Steve for Tier1 people.  Then tomorrow for Tier2 people.  Chuck writing xbase articles. 

Communications: Corey

Corey is working on a campus brochure.  This will be ready for new faculty orientation.  Sept 18 there will be training for MSO and TSPs.  We will send a reminder email to faulty and campus to use SmartSite.  Faculty will be provided additional information at the drop in sessions on September 26th.

Coverage in Aggie, IT Times, on buses, -- list on confluence for all the venues for this.

Question 

Kirk - Will the advertisement about SmartSite on MyUCDavis that says "coming in the Fall 2007" change?  What is the date of the of the roll out other than the Fall?

How do we mark the official roll out?  Babette: we could just say it's the first day of the quarter.  It doesn't have to be any more complicated than that.  This seems sound for now.