SmartSite Project Monthly meeting notes5192008

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SmartSite Monthly Project meeting 5192008

Meeting Notes

Announcements.  Kirk Alexander
New hire. Kirk and others are still interviewing for a new FTE who will provide end user support that has deep knowledge of SmartSite and is technical.  There are no viable candidates yet.

SmartSite Oversight meetings.  There have been two meetings now.  In the 2nd meeting, the committee agreed to write a letter to Pete Siegel in support of his request for a new technical FTE and a support person for us with ITX.  In the 3rd meeting, the Committee talked about the need to enhance the SmartSite GradeBook.  It was suggested that while we're working on the enhancements, we should have a quick link from SmartSite to the MyUCDavis' CMS GradeBook since some faculty are still using the CMS GradeBook.

Course Evaluations.  TRC is collecting questions for course evaluations. We need these data so we can experiment with entering them into the Sakai evaluation tool.  Steve and Fernando will follow up on this with TRC.
The Oversight Committee plans for moving people from CMS to SmartSite are not firm yet.
 
Sakai meetings this Summer.  The meetings are being held in Paris in July.  Pete Peterson and Kirk are attending.  There is also a programmers' meeting in Cambridge about test integration, Google Web Toolkit (GWT), and programming.  Nothing more specific than this at this time.

Communications.  Roger Ashton
Corey's newborn is named Elliot.  Mom and newborn are both fine.  So is Corey.

SmartSite Oversight Committee is recommending to CCFit the following:
1.  Programming for SmartSite's GradeBook enhancements is highest priority after the 2.5 upgrade.
2.   MyUCDavis course tools will not be retired until the enhanced SmartSite GradeBook is finalized.  Then there will be a full 1 year transition period for faculty.  This may take us to the year 2010.
3.  The Committee expressed a need to commit resources to support all the uses of SmartSite, including research and collaboration, teaching and learning, and administrations.  These recommendations will be discussed at the next CCFit meeting June 9, 2008.

Roger reported that using Message of the Day in SmartSite seems to be a very good way to communicate with end users.  He encourages more of this.

Other communications with the campus include an upcoming article in IT Times released the 2nd week of June regarding SmartSite. 

Training.  Steve Faith, Fernando Socorro.
Spring quarter.  Steve reported that they offer one Getting Started and one Drop-in Clinic each week.  They are preparing new classes for the following:
1.  Migrating MyUCDavis CMS content to SmartSite,
2.  Assignment Tool class, 
3.  Grading classes, using GradeBook and other tools within SmartSite that collect grades. 
As usual, Steve and Fernando will participate in the quarterly grading clinics with TRC for finals.

Departmental training classes. Classes which Steve and Fernando conduct within a department are increasingly popular.  In recent months they have conducted the following departmental SmartSite training classes: 

  • Psychology dept for the faculty,
  • Library for the staff,
  • Leadership Development Institute for the advising staff,
  • Biomedical Engineering dept for the faculty faulty
  • Chinese dept for the staff and faculty,
  • Electrical and Computer Engineering dept for the faculty.

Upcoming departmental training engagements include:

  • Office of Provost and Chancellor for the staff,
  • Public Health Sciences for students, staff, and faculty

 
Steve and Fernando maintain a Google Docs for these engagements.  Steve also reported that he is updating the online GradeBook manual.  Fernando reported that he is updating the Test and Quizzes documentation.  Fernando will cover the issues regarding taking a timed quiz that have been problematic for some faculty.  (Faculty say their students are often unable to complete a timed quiz because Test and Quizzes will time them out prior to the test end-time and submit a blank quiz.)

Programmer Updates
2.5 updates.  Thomas reported that they are working on database conversion scripts.  They have to make modification to the database conversion script sent by the Foundation for 2.5 since we have made local modifications. The team compares the Sakai database to ours.  The differences were 5,000 lines that were a mis-match.  The team is about 1/3 through with resolving these differences.  Conversion script didn't create all the indexes it should have so they're capturing this and will return a report back to Foundation.

Much of this work will be finished by the end of the week.

GradeBook modifications are done for 2.5.  This is incorporating the local modifications to the 2.4.x GradeBook into the 2.5 GradeBook sent with the 2.5 upgrade.

There remains a content conversion for the Resource tool which we haven't begun yet.

The team is working to roll out the latest Melete upgrade prior to the 2.5 upgrade.  We have a meeting tomorrow with John Harris regarding managing AFS space.  Melete and other Sakai tools store content in AFS files.

Scantron.  Michael reported that he needs one more pass for the Scantron application before sending this over to QA.  The Scantron applications for SmartSite's GradeBook can use Excel to submit graded test files.   We may make the Scantron application available to our test environment for QA tomorrow. Mike is working on the test plan. Kirk wants to review the test plan. 

Mike Waid, Steve, and Fernando want to help with Scantron testing.

Had a field trip to TRC on Friday (May 16th) to watch faculty work with Scantron.  We also were able to acquire permission to use 4 Scantron grade files from one of the faculty members.

Jon Gorrono gave an update on project database needs.  The details of this update can be found on a programmer page in Confluence:
https://confluence.ucdavis.edu/confluence/display/UCDSAKAI/Sakai+Server+Virtualization+Effort
Next, the DBAs will provide us with recommendations on hardware for each of these database environments.

Project update.  Sandra Stewart
Sandra shared a summarized project plan that showed our progress on the 5 major efforts for the team:  the 2.5 Upgrade, GradeBook Enhancement, Guest Access, and the implementation of the Course Evaluation Tool. 

Jon stated that the summary project plan was incomplete, in that  there is work done on GradeBook and Guest Access that was not reflected in the summary plan.  Sandra will update these figures.  (see attached spreadsheet for the corrected summary plan as of May 21, 2008.)

She also announced that the Roster Tool is once again available in SmartSite Production and available to end users.  There were several recommendations on how we should get the word out on this: Message of the Day, Training sessions, Support User meetings, Help Desk.  Kirk remarked that our Gateway page will have a two-column configuration in the future, in which the Announcements Tool will prominently display news like this.

QA. Pete Peterson
Pete is getting ready for testing 2.5.  This will include testing that our local modifications have been reinstalled properly.  He will also conduct regression testing on our critical tools.

Pete also prepared a user interface mock up for our UCD GradeBook enhancements.  As a result, he has condensed the number of pages for GradeBook from 7 pages down to 3.

QA continues to work on ongoing maintenance testing and preparing test plans for the 2.5.x upgrade.

DBA.  Prabhu Pilli
The upgrade of our database servers, Hammer and Steele, was completed Tuesday morning May 13, 2008.  The configuration for this database environment is Oracle's solution for disaster recovery, using Oracle's Data Guard, also known as Hot Spare and StandBy.  One database is the primary (Hammer) and a second database on a separate server (Steele) maintains a near real time replica of the primary database.  Transaction logs from the primary database are applied to the standby.  If the primary database fails, we can transition (failover) quickly to the standby.  We will handle a failover to Steele as a manual effort.  We could also set this failover to be automatic.

Because of this database upgrade, we have had a performance increase.  Our database scripts for table switching now run in half the time. 

The database upgrade puts us now on Oracle 10.2.04 (version) which has some 11g features.  Real Application testing in one of those features.  Real Application testing is similar to load testing, though geared specifically to the database load.  New database features can be tested against what is considered to be real load on the database.

There was a question on whether or not the JDBC drivers should be upgraded with this new version of Oracle?  Prabhu will research this.

We retired Caje and Saunders, our former database server and backup.  Caje is having memory problems and needs repairs. Joncarlo will follow up on this.

Prabhu will disconnect Caje from listening to Banner production logs for updates to our mviews.

All the test databases need to be upgraded to Enterprise edition and 10.2.04 version of Oracle.

System Admin. Joncarlo Ruggierri
Joncarlo reported that the Data Center is moving systems off old vlans and onto new ones.  This will affect SmartSite since it must be "moved" to a new vlan (not a physical move) and given a new IP address.  The team has agreed to move SmartSite incrementally.  Hopefully there will be no downtime, though there may be some temporary degradation in performance during the move.

The move takes half a day, in that the new IP addresses needs to propagate through Domain Name Service (DNS) for the change to be completed.

Kirk and Sandra think the best time to do this is between Spring and Summer quarters or during the middle of Summer Session I.