SmartSite Project Monthly Meeting Aug 6 2007

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SmartSite Proj Monthly meeting notes
August 6, 2007
 Comments from Kirk
-          Leslie Madsen Brooks is now with TRC
-          A new recruitment is underway
-          Lots of applicants in the pool
-          Will begin interview applicants when Kirk returns from vacation.
 Met with Jon Wagner and Andy regarding communications with faculty regarding SmartSite
-          Possibly hold a day-long Drop-in session for faculty who will have hands on training on SmartSite.  Spend 15-20 min creating a course site and learning the basics.
-          Possibly do this Sept 26.
-          Andy elaborated on this proposal.
 Other options for communications with faculty (Also see below.)
-          Faculty make an appointment with Andy
 Training
-          Steve and Leslie have training session scheduled through September 2007.
-          They have met to construct Fall 2007 schedule
 Faculty Support Group
-          Andy is the current acting manager for the Faculty Support group.
-          Robert Ralston is now a member of FS group.
 August 18, 2007 upgrade - Sandra
     Progress to date on our roll out for Fall 2007 - summary spreadsheet
-          Sandra pointed out that based on our summary project plan (spreadsheet), we are ahead of schedule for upgrading GradeBook with categories and weighting.
-          Sakai upgrade scheduled August 18, 2007.  Emails and notices will all be out by Wednesday.  See comments by Corey below.
-          Local modifications include re-installing our interface between SmartSite's GradeBook and Online Grade Submission (MyUCDavis).
-          There were questions about the use of uPortal - will the MyUCDavis portal switch to using uPortal?  uPortal integrates with Sakai to some extent which could help linking up MyUCDavis (the portal) with SmartSite if MyUCDavis were written using the uPortal approach.
 Proposed upgrade to our client server pool - 3 additional servers - Joncarlo
-          Joncarlo had completed his tasks on 2 of the 3 additional servers we will need for Fall 2007.  He has turned them over to the application development team for their tasks in bringing the servers into our production pool.  We have an action item to discuss this further in Wednesday's Hardware meeting.
-          The third server will be ordered soon.
 Proposed increase in AFS volumes for enhanced content management robustness - Thomas and Brian
-          Thomas described the effort to increase the robustness of our AFS volumes.  Currently we have only 5 volumes in support of Smartsite Prod.  We will probably increase this to a total of 100 volumes.  We will make changes to the SmartSite configuration so that SmartSite writes to a subset of the AFS volumes but can retrieve content from all of them.
-          Do we pay for AFS additional volumes?  Sandra will follow up.
 Proposed migration to the RAC environment for enhanced database robustness - Jon and Prabhu
-          Jon Gorrono gave us an update on our efforts to migrate our Production database (and maybe others, i.e., SmartSite-test, Sakai-test) to a clustered environment using Oracle's Real Application Cluster (RAC).  We had to postpone this effort due to our June 23rd upgrade to 2.4.0.  Having our databases clustered should allow us to experience greater capacity and speed.
 Update from Corey on his communications tasks.
-          Corey updated us on his many efforts to write and send communications to our SmartSite Community. 
-          Corey has many venues for alerting our SmartSite Community about the August 18th upgrade: https://confluence.ucdavis.edu/confluence/display/UCDSAKAI/August+18th+Upgrade+Notice
-          Corey is preparing a brochure for Fall 2007 communications.  He is soliciting input from others for the brochure content.
 QA issues - Lisa Wilson
Lisa Wilson as our new QA supervisor
Current testing for 2.4.1
-          Lisa provided the group with a list of findings to date in her testing 2.4.1 in preparation for our August 18th upgrade.  She will write a more detailed report on her findings and make it available to others.
-          There was much discussion on communications with the SmartSite Community on the different tools, particularly features that are not intuitive.  E.g., Forums interfaces with GradeBook differently from Assignments.  How will faculty learn this?
-          Andy noted that since the MyUCDavis GradeBook is one of the most popular tools with faculty, we can expect that faculty will want SmartSite's GradeBook to work well also.
-           Faculty should be alerted where there are differences between SmartSite's GradeBook and MyUCDavis's GradeBook.  What are the avenues available to us for this?
-          There are other tools that may be confusing for faculty.  E.g., Melete.  We could make tools like Melete available to faculty only when requested.  Other tools that are not intuitive should be identified to end-users prior to usage if possible, and encourage training.
-          Communications tools include Feature Guide, Tech Tips, Training, news articles, Training documentation (Self Paced Learning).  Andy suggested that we need a vision that integrates all our communications efforts.  Some consolidation is probably advisable also.
-          We agreed to surface action items for the many communications issues in our Training and Support meeting Aug 7, 2007.
 IT Express Issues
-          Pete meeting tomorrow with Steve to get specialized training in SmartSite.
-          Pete asked if we could resist responding to end user requests on Saturday and Sundays unless it's an emergency.  IT Express is not available on Saturdays and Sundays.  We should acclimate faculty to the support that is scalable.  Sandra will follow up with Kirk on this.