TPR7: A Model for Centralized Web Hosting and Development

[Intro Music]

Announcer: You’re listening to one in a series of podcasts from the 2009 HighEdWeb Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Mary Albert: So good morning everybody. I'm Mary. I manage web development services at Princeton University in the Office of Information Technology. And my colleague is Joe karam who manages Collaboration Services Group.

And his group is responsible for the underlying infrastructure for our service. So what I'm hoping to do today is describe our service. I will talk about the web development and design side. Joe will talk about the infrastructure side.

And we just want to share with you our experiences in deciding to use a content management system. How we've been handling that for the past several years. The pitfalls that we've experienced. How we're overcoming some challenges and I'm hoping you can take away some ideas and there would be some conversation about what you would like to do.

The challenges that you're facing and share all that information with each other. So the service is comprised of the two groups . Mine focusing on user needs for things such as design. We do both template designs. We also do custom design.

We've written modules for the Content Management System. We also handle the general technical support. We have a developer on call everyday. People ask all sort of user questions from very basic questions about how to se the system.

To out of scale questions about programming and we field all of those in support users at all of those levels. Mainly what we try to do is provide standardize modules. When we purchase this content management system, it did not come with some modules that users on campus really wanted.

A very simple way of publishing news articles for example or a way of publishing, calendars departmental level calendars and also for displaying courses. So those are some examples of the modules that we've written in-house and also we've provide this tiered design service and I will show you some examples of how we do that. Oh did we lose Joe?

Yes, we lost Joe.

Mary Albert: Okay, well I will take his last bullet there. Joe's group is responsible for the environment. So we have a development, a QA, and a production environment. I guess I should say environments because it's actually a very complicated infrastructure,�

We've incorporated 13 servers now and John is actually one our most critical people because it's John who really works on the day to day issues with the infrastructure and make sure that we are up and running. So we support both the university's main website.

I guess I�ll just keep talking till we get Joe. And we also support departments. So our Office of Communications concerns itself with the main precise of the university. And my group not only supports that website. We don't do any design work for that site. Joe's group also makes sure that things are constantly you know up and running.

But my group really focuses on the needs of academic departments, programs, groups, research groups, faculty projects. So we do split our responsibilities that way. Okay, Joe you're back up.

Joseph Karam: Sorry about that. I can resign.

Mary Albert: Okay so we provide services for sites such as the Princeton School of Engineering. We design this site. We developed this site. You can see that they are running news. We developed an application for managing and displaying news.

So there is just one example. Here is one that will be published soon. It's underdevelopment right now. It�s the Center for African-American Studies. And so you can see the different types of sites that we produced.

Any questions for me so far? Okay, brief history. So I�m sure that some of you have encountered this at your own institutions. Departments are really left on their own to figure out how to produce their websites. We had a very decentralized service. You could buy space on server.

You could then develop your site however you wanted to. It�s ready to come out.� We�ve got plenty of people still today using Joomla! or Joomful or Wordpress� or whatever content management system of choice and� people we're really left to their own devices. They we're depending on vendors.

Some departments were spending lots and lots of money on vendors. This was the problem before even this climate of economic downturn.

So the content management system was purchase in 2004. And that predates me by the way by three years. So I came in to this existing environment and it was owned by the University�s Office of Communications so primarily it was.

The prime need was to have a system that people in the�� office of communications could work with. They have a lot of editors for example, a lot of news writers who needed to get content up there without knowing how to program a website and then the secondary need were for departments but what happened is that departments jump on this and demand grew very, very rapidly, very dramatically.

We now have in the neighborhood of 400 websites in the content management system and those represent a fraction of the possible websites that could be developed in this system.

It's a fraction of the existing websites at the university. So the service was moved to the Office of Information Technology. It was clear that in order to really support the infrastructure and have integrated services that have to be within the Office of Information Technology.

And so while success is tied to our constant collaboration. Not only on the design side where we work with all of these departments but on the technical side. Our work, our daily work went back and forth with collaboration of Services Group. Let me turn it over to Joe who may not be, who disappeared.

Joseph Karam: The public number of sites that really work in a single across order as a single hosting.

Mary Albert: So all the sites in Roxen or www.princeton.edu/name of site. I'm sorry? So we do have departments who have their own instance but most of the departments are on an instance that we created cold department. And those are on root level folders.

Joseph Karam: They all have their own design, navigation and models.

Mary Albert: Yes, so the model for design is Princeton does not dictate design to its departments or programs. The university colors are orange and black. People are free to use those colors. There are some requirements and recommendations.

Our Office of Communications publishes those requirements and recommendations and so we do adhere to those. There are requirements for example to show the university logo prominently on the home page.

Actually it's through the site that there be a search that the site. All sites are checked for compliance with not only with these requirements. Okay good. Not only those requirements, but requirements for example for accessibility for a handicapped. Yes?

Audience 10: Do you need to endorse those requirements?

Mary Albert: Yes the way that it was done is my group develops templates so ensure that our design framework meets those requirements.

We also insure that any applications that we developed meet those requirements. But it also up to the content editors to ensure that the content of their sites meet requirements. And any site that is published does go through a review process with the office of communications and they do check to me to make sure all tags exist.

For example, we ensure in design because all of our design is standards based as you assessed. We ensure for example that there is high contrast. That the wings are obvious, that sort of thing. But there are a couple, content editors even though they are required to meet this list and we give them the list.

You know some are more sophisticated than others, some are more diligent than others and so you know we do tend to find near launch time that there are some sites that are sail through and some sites where you have to go back to the prime editor and say, "Okay, you have to include al tags.� I'm sorry we'll go in order.� We'll go in order.�

Steven: Does the CMS not support the enforcements for you?

Mary Albert: It will not enforce for example including tags for example. No, no, no it won't. It is up to the editor to ensure that the images are tagged. Yes, Steven?

Well there are tools. There are software tools to check quickly. So for I don't know if any of you attended the University of Illinois talk yesterday morning. So that's a tool where you can run your site through those.

Another one the main which is phasing at this moment but by development dues but then the Office of Communications, they will go through site manually as well, the review whether that's labor-intensive or not.

It really depends on the site. A lot of those sites are actually pretty simple sites and because the framework complies that takes a lot of the review, the necessary review out of it.

Really the thing that I find the most, the feedback that we get for our clients from the office of communications is that all tag. I don't know for some reason it seems to be the god chief for a lot of editors. So the review process will allow a two-week window for the review process.

It actually used to be a one-week window but once I came on and we started this group, we said you know we just need to have more time. We do some review with the clients and then you know, we just want to get communications more time as well so they had a more comfortable cushion.�

Audience 1: You said that you will but the company that will provide that you work with the department and you provide template for their design?

Mary Albert: Yes we do. So I will show you. We also got a couple of free templates and I'm very excited about that actually cause we're about to publish a couple more but design is in the hands of the designers and in the hands of the department.

And we do follow best practices. We do have guidelines that we follow. We care very, very much about usability. We do information architecture sessions with departments. Frequently departments already know their informational architecture. Some come very well prepared, others do not and so those, that's actually one of my favorite parts of the job.

As we could sit down with the departments and look through the content. We are not a communications department ourselves so we�re not responsible for the words in that website but we do provide a lot of guidance because of the experience that we have and because we want to know the structure of that site before we do design.

So the basic process is this conversation about what's the client needs, do they want to publish news? For example, do they want to publish events? Do they need a people directory? Do they want video on the site? Are they looking for slideshows etc, etc. and then we have what we call working session.

We provide them with documentation by information architecture and then we generally set aside two hours, sometimes it takes a lot longer. I showed you the school of engineering's site. That took multiple days of working together because they have a very complex site and it's a very news-heavy site.

But that's an unusual situation and so in this two hour session , we then go through requirements again and we talked about the structure of the site and we come away with an outline of the site and we used that for our subs for the design so informational requirements informs� information architecture,� information architecture informs design and development. We need that road map.

And we tend to put in a top level navigation as well. I'll show you examples. I�ve got some more screenshots to show you but by putting in the top-level navigation, we find that just helps the content editor and the department get up and running quickly.

You do not need the design template in order to get started but we find that most people feel that they need that. And then that also keeps the client on track with their content. So this is very much a collaborative trust as we primarily to talk about collaboration and our collaboration internally but there is a lot of collaboration with clients as well.

Audience 2: How many sites are In Princeton and are alive and how many are in CMS?

Mary Albert: I don't know the total number of sites at Princeton. I would imagine that at this point over a 1000 that would go beyond, it could well go beyond that and we have just a little under 400 in the content management system that are either live or under development right now. Yes.

Audience 3: You mention earlier that CMS that you wrote stuff. You also worked with departments. Do they request priority to have their own at the CMS and do you go with that and do you have some deadlines on projects being made for CMS?

Mary Albert: Okay so did everybody hear that question? That was an excellent question. How do we play our ties?� We get a department that makes a request for custom development, for example. And we also got projects going on for what we call the university's core site. So the main website and we set up you know a project with the department.

We�ve got a deadline and then oh another priority comes up and it's for the main site. What do we do?� So we depend very heavily on project management. We have a methodology,

It's the Princeton project manager methodology which is modified a little bit for our needs but we so there are multiple parts that question so first to that answer. We do have this methodology which includes front loading of projects and saying , "We got all of your requirements." And then we wrote all of those down into a document.

And this is a signed agreement and I assign a date, a delivery date and I say, "We will do our best to meet this date." But I never promised the exact date because such things do happen. So, for example, two months ago we we're asked to improve advance people search for the main website that was not on my radar but some high-level administrators wanted to see this happen ASAP so I didn't have to shift.

Now, I've got another high-level administrator saying, "You know, I'd like you to make this modification to one of your modules, when is that going to happen?" And so I very politely explain that another project came up.

And if these priorities need to be reprioritized then the discussion needs to happen at a level above mine, significantly above mine, so part 1. Part 2, I'm trying very hard to get us away from custom development. We have these core modules that we've written so for example news, news whiz module that we recently rewrote.

It was very complicated to rewrite that, we're telling people thank you very much for you know suggesting an enhancement to the module. We love that feedback. We take that into consideration when we are writing version two where we release 2. I have just been asked, we have an events module. I have just been asked if we can remove search from the events module.

Those are the sorts of request that we get or some of the departments would like a research module for displaying faculty research you know to show their papers in an attractive way. That is just not something that we can do right now. So part of my job is, one of the difficult parts of my job is that I have to say it I'm sorry we would like to do that, we'll do that in the future but it's not on the list.

So it's that juggling cats as part of the job which you know what's coming up. We also have an extremely high demand for our service. So as part of the history, the group really only existed for little less than two years now. There were 60 projects in the queue. We needed to address those as quickly as we could. We would give them positions. So we now have, I have five developers and I have three graphics designers and our web designers are web designers.

They are not print designers. They can do that as well, but they are people who have to understand the content management system. I was very lucky that I inherited some designers who are already very tech-savvy and who are very interested in how the system works.

And they work very closely with developers. I would not tolerate a designer who said, "I like this, make it happen." I'm sure you never had that experience. So the designers and the developers sit together and they talk all day long and I talk to them all day long and we would not be able to do what we do if the designers did not understand the content management system to the level that they do. Yes.

Audience 4: So what's the separation of work within the group?

Mary Albert: So that's do we hear that what's the separation of work? So there are certain things that we know about the content management system. There are certain templates that we've already designed so we do have you know everything is done with CSS for example when the designer understands the functionality of a module.

That designer is able to when we sit with the client we talk about what they need but designers are already creating a picture in his own head on how we can display information in this module and how it can be displayed so that it is specific to that website so can we turn off search? Can we? Which fields can we show? Which fields can we not show? What are the basic requirements?

When I mean basic, actually detailed requirements of this modules and how things are displayed. You know we know things about navigation. They know things about navigation. They know very well the requirements that have been put out by the Office of Communications so we're only designing with that framework as well.

So you know there's certain that base-level of knowledge have to be in place and so then during development because we have standardized modules. We are now at a point where we can we've been at this point maybe for maybe less than a year. We know that some of these sites are going to go quickly.

A lot of projects that used to require time on the part of the developer's no longer require their time. Their design, their design projects as far we're concerned because once a developer plugs in a module, the designer knows what to do with that module so we're saving time that way. Yes

Audience: Based on what you have, people are having their own.� So do they maintain their own separate servers to maintain service?

Mary Albert: Yes, departments on their own servers or we do have a LAMP sever where people can get space on the centralized LAMP server and then they could put in whatever they wanted there.

Audience 5: So they are forced to come into your CMS or do you kind of serve them?

Mary Albert: So that's an excellent question, we do not force anybody to use the content management system. It is however the only officially supported content management system. so if� you want centralized free web hosting and 24/7 support for that infrastructure and if you want free training and if you want free technical support and if you want a free template because your department doesn't have.

Very much of a budget for this or if you� want custom design and you want to take advantage of the modules that we have then you'll use the content management system. So it isn't. It's actually a very nice position for us to be in as well.

As a service provider, i do get question, I get request. can you develop a Dreamweaver site for me that�s really cool by the end of the month? And I'm able to say, "We do not do any Dreamweaver work." My designers and developers do use Dreamweaver to for editing purposes but we don't develop Dreamweaver sites and we only develop in the content management system.

Joseph Karam: We're losing Joe.

Mary Albert: Oh we're losing Joe again. Poor Joe has not had any opportunity to talk. Is he gone again?

Alright well. In the infrastructure, well here are the goals of the infrastructure. Higher availability, I actually don't have the statistics on our exact availability but I'm sure it's over 99 point something. You're not?� That's not cool.� Scalability? Something that we're working on because of the explosive growth in the interest and use of the system and security Joomla! sites were hacked recently on the LAMP server.

We had three that we moved within a day or two over to Roxen sites. In all fairness they were already, the content was already being moved over before we flipped the switch like that. But you know that's what happens and we got server and application management.

I think if we continue to lose Joe, I may ask John to step in and say a few things about these. And we provide free hosting. That's something significant for the departments that we're able to provide these for free

Audience: Actually question about the hacked site. So how secure is the servers and how do you recover from such attack?

Mary Albert: So disaster recovery? Do you want to talk about that? I think just in the course of the conversation I covered some of these points so I just wanted to talk about two more things.

We rotate operational support. So we've got five developers in the group. I do have one of those developers is the team leader and he really is also our prime developer. So I'm constantly looking at some processes and trying to improve things.

And I decided that when I got back that I need to talk to them about taking him off operational support because we've got four other people but every week, there's some assigned to answer problem tickets. We have a ticketing system. And we have somebody emails loftson@priceton.edu that goes into our ticket queue.

So that's become a very important part of our service. In fact that we can dedicate someone and in fact we have to dedicate more than one person each day. I think it�s in about 1.5 that we need everyday because the questions are so diverse, they could be specific to a site that ne of the other developers has worked on and so even the person on call has to route questions to other people.

But as the service continues to grow I think we're going to need more people on technical support. And project management, I talked about that earlier, that is key. Another key to our success is the careful articulation of each project. Now we do about these micro projects, something that we can get done in five hours or less.

An email suffices for those but projects that have money associated with them do get project agreements that are signed. And we charge $50 an hour for our services, by the way. Undercutting of course what a vendor would charge but you know salaries are paid for by anyway.

�I actually am a cost recovery shop. I have to recover certain percentage of my group's salaries but in reality, I think the best is really psychological point because it requires commitment on the part of the client.

Once they agree to something and there's money associated with it. They�re much likely to stick with what they agreed to and I cannot tell you how many times I have gone back into a project agreement and been able to say to a client, "This is what we agreed to do by this date and if you'd like to make changes to that."

We can certainly do that. We would re-evaluate the project. We would reassign the dates and we would increase the cost. Oh. 10 minutes left. Okay. And we do not create content. That is a wonderful, wonderful place for my group to be.

Okay, IT does take a village. If my group and John and Joe's group are the primary service providers, we have to acknowledge that we depend on a number of other groups as well. So we've got a helpdesk. That�s the primary way that people contact the Office of Information Technology is through the help desk.

And the helpdesk does answer some basic questions and they know very well how to route questions that require more detail answers. The networking group, monitoring disaster recovery, training. Our training group has taken over training for the content management system from us.

�It�s freeing up the developers, very grateful for that. The project office so the Princeton Project Office gets involved in our larger projects. Things that are a very high-level, that has high-level administrators who care about the projects.

And then the Departmental Computing Staff, so in every college it is different but at Princeton, we have dedicated technical staff in the academic departments and in the schools. Sometimes these are large staffs, sometimes it's one person who's shared among departments and so we depend on them too for the technical support.

Their frequently the editors of websites as well, I think we're fine. So here's some of the ways that we collaborate. We get along really well together so that's a huge, huge help. e have a lot of conversations. I was grateful to have some time actually with John because of this conference where we could sit down and talk for a while.

We meet frequently.� We have a standing meeting with Collaborative Services Group. Bi-weekly we have the trouble ticket system. All of that is opened and in fact and everybody in either group can see what's going on and then we ticket it anytime.

We maintain several reserve lists. We use this project process. We go out for ice cream. We do have brew pub in town so sometimes we go there. Go out for coffee. So there's a lot of talking that has to happen. And then there�s the collaboration or the working.

The working with customers who moved over to defined so as I said before projects are defined agreements are signed. Our own administration gets involved sometimes on these high level projects. We have user meetings. Slightly the academic year. It�s the rocks and user meeting, we get together bi-monthly. We no longer serve cookies and coffee. But we do provide a form for any user on campus to come in and listen and talk.

And part of our user meetings .we've got the room setup with tables and at each table, we station a designer or a developer and it�s called Ask an Expert. Part of the session, we'll put up a little sign that says �Ask a Designer" or "Ask a Developer" and people can get one-on-one help.

During that time, and again the range of questions is extremely broad. We might have somebody who is working on their own department site and says, "You know, I just need some help with CMS. Can I get a quick tutorial on CMS?"

We do that. Sometimes, new ideas come out of those requests for new projects and I would like you to develop a custom module for me. Also for things coming out of that time but the users really appreciate that.

Audience 6: How often do you usually meet?

Mary Albert: Bi-monthly. In the meantime, there�s a list of list so it's very active. It's called Roxen Support. The hundreds of people in campus who are part of the Roxen community in campus belong to the reserve list and people answer each other's questions. Sometimes people my group answer questions, sometimes its other users on campus answer each others questions. It�s an extremely helpful forum.

And it generates a lot of goodwill to and it helps form relationships across campus as well. Somebody new to the system will ask a question, "How do I change the order of the menu on my site?" and another user from somewhere else on campus will answer and then, there we go. We got help to set up.

We�ve got a relationship started there and so what were trying to do is just provide as many channels of support as we can for people who are using this system and it seems to be working. We have a user support site. Our level service site called WDS but this is actually my preferred site for technical support.

I know we're running out of time. So cost-savings, expensive vendors no longer needed. I can tell you that in two instances, we save departments 85 percent by having their sites developed in-house. In both instances, they were very complicated sites that needed custom development.

In one case in particular, it's one that my staff feels very sort of closed to our heart , we feel very good about this site because it's the sort of thing that you can do if you working in academia .

It's a site that will support people on the ground and fragile states such as war-torn countries or countries that have just come out of war and they need to establish an infrastructure in that country so it answers questions for practitioners like how do I setup a police force? How do I handle garbage collection in my country? That is still under development.

It is very complex site but what that allowed that group to do was because they save so much money by having us do the development. They we're able to hire staff member who's now writing the content for that website.

So they've given the person a job. They're getting this information out to people at you know on the ground more quickly as a result so that's the sort of thing that we feel very good about.

Can I just let you read the rest of that slide? No more redundant services, centralization. I wanted to get to you a little more of the fun stuff which is to show you some examples. John�s monitoring tools so the Collaboration Services Group has written some monitoring tools to know what's happening on the system.

Anything you want to say about that?� We can just see the user activity. Another monitoring tool so Roxen did not come up with all of the tools that we would have like to have so John and others in the group are writing monitoring tools.

Joseph Karam: And some of you blog, this is not managed design. It's my design. You shouldn't take credit for that.

Mary Albert: It works incredibly excellent. So this is Roxen out of the box.

Joseph Karam: The reason that we need to be aware of how Roxen is that even though there are four front end severs and two edit servers, this is some of the questions that you have to remind if you are on call as to where did John put the services. And so, we created "Where is my Roxen?" so this site tells you where these services are running.

Mary Albert: I want to show you a few things from the portfolio. So this I don't now if any of you have caught of the news that we have made such outlets as Fox News. We are running an e-reader pilot at the university along with. Several other university students have been given kindles and they�re doing their reserve reading from the kindle.

And we put out this website using a template that I�ll show you the actual bare bones template and we did this whole site in three hours from request to publication.

That was because the editor has the content ready to go. He put it within three hours. Here's another site that we did recently, this is the Department of Facilities on campus. I just want to point out if you see this as a whole; the horizontal navigation for example as its primary navigation so we do horizontal and we do vertical navigation.

It was hosted by an ISP for a number of years but the group on campus wanted to bring it in to the university� structure so that was one that we did recently. Here is the free design theme that the e-reader pilot was based on.

All we did was change the banner.� Here is an upcoming free design theme. One of several that we are about to publish. So you can just again change the banner image. Write your content.

Put your navigation in and you have a free working website. I believe that's my last slide. Oh good.� I will stick around and maybe my last slide is my contact information and Joe's contact information.

I will stick around if you want to keep chatting and thank you very much. I hope you are able to leave with some ideas for your own jobs and your own institutions and thank you.

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