Tag: web

Delivering a University Web Strategy

Cool graphic designed by our cool LTW graphic design service

The University Web Strategy (https://edin.ac/web-strategy-2018) identified a programme of activities, including the development of new web publishing tools or web publishing platform.  

“There is a fragmentation of technology, working methods and standards, which leads to uneven and, in some cases, broken user journeys.” – University Web Strategy 

 The strategy stated that “it is important to recognise that technology is not a solution but an enabler. Whether delivered centrally or locally, there is a clear need to empower our staff by providing them with the intelligence, tools, standards and resources to attract and engage users.” 

Building a New Platform

 Our Web Publishing Platform (now named EdWeb 2) project’s aim was to create a web publishing platform for our publishing community within a strong web governance framework. Therefore, this project should not be viewed solely in isolation but within the wider context of the web strategy. The goal was to create a platform that could be continually improved, meet the immediate needs of our existing editorial base but also meet the needs of Schools and business units that had never used the central service for web publishing before.  

The web strategy identified the following common approaches:  

  • Improve the quality of our web estate and online channels through the adoption of an inclusive and supportive governance model  
  • Enhance the accessibility and security of our web estate by establishing and evolving University-wide standards  
  • Enhance solution and content quality by improving the digital skills of web publishers and practitioners; establishing a common understanding of web roles and capabilities; and delivering web publishing and management tools 

“The strategy does not set out to answer the exclusive needs of a business area or address a single specific University activity. As a pan-institutional strategy, it establishes a framework for the use of web technologies, both centrally and locally, to achieve business goals.” – University Web Strategy

To address these common approaches the web publishing platform aimed to deliver a product that was flexible and geared for iterative improvement to support ongoing business and user demands.  

The delivered solution needed to support central and local innovation, allowing website teams in schools to make use of and extend the product appropriately, aligned with agreed University standards and guidelines.   

This project has delivered the platform and associated processes to create the web publishing services that will support this strategy. 

This includes a high-quality, future-proof and long-term sustainable University web publishing platform, aligned web publishing services, training and a support model, all backed up by a team with the requisite knowledge and skills.  

Successes 

Planning 

  • Platform training programme with the planning, development and roll out in very close collaboration with our  Digital Skills team was very successful, and receiving excellent feedback (Phase 2 – Deliverable 1.3) 
  • Major achievement to deliver a fit-for-purpose, web platform, fulfilling the targets set regarding flexibility, migrating over 60 sites live despite some of the complex issues faced by the project.  (Phase 1 – Deliverable 1.3) 
  • Early and ongoing engagement with the service users, and the wider web publishing community, was essential to ensure the web platform developed in a meaningful way to address their external audience engagement needs. (Phase 1 – Deliverable 1.2, 7.1) 
  • The project has delivered a solution in line with the original University Web Strategy in terms of the flexibility offered and that the offering should appeal to Schools and business units that have never used the central service at all for their web publishing. For example the School of Chemistry now has a live site on EdWeb 2.  (Phase 2 – Objective 4, Deliverable 4.1) 

Developing for our Wider Community   

The University of Edinburgh is a highly devolved organisation in terms of physical locations, organisational structure, decision-making and budgets, purposes, goals and audiences.  

Aside from the central team, our community extends across the organisation, from system administrators and developers to UX and user-centred design practitioners, content creators and marketers, each operating with significant autonomy and responsibility for their own sites. We had to take this into consideration as early as possible in any decision-making process, and to emphasise the importance of user centred design, backed up by user research, and using the experience and expertise of staff around the University.   

The new platform had to work for existing users of our CMS but also support the needs of our devolved community of developers and administrators who are responsible for building, developing and managing our wider web estate, from colleges and schools to individual research projects.  

We chose to continue using Drupal as this platform and surrounding processes support highly distributed development, allowing code contribution back to a managed common modular code base.  

Project Approach  

The project was approached in two main phases, with the ultimate goal to have introduced the new web publishing platform and having all relevant EdWeb content and sites migrated to the new platform by November 2022 (the initial deadline for Drupal 7 end-of-life).  

The deadline of completing the migration needed to be moved due to the extremely complex nature of the websites built in EdWeb, and the differences between the two platforms, as well as ongoing resourcing issues and is currently set for November 2024.  

The project involved the application of Agile methodologies using the Scrum framework and has tried to use a user-centred approach to service design wherever possible.  

“User-centered design is based on the understanding of a user, their demands, priorities and experiences and when used, is known to lead to an increased product usefulness and usability as it delivers satisfaction to the user. “ – Wikipedia User-centered design 

 

summer migrations

In LTW we meet in person twice yearly for LTW All Staff meetings and our summer gathering this year takes place next week  at the recently opened Bessie Watson Lecture Theatre at the Outreach Centre. There will presentations from colleagues, group exercises and snacks.

Every 6 months I  ask each of the LTW Heads to send me their list of team achievements, so if you think they might have missed any, now is the time to remind them.

As I read through their lists this time I am struck by how much time we spend on procurements, replacements and migrations as technology changes. Some of our funding comes from capital pots, which might usually be used for buildings. But technology changes much faster than buildings and we have a rolling 5-10 year plan to replace platforms and technologies as ( or before) they go out of date.

It takes  an enormous amount of work it takes to move from one platform to another.

If colleagues suggest we should get a new VLE, or a new portal or a new media asset management platform it is a huge amount of work and sometimes it feels like there is very little gain. Migrations and replacement projects seem often to be replacing like with like. So it is important to be able to identify the benefits which we will see, improvements in managing, keeping up to data and mitigation against risk. Risks in LTW are risks for the whole institution.  If we don’t have up to date robust systems, learning teaching and the student experience will suffer.

Never underestimate how much work a procurement, replacement or migration can be. But no one will thank you for it. It is the hidden labour behind the fancy new tools colleagues and students demand.

I have spoken much about the upgrade and migration work required for Learn Ultra.

We’ve have also moved away from QMP on-Premise to the Cloud – Karen H estimates this was the longest upgrade project we’ve ever had.  Early next year for complete decommissioning of the on-premise system and then we’ll have our celebration.

Our largest migration on going is a huge move of the entire University website (1.5 million pages) from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10.   Of those 1.5 million pages I’d estimate around five of them were the same, so the work to automate this lift and shift at scale while building a new platform in flight has been a huge undertaking. Perhaps we were naive fools even to try.

We have new colleagues in our website migration project team. we have worked hard to find creative technical solutions and to keep colleagues with us through the move. We introduced more resource and optimised our processes and engagement.  Current migration count is 75 completed, 86 still to go, almost 50%. EdWeb to Web Publishing Platform migrations | Website and Communications

By the next LTW All Staff in December, all the migrations will be completed. And Stratos and I are looking for a date for the ‘end of migrations’ party.

That will be a well-deserved celebration.

growing your website? deadheading is key

For those of you who are a bit green fingered and like gardening. You’ll know we always have to remember what to dead-head and what to leave. We dead-head flowers so that they don’t go to seed. Unfortunately  that has happened all across the university estate.

If you want to grow a successful, health, well-stocked and well-designed web garden on your digital estate you need to get ruthless with your deadheading and weeding.

In order to improve the quality of our website content we have conducted the first University-wide website content audit.

Let me introduce the University of Edinburgh ‘100K content pruning challenge’, aiming to remove unnecessary/duplicated content. #deadheading https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/website-communications/content-audit-findings-and-the-100k-challenge/

voices from the institution

This blog is for Amber because she wants to know about institutionally provided technologies  #openblog19

At University of Edinburgh we know that our people are our strength. This is a place of knowledge creation, and a place of knowledge sharing.

As Director of Learning, Teaching and Web Services I am lucky to have responsibility not only for the institutionally provided learning technology, but also the institutionally provided Web. You know me, I like to have a strategy for such things.

Our Web strategy addresses how the university uses web technologies to enhance our
students’ experience, disseminate our best research and engage with our diverse audiences.

The University’s web estate and use of online channels has evolved largely organically, which has led to gaps in corporate knowledge and exposed the institution to significant risks. Its no secret that there is fragmentation of technology, working methods and standards, which leads to uneven and, in some cases, broken user journeys.

We try to address these issues, with a tight focus on the University’s vision to deliver impact for society through leadership in learning and research. While University websites, including the corporate website (EdWeb) and MyEd portal, are at the core of the strategy, strong consideration is also given to online channels as a point of user acquisition and engagement.

Whether delivered centrally or locally, there is a clear need to empower our staff by providing them with the intelligence, tools, standards and resources to attract and engage users.

Our vision is founded on a need to work together in the use of web technologies to achieve business goals across the University, developing the operational agility to take advantage of the most promising online opportunities.

Our web strategy aligns with the University’s Vision 2025, Corporate Plan and other significant institutional and national strategies, and complement initiatives such as Service Excellence and Digital Transformation. This strategy was developed in the manner in which it should be executed – collaboratively – with strong senior leadership and active engagement from publishers and practitioners across the University.

One theme of our strategy is that of ‘Influential voices’. We aim for:

  • Increased online visibility for the work of staff, students and, ultimately, the University
  • Improved profile and visibility for the University across search and online channels
  • Well-trained staff and students who effectively and safely manage their online identity
  • Improved cooperative working online with partners from the commercial, third and public sectors
  • Enhanced partnership syndication of University content
  • Investigation into the development and deployment of a centrally-managed website publishing platform
  • Development of policies, processes and quality control mechanisms to support staff and student publishing
  • Development of content syndication and sharing  tools
  • Creation of training materials and investment in associated communities of practice

The development of and launch of an academic blogging platform and Domain of One’s Own is a big part of what we are doing in this theme of our web strategy. You can read more about this in blog posts from Anne-Marie and Lorna. And once Jonathan is in post, you can meet our new Head of Web Strategy to find out more about each of the other themes.

University of Edinburgh Web Strategy 2018.

 

taming the wild web

The title of this image from the CRC collections is: ‘Examining an Doubtful Brand’. https://images.is.ed.ac.uk/luna/servlet/s/n8dh30

Work is currently underway to manage and  rationalise the web estate.

The University owns and manages the domain www.ed.ac.uk but a devolved approach in managing the University web estate has resulted in a growth of websites and associated web applications.

An audit of University infrastructure in September 2017 found that there are around  1,600 University of Edinburgh websites, only one of which is the corporate University Website (www.ed.ac.uk/*). The  corporate University website contains 400 sub-sites of its own.

The other website domains are split between circa 1,300 sub-domains (for example, law.ed.ac.uk) and 300 top-level domains (for example, www.mediblog.ed.ac.uk) depending on the business unit’s affiliation to the University. The suppliers, technology base or quality of these solutions is not well known and it’s a bit of a wild west at the moment.