UNT Webmaster Dashboard

When: Thursday November 18; 2pm-3pm

Where: McConnell Hall Lab (Enter the front entrance of McConnell hall
and the lab is immediately to the right)

Agenda:

There will be no formal presentation this month. Instead, staff from Central Web Support and the Web Development Center will be available to provide in-person advice and help with any questions you may have, or problems you may be experiencing. There will be 20 computers available, so it will be possible to work completely "hands-on". We hope that this will be of service to many campus webmasters, especially as you may be preparing for the upcoming spring semester.

Here are some of the topics for which we'll be available to help:

• General Drupal questions
• Custom module development
• Theming/css
• Javascript
• Writing for the web
• Information Architecture

We recently updated our SLA to add guidelines on how quickly you may expect certain types of support requests to be completed. Here's an excerpt:

CWS staff will respond to support requests (submitted via the online ticketing system at https://webadmin.unt.edu) within 2 hours on business days. All requests will receive a prompt response; however, certain requests will take longer than 2 hours to complete. This may be due to the existing request volume at the time of the request, or the nature of the request:

• New site creation. CWS will set up new site installations within one business day of approval.
• Site migrations. Migrations will be completed within one business day. If you need a migration to occur at a specific time, please schedule it at least one day in advance.
• Advanced development questions requiring research are answered on a strictly time-available basis, and generally will take at least 1-2 business days.

If you haven't read our SLA recently, you may wish to take a look and familiarize yourself with some of the services we offer. We constantly strive to improve our technical and support offerings, and welcome any feedback from the campus community.

Over the past few years, we here at CWS have received a lot of support requests, and we're always trying to figure out ways we can address them more effectively. We've noticed that there are certain common issues that we can't resolve without specific details from the requesting user; e.g., if you're requesting a new site, we need to know what department owns it, what the purpose is, who should have administrative rights, and so forth.

If the user doesn't provide these details in his or her initial request, it often takes a lot of back-and-forth communication to figure things out. Rather than go through this process, we thought it would be helpful to build some specialized forms addressing these kinds of issues. As a result, the "Submit a ticket" link now points at a simple menu screen listing off a few new options.

Overall, this won't change much about how you interact with us; you'll still have access to all your support requests through the My Tickets system, and you can even still use the original entry form. However, if you do use the new forms when applicable, they'll probably save you a lot of time, and ensure that we have all the information we need to give you the support you need.

Thanks!
the CWS team

Today, the CWS staff is pleased to announce the launch of the Drupal Edu Initiative, a centralized access point for resources about using Drupal in an educational context. Universities face a unique set of challenges when it comes to web publishing, and we here at CWS believe Drupal can be a key component in addressing those problems effectively. However, specifics about this aren't always easy to find; that's where Drupal Edu comes in.

At the moment, the site is very simple—authenticated users can post links to relevant outside sites, participate in forums, and vote on the usefulness of other user-contributed content. We hope the community will really get involved in this; the more people contribute content, the more useful the initiative becomes.

If you're interested in this, please check out http://drupaledu.org —and if you've got some Drupal-in-education-related content to share, please feel free to do so!