Registry @ York St John University: March 2007

Friday 30 March 2007

Now - headaches, coffee. The future - slick, efficient processes. Oh yes.

Friday headaches and coffee
Originally uploaded by YSJU Registry.

Another one of those full-day consultancy/training days that we know and love, this time with Ollie Magro and Howard Ormerod from Tribal, to get the ball rolling on the Process Manager project that will move the first of hopefully many off-line paper processes online, onto e:Vision.

I think it went quite well, and both Ken and I ended the day with a fuller understanding of the tools available, and how our existing process can map against their online templates. More training and consultancy booked in next month, with the aim of being able to deliver a working process in May. All good stuff.

"Students object to the changes on the UCAS application form"

This, from the Independent:

Students object to the changes on the UCAS application form

UCAS is planning to ask university applicants for more details of their background. Lucy Tobin reports

Published: 29 March 2007

The plan by UCAS, the university admissions service, to require applicants to record whether their parents went to university is deeply worrying to today's students. I probably wouldn't even be here under the proposed new admissions procedure," says Sara Carr, 21, an undergraduate at Cambridge University. "I went to a private school, both my parents went to university - and I'm middle class. I think it's terrible that, if I had applied via the new UCAS form, universities might allow my background to overshadow the A-levels I worked so hard for."

Continues...

And lots more here: http://news.google.co.uk/news?hl=en&ned=uk&ie=UTF-8&q=ucas+applicants+parents

Tuesday 27 March 2007

AUA's code of professional standards

The Association of University Administrators (AUA), a professional body for higher education managers and administrators, has drawn up a code of professional standards that provides the framework of core values and principles to underpin the profession of university administration. I joined the AUA about a year ago, not that long after I started here, and found it a useful source of information on best practice across the sector on a range of issues. Their code of standards sums up quite nicely for me what's important, what it means to be a professional.

The code

This code of values and principles establishes the framework within which AUA expects its members to set the highest standards of professionalism. In order to demonstrate this professionalism and their commitment and contribution to higher education, AUA members are expected to:
provide high quality professional services
develop an appreciation of the academic culture, of the traditions and values of the organisations and institutions through which it is sustained, and of the roles of colleagues at all levels and in all branches of higher education
be sensitive to the multiplicity of clients served by the higher education administrator and to the need to balance conflicting demands
act with integrity, honesty, fairness, professional impartiality and diligence and without discrimination
observe due care, objectivity and respect for confidentiality
be explicit and straightforward in their dealings with colleagues and clients
ensure that personal interest does not override the needs of clients
accept responsibility for their actions
challenge existing practices and ideas when necessary
be committed to their own personal and professional development by seeking new knowledge and skills to enhance professional performance
foster the development of others by sharing expertise and good practice and by encouraging employers to support professional development.
http://www.aua.ac.uk/about/code

Monday 26 March 2007

But what is a Content Management System?

I've just realised that I've written an entry about what I feel are the requirements for a content management system, without actually explaining what one is. I'm sure the term can mean many things to many people, but this is what I'm on about at least:

A content management system is a software system that helps us manage our content. Sounds obvious, but to expand, it helps us produce, organise, control and publish large amounts of documents, web pages, images and multimedia resources. We're interested in web content management systems, as I think there is a recognised need to address some of the shortcomings in our external and internal websites.

Here's the obligatory steal from Wikipedia:

A web content management system is a computer system used to manage and control a large, dynamic collection of web material (HTML documents and their associated images). A CMS facilitates document control, auditing, editing, and timeline management. A Web CMS provides the following key features:

Automated templates
Create standard visual templates that can be automatically applied to new and existing content, creating one central place to change that look across all content on a site.
Easily editable content
Once your content is separate from the visual presentation of your site, it usually becomes much easier and quicker to edit and manipulate. Most CMS software include WYSIWYG editing tools allowing non-technical individuals to create and edit content.
Web standards upgrades
Active CMS solutions usually receive regular updates that include new feature sets and keep the system up to current web standards.
Workflow management
Workflow is the process of creating cycles of sequential and parallel tasks that must be accomplished in the CMS. For example, a content creator submits a story but it's not published on the website until the copy editor cleans it up, and the editor-in-chief approves it.
Document management
CMS solutions always provide a means of managing the life cycle of a document from initial creation time, through revisions, publication, archive, and document destruction.

Summary of requirements for a Content Management System

I think we're all agreed that we need a new Content Management System, but we need to make sure we get the right one. Here's a summary of what our basic requirements might be. This isn't entirely my own work, I hasten to add. It's based on example requirements from elsewhere, but I think it provides a useful starting point. I'd be very interested in what you think.

The CMS must be an established system, with demonstrable market presence, from a financially stable provider. It must provide a single repository for the storage of information, and enforce the separation of content from design. It must be easy to use and cater for a cross section of skills, and should improve the speed of creating new content and editing existing content. The system must be able to run both our public-facing external website and our internal intranet, with reliable security measures and system contingency. It should be easy to extend or customise the software, and develop into other web service areas, such as discussion threads and online form design. It should be possible for the system to interact with other software in industry-standard formats such as XML and RSS. Technical support must be available from the supplier.

The system must enable decentralised management of content to avoid authorisation bottlenecks, be accessible 'outside the office', and must have the ability to manage users and administrators efficiently, incorporating role-based security and group profiling. A full audit trail of content authors' activities must be available. A workflow model must be in place, with clear content approval processes.

The output of the CMS must conform to accessibility and disability standards, without requiring content contributors to have any technical (e.g. HTML) knowledge in this area. The system must provide the ability to publish content to a variety of channels, including mobile devices, as well as text only. It must enable the incorporation of multimedia content and be capable of displaying content 'dynamically' so that pages can appear fresh and different each day. The system should incorporate a link-checking mechanism, and links within the site should not be broken if a page is moved or renamed.

The CMS should publish pages with human-readable URLs and have an automatic, customisable sitemap capability. Site navigation must be easy to maintain, and should preferably automatically reflect changes to the site. The CMS should provide conversion and publication of MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF documents, and should preferably have tools to enable the migration of content from our legacy CMS.

CMS administrators and authors must not need to have proprietary software skills (e.g. HTML, JavaScript, ASP etc), but it should be possible for advanced users to take advantage of their extra skills. The system must have a WYSIWYG style content preview function, and enable users to add images easily from a 'library' of acceptable images.

The CMS must have version control functionality, allowing users to view versions of published content, subject to permissions. When approving a new version, it should be easy to determine how the current and the new versions differ. Roll back and roll forward functionality should exist, that retains the integrity of the version history.

It should be possible to create secure areas of the site that only some site users can access, and a full audit trail must exist for both content and users. The CMS should provide a visitor statistics facility and a search facility.

Is it even possible to list them all?

To help with the review of the Univerisity's web needs, I've attempted to list every identifiable website, or distinct, discrete section of the University website, in order to outline the scope and breadth of our online presence, as it were. It aims to be comprehensive, but I'm sure there's something I've left out.

In summary, I can find 38 websites or microsites or whatever: 12 internal and 26 external; 18 served by Linneys and 20 on home-grown software. Wouldn't it be great if we could pull the whole lot together, and present a coherent, consistent picture to our staff, our students -- future, current and former -– and everyone else with an interest in what we do and how we do it. It's all about the same university after all.

Registry join in too

Corporate Systems Board -- a termly meeting of Exec and others charged with developing and implementing the University's information strategies -- were impressed when it last met that one of its papers was a blog post. elearning-ysju.blogspot.com is the address for the 'e-Learning @ York St John University' blog, "an informal place where the department will post information about what we're currently doing, advances in technologies, web 2.0, useful website links and general issues affecting the world of e-Learning and learning technology." (There's more about e-Learning at York St John on their website.)

We all thought it was a great idea, so I've set this Registry blog up to see if it can help things from our side too. As Mark describes in his blog, "Lots of people have heard of weblogs or blogs, but many are unsure of what they are or how they are used. This is a blog - a website where we can send messages which are posted in reverse chronological order, to which people can comment upon. Blogs can be on a variety of topics, a single topic or just a stream of consciousness, with the main aim of letting the world know what the blogger thinks and feels."

I suppose I should have a disclaimer at the foot of every page along the lines of "the views expressed here are those of the individual and not necessarily those of the University" blah blah blah. Anyway, I've made a start, let's see if I can keep this up.

Registry @ York St John University