Tuesday 13 December 2011

Contact Form: nowonline

The SBE contact form is now online here. It's a bit more elaborate than the usual forms. This is why I used FormSite for its realization. Its pretty cool and allows for more flexibility than Wufoo. But its not so user handy than the latter and not so easy to style as one might want to. But for the rest it is great!
A year ago I was asked to put everywhere on the website email+phone for prospective students to ask questions. With the result that the admission department had to deal with a massive load of emails that contained questions which where not related to admissions in particular put covered basically everything. This caused some upset and in combination with the budgetary situation of the moment my task was to implement this solution.

The form distributes its content depending on the categories to different email recipients. In this way it hopes to reduce the influx of non-relevant emails to the admission office. Thus freeing them up to focus more on their job. It is basically a distribution solution that does not lower the workload, only distributes it up-front. It makes it easier for prospective students to ask questions by lowering the threshold to do so. Once send off, the question is processed in the same way then before. They arrive as emails in the inbox of a person who answers them by sending an email to the sender.

The problem with this solution is: 1. It does not allow to track a user request f.e. any ticketing system does. If a user send a request using this form, nobody can check if his request ever gets answered. 2. It does not lower the workload because the answers are send individually per email as before.
A solution used other service industries is a customer support system. Virtually every company has such a system implemented on their website. It includes a simple forum that allows users and the team of the sales support workers to communicate on a many to many platform. Questions posted in the Forum are answered and moderated so as to allow others with similar or same questions to look them up as conveniently as a google search. A webform that allows the company to track the requests and responses so as to monitor customer relationships. This is already implemented at ACO or ICTS where a simple email ticketing system provides such functionality. And of course customer relationship management is not solely a matter of email and webforms. Why not responding to requests via twitter, or facebook?....
 
And I did many other things as well today. But this was the highlight! ... Well, and I posted on facebook after my long abstinence.

Monday 12 December 2011

Wikileaks Spyfiles expose webcontent coordinator

Little makes for nothing. Two Santa substitutes ran a mug and the world grow two weeks older. What has happend? This year prize money for the awards are cut in halve. Student assistant's are denied access to a workstation and are being replaced by technology.

The web form which are substituting two student assistants causes unforeseen problems. Wufoo's ability to create more complex forms is severely limited because of the restrictions in its Rules-System. I can only apply up to 50 rules to one form. This is not enough given the fact that the logical elements are not juxtaposition-able and comprised of AND/OR's only. I cannot think of another name for the tool that solves this problem effectively. Maybe you have a solution?



The other problem concerns the tickets send to ICTS over the course of four weeks. Here is the response from Jon:





 

Tuesday 6 December 2011

GX Problem #8 28.11.2011 #9 missing #10 #11 1.12.2011


GX Problem #8 28.11.2011
The problem: The problem is that Brandingblocks that are added on pages other than the frontpage (or faculty homepages) show a faulty top_line (3 or 4 lines). It disturbes the continuity and is visible on Firefox 8, IE7, IE9. I checked all settings (size, positioning, format) of the image used in the brandingblock but could not find a solution. The error occurs across all pages where such elements are inserted. See below two screenshots of the problem in IE and Firefox: 
  
 Problem #10: Many updates concern the Master and Bachelor programs. Most of its content is in a “Content” – item created by the Media Repository. The faculty has no access to them, cannot update or change it unless it kicks the items out and copy pastes the content into a empty page. The request is to open up the possibility to access also these content types by the web coordinator of the faculty.
Problem#11: Some people report the same problem with GX on IE7 that I did. Saving a page or pagesection causes the browser to stop working continuously. While most people work on Windows7 I can reproduce the error using WindowsXP. I already discussed this issue on thuesday with Hamers Jos from ICTS.