The brandingblock problem and its solution

From the early days one problem came up regularly. brandingblocks that where put in as pagesections where messed up. Like this one:

The problem with the brandingblocks on different pages is that they don’t have the correct layout. The correct layout is: “UM inzet linkerkolom (zonder titel)”, see below.

You can select the proper layout for the (branding block) page section as follows:
 File > Properties > design


I have adjusted the brandingblock that is used on the page:
http://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/web/Faculties/SBE/TargetGroup/Professionals.htm

You can assign the correct layout to the other brandingblocks (SBE_PGE) by passing the settings on to the page sections on the same level. (Only for the Brandingblocks!!!The other page sections have a design of their own)

(A BIG thanks to Milly!!!)

UM Wide Personal Profile Pages NOW AVAILABLE!

Who would have thought this. At yesterdays' webco meeting the official launch of the long anticipated personal profile pages was announced. Faculty and Staff members can login into MY UM and find at the bottom of the page a link to their personal profile. This profile page is contains lots of information and will be developed even further. Who is responsible for the information on profile pages? Everybody is responsible for her/his profile. Who can edit, add, delete information on profile pages? The person who is associated with the profile page and the webcoordinator. Who is obliged to have a personal profile page? Academic staff is obliged to maintain a profile.

Please be aware that this project is still in the BETA phase. This means that there will are some bugs that are not fixed. The personal profiles will show up in the UM wide intranet (MY UM) and on your department site once the profiles themselves are ready. For now please inform the members of your department and ask them to start working on their profiles. We see how many problems arise. I have a student assistant who might be able to help out if the problems are too time consuming. But I think we should wait and see what happens. Well, lets hope for the best, carnival is over, so the next big thing is the Masters Open Day on Saturday!

Have fun,

Refresh your web content management skills today!

Are you afraid of GX? Do you have issues in publishing news items? Do you feel uncomfortable when you think about updating your department website?

For those of you who's answer is YES you have now the opportunity to refresh your skills and get rid of your fears. Check out the proposed dates and contact me via email:

• 31 January
• 13 March
• 24 April

All take place in room GL 17; 1.229 (1e Floor Front office UB inner city library).

New Postgraduate Education Website Launched

Its the second week in January and right in the middle of the storm arises this sexy new website. From the first meeting in august 2010 until its launch yesterday much water flow down the Maas. Many meetings and re-dos where needed to make it look like it is now. In addition to an inferior web content management system that masters even the "not so grim" minded person it was a challenge that was faced by brave men and woman from the postgraduate education unit.
As for the website there are few things to remark. I already spoke about it at a webco meeting and for the most part of it nothing has changed so far. The word "website" is misleading because it is in fact an online product and service catalog with no interactive features nor engaging design. Its rather slim and focuses on the basics. It features an clickable graphic on the front, a google calendar and some webforms used as contact or simple data-mining systems. In addition with the core website a weblog, twitter, facebook and linkedIn channel are also part of this enterprise. It was by far the most incomprehensible and plainly ugly part of SBE's web performance. So it was more than necessary to update it by redoing the whole thing.
But lets move to the important part. I am now redirecting purchased URL's for all Executive Master, MBA, Management courses and whatever PGE concerns. If you have purchased a URL for your program please let me know so I can redirect it to the new website! Here is a quick list of things that have been done:

• Implementing New website http://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/web/Faculties/SBE/TargetGroup/Professionals.htm 
• two languages (dutch/english)
• SEO implemented (tags, title, description)
• Advanced Data-Mining Functionality via smart webforms
• Events and Activity Calender (google)
• Online Registration for most programs

This are just some of the specifics. More will come in the days to come. So please let me know if you have any URL's that need to be redirected. Currently I use a trick to redirect visitors of the old PGE pages automatically to the new version of the pages. But this trick will not do it forever since I will delete the old files in the months to come. So please help!

GX Problem #12 09.01.2012

This is series of requests that I am going to issue the weeks to come. As remarked earlier I will write one email each. It concerns problems or challenges while in GX if not stated otherwise.

Problem: The page that lists members of a department looks quiet different depending on the browser one uses – in the Back- and Frontend. Please see the two screenshots attached of the Front- and Backend respectively.

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:

 

Rapportage registrations sebtembererinstroom 2011-2012

This overview of BA/MA applicants (8.November, 2011) speaks for itself. Overall are  15.824 students registered, 300 more than last year.

One year anniversary

When the Arab spring was still in its Dornroeschen sleep and Julian Assange was playing hide and seek with the CIA I started to work at the School of Business of Economics. One year ago on that very day did I became web content manager for an institute with 500 employees and roughly 3000 customers served at one time (pre experienced and post experienced together). A couple of months later did I successfully begged for enough money to hire an assistant for eight hours a week. Together we are responsible for the further development of SBE's main website and all related web projects.

This sounds like a great adventure. What did we accomplish? So far not much one might say from the outset. But given the fact that the school possesses no in house-knowledge, no inventory of existing online activities, no strategy nor vision on where to go with all the new memes we did not do such a bad job. The first tenets of an online communication strategy are out there. All major structural units are integrated in the new CMS or indistinguishable from it. New online projects are in the middle of the development - among it a exclusive social network for enrolled students and an online magazine for students and staff. Social Media is integrated and used to promote the schools branding targets and looks in comparison with its major competitors not that bad as many people may want to believe.

What did we learn? It's all about money. One 0.8fte + 0.1fte for entire website and service is a slightly crazy undertaking. But be it...

Online Strategy and the Webcoordinator Meeting

After this week I am in the mood for ice cream. But lets start with UM's Search Engine Optimalisation guidelines. And move on to something I blogged already a while ago: Web video and UM. There are important documents for everybody at SBE interested in the video production workflow and standards there is even a powerpoint to this topic:


And since not everybody can take part in the supreme meetings of the high priests of UM's online activities here are the minutes from the last one.

My main attention was devoted to SBE's online strategy which should be finished by begining of june. Everybody interested in it can see the current draft here.

Anything interesting. Yes, another department website got published this week and with some luck another one next week.

GX resets

Anybody can try this at home. Create a little mini-website for whatever is in your mind. A mini site refers simply refers to a punch of pages with one parent and some children pages. Add/ or remove a page section to the right sidebar and watch the pages. .....Magic.... Suddenly you will end up with a similar result as I did when I tried this: On every page I add/remove a page section another seemingly random page section appears in the main content area. This is also true if you change the "Design" settings on the same pages.

This is indeed a strange behaviour and not the only build in - "inconvenience".

The online strategy is also in the making and a positive reply for the iTunesU project has also arrived. Brightcover (a video distribution platform) has a native connector to iTunes and TS36 offers to setup the channel for little money.
Strategy wise there are also some new projects. A section for students, either in form of a Social Network or another online application useful for students to connect and exchange. A kind of virtual meeting place similar to the garden or the entrence for in their pockets.
A Social Media page where all links to all SM channels used within SBE are listed. That is the big return of the list!
A clear focus on using state-of-the-art on the shelve products to solve problems and be present to profit from their user flow and/or brand value.
A clear vision of a mobile, engaged and lofty audience. Focus on video content and creative commons licenses.
Away from pages to streams, but not forget the pages! The website is important and looks like a brochure. No interactive features are in place besides Emma and webforms. Many pages are dublicats or contain "strange" links (see EDUCATION section). The future are streams! Facebook and Twitter are the best ways into the minds and eyes of students and business partners alike. How to integrate students conversations and participation into the communication activities? The application process takes too long!
A clear focus on the "experience of studying" than on "authenticity of mediating" it.

week18 - summary

 Since everybody thinks nothing changes here at SBE. Lets look at the rest of the world. An anticipated but never the less exciting new development is googles latest announcement of its chromebook. After the desaster of "the cloud" surrounding Sony's playstation and Amazons Data Center failures its kind of a creepy thought. But a nice video it is indeed:



This week was full of guests: Vaira Vike-Freiberga (former president of Latvia) and Jaap de Hoof Scheffer (former NATO Secretary General) visited SBE and students who where interested in what they had to say. The interview I conducted with the the former president of Latvia will come soon but I must warn you because it will be the censored version only. Like its used to be done in the former russian republic of Latvia.

Besides the usual small details I had a chat with one program director who envisioned a system to pay tribute to the shift in the business of education seen today; its the shift from a supply driven to a demand driven market. The idea is a webform where intersted parties are able to get a PDF when they provide personal information. This is than used to personalize future relations and costumize messages. Particular for smaller programs (those with 20 or less participants / year) it is a good idea!

A new training for the webmanager is initiated and will take place on the 17th of may and I am busy working on the online strategy for SBE. It is in a preliminary state but I share them with those who are interested in here.

Finaly I also found someone who pays for SBE's Flickr account: A big thanks goes to this person in the department of Marketing and Supply Chain Management!

Departmental websites are not really advancing. A lack of input is the main reason. While the framework is in place and all necessary content is already migrated nothing more is happening.

One Idea that seems to be send to people who respond with an approving eye is to use Ecofont to save Printer toner. This brings us to the idea of the Green office and a website where people can submit ideas to help saving money. But who has time for this?

Third department website launch

After Accounting and Information Management and Economics its time for the department of Finance to scream "Hello World". This websites are not so much intended to attract potential students as they are to attract business and academia. There where little suprises along the 303 document with the exception of the timing. Personally I expected to finish the department websites in December. Now, end of march, I must admitt that I was to confident. The daily duties consume more time and unforseen requests take up the rest.

The last two departments are in the pipe and should be online by the end of april. Once this is out of the way the two institutes ROA and UNU-MERIT recieve more attention. As does the Online Media Strategy currently under way together with Veerle, Heiner and Atticus. The upcoming webmanager training is smooth and fun. Another job that is on the way are websites for the students associations affiliated with SBE.

Besides changes in the Admission pages of all Master programs I have also changed the Research Master's one level lower than before. This caused some emails over competencies and resulted in nothing but warm air. The ICC@M - International Case Competition in Maastricht - got also their own website but sticked to the colour scheme of UM. And ACO prepared a server for future websites hosted @SBE.

And I finaly found the problem for which the Iphone is the solution: The Uroboros

First Department Website ready to launch

In the next weeks one after another department will launch their sites. At our first meeting with AE1 of the department of Economics we discussed their new website here.
Some links need to be in place but all the necessary content according to Score 303 is migrated and ok to show off. Changes are:
- Additional Links from >RESEARCH to Publications and Seminars
- under >PUBLICATIONS the years in the content field go
- METEORIT seminars? what about them?
- Banner for the department window

Besides that there are many other things to do. Two of the bigger projects are a website selfservice center and a SBE community.

URL for Department websites

Since its always the simple things that do not touch the mind here is one for all of you: What is the URL (internet adress) of the new department websites? Any suggestions?


http://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/sbe/...


...finance
...aim
...econ
...erd
...os
...qe
...mscm


or

http://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/...


Deadline: Thursday 27 january

Web 2.0 at UniMaas... and the development of what so ever 2.0

Starting with todays cartoon on the last page of the Observant I am compelled to relate it to a particular dilemma regarding MU's use of social media. The cartoon depicts a character who spends his evening updating his inventory of social media channels ending up with no time to study. The apparent grievance or joke touches a point worth considering here. What gives rise to the grievance is not the time consumed by the the cartoon's character but the apparent dissonance between what he says he's doing and what he actually does. Namely nothing! His homework is not finished and he did not study. What should give us a thrill is the fact that the UM website is as far from being done as the character's homework at the end of the cartoon. But instead of looking at the causes of this particular joke only its effects show off in peoples faces.

We all know that keeping an additional communication channel nice and pretty is time intense. And it is important to be on facebook, on twitter, on foresquare, on what so ever 2.0. Of course these tools are for free and therefore are used by everybody. That is the democratization of the net and the main reason behind UM's aspirations to be there is to claim part of this space in order to get the attention of prospective and current students. Primarily for the purpose of recruiting them for one of our programmes. Having said this there is no empirical evidence that it has any effect on recruting other than guesswork to my knowledge. But its like TV, newspaper, radio a legitimate channel to reach out for eyeballs. And there is nothing to support the antithesis either. So we can say, lets try and experiment with this.

But the main problem remains, namely that the primary communication channel of MU is in comparison with other University websites underdeveloped. So whatever hopes are attached to this technologies they are more like phantom pain in their appearance. Like people who lost an arm point to their missing limp as their perceived source of pain, people engaging in a dialogue about web2.0 technologies point to facebook as the sources of pain that needs a cure. This curing of non existing limps is impossible but a welcoming distraction from the homework. And it is exactly the distraction from his homework and from his study that causes us to feel pity for the Cartoon character while at the same time reminds us of our own situation.

A small make-up of SBE's facebook page and some small fixes here and there on the website was among the jobs that kept me from updating the blog. This week a wordpress MU account was launched by the Student Service Center offering students their own blogging environment. Interesting enough it is hosted in the states and initiated by students themselves. The Postgraduate Education Department, if one wants to call it like this, also launched their blog using a hosted solution offered by the same CRM than the Student Service Center. Another one of those novelties I used recently was Eventbrite for the SBE Christmas Party 2010. It's a free service offering you with more or less ease to let people register for events. I also managed to get hold on a webserver "webserver 18" as Walter calls it that will be used in the near future.

Another time consuming activity is the begging for money one. But it relates to a very important point I stressed already over and over again. There are universities that have a web team. And this is reflected in the website of these universities. But here I am my own team. And to extend it I want an student assistant. So if you read these lines, and you are a motivated, structured student at Maastricht University, with the aspirations to work for money one day a week for a year at a very challenging environment just drop me a line. Right here! Together with Julijenne I have 4 departments already in my pocket to pay for you. And the rest follows.

Some meetings where also on my agenda and together with all the above mentioned activities cost about 1/3 of my time. That is definitely too much but I am working on it. Among the meetings where those with people from METEOR, MSCM, AIM, ICTS and Cross Knowledge. Now you might ask, yourself dear reader what this is. Its a private company offering education for highly skilled and flexible knowledge worker. And if this does not sound convincing I can assure you that it is. Its an all in one package including infrastructure (meaning website, learning environment, customer relationship management software), Content (audiovisual educational content designed for distance learning activities in I think 5 different languages) and expertise. Mr. Pieters visited me early and in the exciting discussion I learned a lot about the "state of art" in selling education. The wave upon which CrossKnowledge rides high is the trend from formal to informal education. No flaws, no discontinuity and supported with a broader vision that I can relate to. In fact, it was this meeting that gave me the most joy in the past two weeks.

The big part now for the end. The department websites occupy my the second 1/3 of my time. A third training session just got confirmed today for the 16th of December. I happy with this because it means that all people are trained and have access to their parts of the website. The content is coming in slowly and I better spend more time on writing it myself. The personal pages topic is one which will not be solved soon. In the first step only the important information such as Name, Title, Availability, Room Number, Telephone, Email, and a link to their existing profile pages is oversee able. What I got from one of the meetings was that people of FIN are really happy with their System (ASP) and can be used for all of SBE.

The other points regarding the department's structure are straight forward. A description about their programs (MSc, BSc, Executive, MBA) and their research activities should be doable, I thought. And some sentences about their department's aspirations or mission statement would be already more than other universities' departments have to offer. We are getting there. ...HEELLLPPP!!!

In tandem with the department websites I also redo the METEOR site and draw on my whiteboard the outlines of the whole SBE website structure. Starting with a programme page that displays all programs that we offer is an important improvement that needs to be in place before the next semester starts. A service page, displaying all the services is indeed as necessary. And together with the departmental websites it captures the essence of what SBE does. 

Any Feedback?

Event website launch

The Department of Organization and Strategy hosts an event on the 17 - 20 of November 2010. I was approached to put "something" online. Academic conferences are not sexy and the best example is the main conference website for the event entitled "THE ENTREPRENEURIAL PROCESS IN A CHANGING ECONOMY".

To promote the conference the Department used a database of around 4000 emails. Over a third bounced back to the sender when trying to invite the people who's email addresses where inactive or wrong, the person responsible commented in the meeting. Since things are complicated I want to make a quick round up of what I did.

First I created a mini website that contains an overview, the program, details about the avenue and how to get there and a link to the registration form. The department uses Formstack for the registration process. It's for free if you don't have more the 50 registrations.

The second thing I did was to create a facebook page under the SBE profile. One person in the department is going to take care of this page, posting updates and keep invite people. The page will also be promoted using Facebook Ads. How easy it is to implement a fabulous "LIKE BUTTON" into the event page cannot be underestimated. It's really easy and a desperate attempt to integrate some interactive feature to an otherwise static webpage.

The third promotional activity is to publish a news item or press release. A fourth option is to get glimps of the conference into the TalkinBusiness magazine.

The hardest part was to get the content right. Since the program is not fix except the main points and no visual elements are available it is hard to build a website. But the result looks ok. The graphic on top of the main page takes the style guide literally.

I also had an interesting meeting with two nice woman from METEOR. METEOR consists of six different research programs and was intended overcome the old "silo" thinking by an interdisciplinary approach. They assist almost 200 PhD students and update the website regularly. To publish seminars they use an Access database. The data is displayed using an iframe on the Seminar page. Conferences are updated by editing pages directly. When asking about their experience they reply "updating takes a lot of time and is not easy" and "lots of work needed to be done before you can actually publish something."

Impressions from the first training in GX

The first of several trainings is over and a lot was learned. People who will lay hands on the website did so under the supervision of three experts and myself. And as it turned out the result was very good indeed. Coffee and chocolate where only partly responsible for the relaxed mood during the three hours of hard core programming. It became clear I that it is not so easy as backing a vlaai but that it is not a miracle either. By the end of the training everybody enjoyed to be part of a team that will do a great job. And by the way, aren't we gorgeous?

For now I instructed everybody to register on two services we will use to work together on our website. I also put a short Resources Page together where all necessary information will be collected. Next week I will meet with everybody to discuss the gathering of the content for each department. This will be a lot of fun and the main task for the coming month for the community managers. I also had the change to give a short presentation that should explain why I am here and what my plan is. I put it up here for those of you who did not participate so that you don't miss out on anything.

Training Update

Since more and more people want a attend the technical training I need to plan a second one. Unfortunately this means for some people that their training will NOT take place 14th of October. What counts is the time of registration. This means that for the following people the training will take place at the announced day:

Fleur Keune-Roemers
Hannes Datta
Yolanda Paulissen
Cecile Luijten
Adela Buttolo
Nicole Hulsman
Claudia van Oppen


For everybody else who registered I will announce a new date and location for the training the next days.

I am still waiting for some more input regarding the web site structure? Any new ideas?

Training Material and Registration

Since more and more people want to participate in the training I hope to provide you here with some additional information. A document that describes the upcoming training activities is available here. If more people want to sign up here is the form.

reply to comments

As was commented there are some menu points missing. EDUCATION and RESEARCH as top level menu items really belong to the department site. And it is as if the commentator could travel through time because at a meeting today with the other faculties we discussed exactly this. The first guidelines concerning the 'basisnavigatie' were being presented today and contain exactly what most of his comments where about. I like the example of Tilburg University and think we should aim for something similar.
"Database" was the most used word in the comments. Well, and there we have to look into solutions.I had a talk today concerning how an interface between the Digital UM Library could look like. In fact it looks very promising that we can connect the content with the system managing the department website. However, this is a longer process but possible in principle. A personal publication list can be created as easily as a repository of a single department's written output.

Concerning "thesis topics" I am aware that this refers to topics proposed by professors to students. Such a list including the thesis's title, short description, date, contact details, professor, etc. should be available somewhere for interested parties to consult. But should it be on the department website? I don't know what do you think?
Another thought about the staff page and personal pages. There will be a style guide coming up on the horizon for this and the images. Since this is something that will change, I am thinking of not putting to much effort in it and keep it simple. Ideally we put this information into a database, make a website where everyone can login and update his/her details which gets then presented on the website. At least in an ideal world this would be the case. But this takes more time to think. Everybody who has ideas on how to come up with a simple and good solution is welcome to share it here!!!

In two other meetings today the issue of weblogs kept popping up. Some people want to blog for marketing purposes or to strengthen their ties with exchange students. Again others want to have more training on how to use Social Media to engage with their audience in a new and exciting way. I promised to post some videos in the future that concern the later point. Well, and thanks for the many comments :)