GX issue 13 10.01.2011

Problem: The breadcrumb title of the subpage “Professionals” of the main page “TARGET GROUP” is not visible in the dutch language version. I checked the settings of the Metadata or any other page related settings I could think of. Neither is the Status of the parent- nor the child page unsound nor are the “Sub Pages” or “Do not Show in Navigation” Settings wrong. Since the page “Professionals” is the only one that is available in two languages there might be a problem. Can you help?

2012 starts with Sharing Success

The exclusive social network for chosen ones opend in May this year. Until September selected bachelor students could meet up online upfront in a customized service from NING. The success was partly due to the flexibility of the software employed and user friendly interface. The so created online environment allowed for sharing of practically anything from questions about housing to party pictures. The aim was to increase the loyalty of these students after they where selected by the faculty. And the result:

IB

2010:     63% of decentrally selected IB applicants became students at SBE  

2011:     77% of decentrally selected IB applicants became students at SBE

(of decentrally selected IB applicants 72% were Sharing Success, and 85% of these became students)

EBE

2010:     63% of decentrally selected EBB applicants became students at SBE  

2011:     70% of decentrally selected EBB applicants became students at SBE  

                (of decentrally selected EBE applicants 76% were Sharing Success members, and 88% of these became students)

More detailed information about the project see here.

Another project finished in the old year is this website. A hosted version of worpress and a template customized to the need of the Master program did the trick. The online admission form is realized in Wufoo and the pretty pictures are harnessed from photostocks secret chamber. The result is a convincing stand alone site featuring important information, contact details and online registration. Its indexed and Search Engine Optimized. The price: Ufff... Thats the magic! Let me know how much you think it costs and the winner will get a change to meet me for a coffee.

Are you ready?

Talkinbusiness 2.0

Developing an online magazine is an easy exercise and especially simple when nothing needs to be done from scratch. The old version is here and demands little further explication. After some month of waiting for an test server: A virtual server running on an Windows Platform.
This was a big step taken entirely by our Authentication Department.
The target audience is clear: Business Professionals, Students, Staff and Faculty Members are the main group of people we are aiming at. The goal is to provide an attractive online appearance with up to date news and reports on the school's activities. In doing so we hope to increase the schools reputation among our audience. We want to be in the news and the best way is to make the news ourselves.
The technical setup starts with some thoughts of the CMS. It should do what we expect it do:
- run an online magazine
- provide different users with different roles with a intuitive back-end
- Cheaper than the current version and hosted on our own server
- Enough Support and a lively community

Of course there are many other demands on the system f.e. integration of SM, a Newsletter distribution system, dynamic front page, Monitor activity...etc. If 2000 hits per month is an optimistic estimation than the system should handle at least three times this much before the first problems become apparent. After all, Images, Videos and everything that can possibly reduce the bandwidth drastically is hosted somewhere "over the rainbow" in the cloud. A catchy title for an rather ancient technology! The choice is rather clear and given the nature of the operation also not very difficult. Cheaper means for free and WordPress fulfills all basic requirements.
The next step is to come up with a basic layout and structure for the website. A little graphic might help to envision the big picture before the details make you clean out the forest from the trees. Followed by discussion and debates on key issues like Categories, Picture here or there, Text one can sort out the things that are already there from the things that still need to be done.
The next step is to look for a theme that can be customized and utilized for the desired purpose. There one can spend some money to save time. Customization means to adapt it to the official color scheme, type fonts and house styles rules.
The next big challenge is the Newsletter system. The idea is that people can subscribe to the magazine by simply filling out a short web form. A double opt in process makes sure that the users are not machines and really do want to receive an email in their inbox with the latest entries. This system is a service that works seemlessly with the CMS and once configured produces the newsletters, handles the subscriptions and even provides templates. After some tests and the integration of subscribers info from the old site everything is in place. Almost everything.... Because who is the author of the articles? Who is the editor? Who takes the decisions that have nothing to do with the technical or managerial side of this project but with the content of the magazine itself?
I don't know this yet but for the rest everything is on the right track.

Ps. And never forget to map the domain!

Webco Meeting 21.06

Just beeing back from the web coordinator meeting where all with the same lable as I come together and disucss "online thingiieess.." under the supervision of Manon.

The personal profile pages deadline is now February 2012. The initial proposal presented by Tim Smith on January 4, 2011 is still the valid one. In the meanwhile we will utilize the Department of Finance application and extend its use to all other faculties of the school. In a recent email from Matthew he states the reasons for a university solution as follows:

"I understand your recommendation regarding other service providers. However, I strongly believe that people (including myself) find sites hosted by the university institution more credible and their first port of call for academics‘ information on the web."

A centralized solution for future Google Analytics reports are also discussed. The marketing department will recieve a detailed report every month as do programm coordinators. What kind of information they want is up for debate here! Any suggestions please send an email to me (webc-sbe@maastrichtuniversity.nl)

The faculty of Law is proactive and has a slick web appearance. The trick is to use less text and more videos. T36 is responsible for the videos and add value to otherwise often confusing texts. The webvideo initiative with Brightcover at the centre is not used by SBE at all. So here is a call to everybody who has videos to bring them to me (B-1.10) on a disk or USB stick. The upload and distribution will be taken care of by a student web editor on central level. Please let me know if you have any videos.

Finalizing SBE's online evaluation report is my main job these days. I hope to finish it this week. It will be published as by the end of this month exclusively here. :)

Another call is out there to send in information about SBE faculty members who are in some European Union expert panel or otherwise related group. One strategic aim of SBE is to increase the presence of SBE faculty members in the press. And with the help of the EJC there is a good chance that we might succeed.

Month 10

Why does it take 10 month to create 6 department websites? Why is it important anyway? And does the internet make us stupid?

- Request Actie URL's for the last three departments:
++ Quantitative Economics (pageID: ?) gets http://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/sbe/qe
++ Organisation and Strategy (pageID: 3385974) gets http://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/sbe/os
++ Marketing and Supply Chain Management (pageID: ?) gets
http://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/sbe/mscm

- Request of new Terms for the GX Database
++ MARC (Marc Seminars)

- Check if NSI is shown on the UM research institute overview page
- Update Jean Jacques Herings profile in teh Full Professors Gallery
- Check if Heiner updated the Case Competition of Auckland
- Check if Nick makes the changes for the mmc
- Adding the New statistics from teh Fontys Hogescholen and hogeschool Zuyd to the strategic report
- Check on how much EMMA costs
- Hannes's MA Thesis Banner to M.Sc. Banner....
- Contact Sciencevision for itunesU: Origional Content
-...what about the big chunck.... Evaluation Report

- Google Tracking mechanism Fix!

Webco Meeting 5 April presentation

Update:
Two remarks where made during the meeting. One, from Pascal if I am correct, suggest to add this feature to a "share this page" item similar to the one at Postgraduateducation. Combining Social Media toolsets with this feedback system serves as a reminder of the effect SM has on existing websites. They penetrate them from the inside rendering them obsolete in the moment they are implemented. This happend alreay 10 years ago when the "Island" approach gave way to "Sharing is Caring" one.
The second remark concerns the position of the "Report a bug". In the presentation I placed it in the footer with the expectation that nobody who does not care will not notice it at all. By placing it into the header one cannot miss it. Together these two remarks do make sense and enforce each other quiet well. But those who don't celebrate the process and focus too much on the result forgot why the roman empire collapsed. Because of the supply chain management problem with egypt which produced the papyrus for the laws the empire created by Alexander the great. With the inavailability of papyrus came the collapse of the empire. I am proud to predict that as soon as UM introduces the "paperless office" it will collapse as the empire which had not the choice between adaptation and adoption. And the rest will be history.
Besides this remarks the meeting was timely and glimps of the UM 2.0 site was presented by Tim. If his presentation will be online you get it here first. Two categories: MEDEWERKER and STUDENTS which where on the UM site 0.1 in 2004 will be the hot spots of the UM2.0 site in 20XV.
I am sitting in the training and got promised sun this afternoon. Well, and the DIME conference is starting today: DON'T MISS IT!!! http://final.dime-eu.org/
Last but not Least, Jeroen presented Google Analytics here:

RSS Problem

Lets start with a problem:

Here you see a seminar which was created using an Agenda item. As you may notice, a very important piece is missing, namely the start date and time of that seminar. This information is important but missing from the RSS feed. On the website the aggregated feed looks like this:

Using the GX's Media Overview to show the same seminars on one page everything looks ok:

But on the backend one thing is wrong. The agenda items are sorted by publication date according to the settings of the MEDIA OVERVIEW element. The same element produces something else; It lists the agenda items according to its start date in descending order and not as the setting of the MEDIA OVERVIEW suggests by Publication date.

The date of publication is the date of the agenda item's creation! Interesting enough, when looking at the RSS feed, the publication date is contained in the field y:published while the start date/time is missing.

Why is this a problem? First, RSS - Really Simple Syndication makes only sense if the most important information is actually contained in the feed created by the Web Content Management System. What sense does it make to offer people a subscription when it contains the publication date and not the start date of an event? Second, if the UI does not do what it says it does it only confuses people to the point that they don't care anymore about it. Which is a reall problem when the goal of the web project is to make people using it.

Budget Cuts and the Effect

This week I violated the house style guide several times. After months of negotiations and meetings, proposals and recaps I could finaly implement three more brandingblocks on the SBE homepage. The programm pages are now updated to the agreed terms of last weeks webco meeting and many minor tasks have been accomplished.

Most notable is that SBE staff members can submit events online under >MY SBE>ACTIVITY CALENDAR> which took a bit longer than expected but does look fine. And since more and more people put content into the new system you can now subscribe to News and Seminars via RSS.

An interesting discussion with ROA about their website ended with a document that lists the disadvantages of the Content Management System. It summarizes the concerns I meet with increasing sympathy and scepticism alike. In the discussion I recognized that no awarness is payed to simple but important questions. Who is your target audience? What is it that you want to communicate? For whom or which purpose do you have a website? These questions are simple but necessary. On the other side, I recieved a presentation with arguments for the transition to the new CMS system for everyone.

A major point of interest are personal profile pages and I recieved the first draft for such a proposal and was also at the first meeting regarding the general outlook and some minor technical problems. They look good and integrate METIS information as well as information from and about users themselves. At the end of that meeting the discussion revolved around privacy or how much of what information should be public? Isn't it boring to search for people by their names? Would it be more fun and interesting to search by interest or age, by past projects or current ones, or maybe by birthday or favourite colour? There are many options, but not every option is also a solution.

Another meeting this week revolved around NEWSKIOSK, an Application Service Provider (ASP), whos boss went on a sabbatical (like me) for a year. But he stayed in his house somewhere in the Netherlands. I can imagine better places but who am I to judge! The trial use of GoogleDocs for the IRO office failed after two months. Reason: They recieved training and can place links themselves on the website. Eureka!
After the begging for money tour was succesful I also look now for an assistent here.

Second Error in GX

Removing page sections simultaniously from many pages causes an repeated error. F.e. if you want to get rid of many banners, testimonials, news lists, and so on accross a big array of pages at once (because it safes a lot of time) you get an error.

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

Silent Start into the New Year

The old year ended the way the new year began. The SBE Christmas party was a good occasion to see the  informal side of SBE. Wherever youth is synonymous with beauty the past is captured in the moment. And so it was not the fact but the consistency by which the portraits of SBE’s award winners are out of date by at least 10 years. Besides the pompous prize money which reflect the attitude characterized by an institutes struggle for financial vitality nothing could be more damaging than Wikileaks announcement to release SBE classified data.

But enough from this and back to work. The new Research Centre Section was put online today and some minor changes across the site where implemented. FAQ pages for Master and Bachelor programmes as well as a new case competition are online. The student-for-a-day recruitment initiative and new LCD screensavers where also on the work table and besides some other small magic tricks done in the blink of an eye.
Tomorrow I will have time to see after the Department websites and their developments and the programme page.  

week 50 - How to successfully resist innovation

Nobody suffered from high fever when the room was not ready and all participants enjoyed the third and last training in basic webmanagement for this year. Marie-Louise gave  here best in organizing in the last minute a room at the library and I tested out a seemingly harmless pretext to get free coffee: budgetcuts. It worked out fine and so did the whole week.

Starting with Monday I had a interesting meeting with Manon. Former information architect and early explorer in the unfolding 'cyberspace' of the 90s she is now in charge of the "webproject". Back than Maastricht University was known as University of Limburg for which Manon created the first website. In our talk about my impression and her experience it became clear that the problem faced by today is not significantly different from the one she faced. But the means have changed drastically in the last decade. Spending the rest of the day on stupid copy paste work I found some time to engage in a discussion on facebook about wikileaks. This is the 18th day since the media storm surrounding a platform and its founder has swirreld around the global media-echo-chamber.

Thuesday was Department website day and it is going fine. Little input from departments ensure that I have enough freedom to move around things at will. The major hurdles are overcome but new appeared on the horizon. F.e. I created a page with the intention to share its content with participants. But unfortunately the content managment system is configured as to deny access from outsite MaasNet. A surprise but nothing that cannot be detested. The machine easily masters the grim. Another aspect was to edit the interview with Youp van ‘t Hek. The video isn't online yet but SSF allowed me to announce it when refering to their youtube channel. It was a fun exercise in nostalgia.

Wednesday was a day in GX and I remembered that I shoud write more about my experience with this CMS. Another talk with the people behind the maastrichtstudents.nl blogging plattform. This would take another post.

... Yes and the Santa was at the office!

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?

What I did today

Today I visited some more people and talked with them about their work. The experience is close to uniform. It takes a lot of time to update even the most banal information. Most work is done in Frontpage in which some of them received training under the old web master. What surprises me is that all websites are up to date and the woman (predominantly) doing it are very well organized. A good indicator is their work space. Another good idea for making boring text more exciting is putting a random video after the first paragraph.

Maastricht University School of Business and Economics - SBE - Bachelor's Meeting from UMSBE on Vimeo.

Today I updated the Mockup and went over some of the technicalities like what terms to use for the media repository, sizes of banners and branding blocks and the navigational structure. I also updated one of the main sections on the SBE frontpage in a desperate attempt to make something visible. Branding Blocks are the new Ice cream. Everybody wants one and I have only three to give away. Besides the usual email war and the zero sum games that people play I have to write a communication strategy for the school. This will take another post so I will skip this.

Following up on last weeks training the first meetings start next weeks. I also try to find some way to get more people into the use/misuse of social media for marketing purposes. I started out with collecting some links to our delicious account. So everybody interested in How to use social media is welcome to have a look here.

I talked today about repetitive strain injury and what to do if someone suffers from it. It is damn serious and need immediate actions. If you went to your doctor and he diagnosed it there are some options within the school of business and economics that you might want to try. Visit Richard Thal/ACOhelp who can help you further.

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.