2001
DecemberBest tunes
Riding around the botanical gardens and military bases of Hawaii and listening to the Boredoms Vision Creation Newsun, quite a blast, athough my sunburn hurt like crazy. Man, what a nutty album, and my best of 2001.
November I got style
The website got a much needed overhaul, and I think this stylesheet thing may catch on. It certainly allows me to mess with the look of the site without messing with the database and the content. It is taking a bit of work to get rid of tables, and boy, there's a real problem with IE 5.5 - has anyone told Microsoft?
AugustDEXA Munich
Jack Brzezinski and I co-wrote a paper that I get to present in Munchen this month. I came up with the idea, implementation and such, Jack worked on the sorting algorithm and data mining piece so we could connect up the students with each other. The idea was somewhat simple (very complicated really) students share certain connections, enrolled courses, course topics, majors. Forums are crummy and go on forever, after any meaningful discourse has gone on. How can you put people in a group where meaningful discourse could take place. If it doesn't, how do the participants react rather than bailing (or lurking)? The meme machine (nods to Neil) attempts to put people together in interesting groups, give them a subject they can all get to know each other about, and then let them 'kill off' the topic if it gets bad or boring.
Add a bit of tamagotchi behavior - the forum members can rate each others contributions, and if they don't contribute, it bugs them to pony up some decent topics. After neglect, the topic grows ill and is finally destroyed. This is the real valu add, so just like real life, conversations begin, then fizzle out when they lose value. The internet doesn't play nice since all information is constantly in play. Now, if we could only get the university to pony up the resources to build it.
December Intranet advising
Appointments, waivers, notes, grades, scholarships, teaching assignments - the delivery of all the interaction we could think of goes live to great acclaim. The real reward with intranets is to have such instant feedback. When things don't work, you get the thing triaged and fixed right away. Some great elements to the solution, especially the notes area. Make the notes prominent when students are looked up and advisors will use it, fancy that! If its the first thing you see, you see it.
There is a lot of lessons learned, by exposing data from the university we found out pretty much instantly how and where the bad data was. We learned how to use web services to put together different views for different purposes. Also the data mixing trick where we do value added transactions on our end (substituting courses) then had to 'send' the data back to the home office to keep them in sync. Fun stuff :)
September Sharepoint teamservices lessons learned
Having great fun rolling out Sharepoint (its good to be a Microsoft partner and get this new software) - but lots of things it is bad at. Here are some lessons for the future.
- Sharepoint’s collaborative functions are best leveraged among small groups focused on one subject. To allow groups to communicate naturally, it is best to organize a sharepoint site around a subject and invite users to be contributors that will indeed contribute to the effort. When too many people are part of the site, the collaborative tools found in Word and Excel do not function.
- Sharepoint has many tools for organization and promotion, such as news pages, link lists calendar and many others, by creating a site around one subject, the owner is free to use these tools to help organize their content most effectively.
- Having a site ‘owned’ by someone also allows them to rework and reorganize the site based on direct user feedback from the collaborative team, rather than having to serve the information needs of the entire team.
- Sites need constant updating and care to remain effective. When information is no longer needed, if it is part of a larger site it usually remains there and clutters up the goals of the site, by making smaller focused sites, they can serve the needs of the team and then be ignored or deleted when they are no longer useful.
- Sharepoint sites are designed for easy creation, privelige granting, and deletion. Teamsites can and should be created for each meeting, project type and collaborative effort. Since they are data driven, new sites do not create any extra load or space changes, also, the hierarchy of sites can be shown on the main site, since these sub-sites are children of the main site. For example, Microsoft uses sharepoint and currently has 4 portals with over 23,000 individual sites underneath, there are tools to help users aggregate information from all those sites to keep them in touch with their collaborative partners.