APS3: Building Awesome Sandcastles by Sharing in the CMS Sandbox

Donna Hamilton: We kind of got six or more specific kinds of lessons we've learned and Brian's going to talk about that.

Brian Warner: Hi everybody. I'm Brian Warner. Formerly, I work for Donna in the Web Communications Group and then I moved to the College of Nursing where I have been participating pretty heavily since the RP went out for the Day product.

I kind of want of reiterate a couple of thing that I've noticed. I feel like it was very, very significant, this change in the culture that's happening in the University of Cincinnati. I don't know what your universities are like but UC is extraordinarily siloed, that people can be in the same building and in fact share an office but they will not talk to each other. And this presents a pretty big problem when you want information from this department over here and it's very difficult to get that. I mean, literally you're sending hundred of emails and calling, you're not getting what you want. I guess that's what the culture was.

And so, especially when you have a centralized IT that's cost recovery and I'm sure we all know what that looks like. We have departments that have very little money and they want to accomplish things, instead of paying the cost recovery money, they go and they find their own people that can do it. And maybe, it's just that person who builds websites at home or whatever. So you start to get this hodge-podge patchwork of free content management systems they downloaded off the Internet – the WordPress and Joomla and some of those of other things. UC is a predominantly .net shop. It has a little bit of PHP thrown in there but for the most part, it's Microsoft all the way. So there's a lot of budding heads from the technical perspective. So how do you get all these stuff to play nicely?

Well, originally, when Donna's group threw it, "Hey, check it out. Why don't we all kind of get together and since you guys have developers and you guys have CSS folks and you all know Javascript and Ajax and things. We have this resources but no one's playing, so why don't we? Does that sound cool? And we may get to the university to help us out with some money. Get a contact management system anybody can play with." Well, universally, across the board, everybody drank that Kool-Aid. Thought it was the greatest thing since slice spread. The initial meetings were packed. We're filling conference rooms with folks that were interested in this concept and interested in this idea.

Well, this brings us to one of our first lessons. Originally...

See, there's a lot of cat pictures here. I tried to have the entire conversation with lolcats. You all know what low cats are? Yes? Low cats? All right. Sweet. Wooh!

[Laughter]

Brian Warner: All right. So we have a lot of these folks come in early and say, "Yes, sign me up. I want to do this thing. Help me help you." And so, Donna's group said, "Hey, everybody can come in and play." Well, what we didn't understand is when someone said, "Hey, I understand development and I can do code" that some folks meant that  "I have developed a website in 1996." And standards may have changed during that time. So we didn't really do a very, very good job scrutinizing. We're just very excited that we had all this buy-in early on and say, "Hey, everybody, jump aboard, let's do this thing." And so, when we run into issues, is that someone would say, "Hey, I know the CSS," so that person will get tasked with "Why don't you help us build the initial templates?" Weeks later, the templates are in shambles, that person is way in over his or her head, and you can imagine what kind of drama that causes because everybody else is kind of waiting for that template to show up so we can move forward.

Additionally, we got some folks that actually have a very, very strong technical background in other things.  And then, there are also kind of know more about say understanding Ajax or whatever and they are, you know, a PHP developer. They may be not just super strong with Javascript so that we're in a similar problem.

The second lesson kind of goes along with that. Is that as people started to recognize, "Hey, maybe I'm in a little bit over my head. We had some flux in the folks that would show up to meetings and participate. And sometimes that would happen in the middle of some projects. I'm developing components next to GUI and that person would get, three days into it, "I can't do this because of... " you know, whatever reason and off they would go.

For example, I was on Donna's team originally when we did the RFP process and we're choosing content management system. Then I moved over to College of Nursing, he was way bought into CMS as a concept. Problem is they also had a dean who wanted to launch a website like that day. We haven't gotten...  We were close to our coding so I spent a good portion of my time hand building the site which took away time from coding and developing for a day at that point.

However, once we got started to the beginning of school this year, I will ramp up my time with these folks and we launched Kyle Sesner's website about... So yeah.

What's funny. This is why I have this cat picture with the bag of carrots. So you're like, "What is bag of carrots in this crazy cat picture?" you might think. So during our first engagement with the Day folks, we had a bursting conference room with laptops and a trainer from Day had come out. And so you had all these folks from all these different regions hanging out, they're way excited, they wanted to do development. So the entire world is filled with folks hammering their way out some codes 'cause I'm way into it. Which, again, this is a new thing. No one talk to each other at UC.

So except fore one guy, not hammering away. What's he doing? Amidst the tickey-tickey-tickey-tickey of people typing, crunch-crunch and he's on Facebook. And so this, constant flux in the core team is we would have folks that were like this that would show up because someone in the higher opposition would get super-excited about it and toss random person A into the development team. And that person was not interested in being there and so they didn't really contribute a whole lot.

And so it took us a while to really figure out what makes the right person to be on this. It's not always someone's invested in it but also has the right skill set but also has a management team that's way into it. So it's really those three ingredients.

This was a big one. We have had many failures on the Internet. Having a single port of control for code moving forward is a big deal, and especially when you're talking about having a bunch and bunch of folks that are all contributing code into one spot. Well, some of you, there may be developers and I understand there's SPN and other couple of the other code check in check out situation. We shall all get to SPN and our experience with that one on the next slide.

But you see, we have a central IT system. The central IT folks control the servers and so they have a single port of contact in terms of "You want to go in production, cool. It comes through me." But we also have MCMS. We have a code builder and that person is in charge of taking all the codes from all the developers in putting it to one package so it can go to the IT person. Well, when centralized IT puts in a package into that collection, about half an hour after the code builder does, someone's code overwrites somebody else's code and there's mass pandemonium. And it took hours to figure who did what and why is this happening and why so the website blacked out.

And really, the lesson learned from that is, we just need a better communication in that point. And it seems like something silly when we’re supposed to talk all the time. What it is, at that particular moment, didn't happen to say, "Hey, by the way, I'm throwing a package to production. Check it out."

The amazing disappearing code. We had one of the folks... This again goes back to people skill level and understanding how things should work. And this is maybe a failing of the greater group's part of not really filtering some folks out. But we had some people that were editing code on production which is a super no-no, especially when you're tossing production level packages that has been through QA, up there which will override everything.

So that was mass hysteria for awhile because we have a lot of this little baby pockets of resistance of people trying to do their own thing and not play nicely and it would break and then they will go, bing "Oh, I get it. I should play with the group. I should talk to the group. I should participate in sessions and understand kind of the timeline for how things are going to work."

Finding the right tools. So when we first started with CQ. What's interesting about CQ is that... Some of the others have Day and or have used Day understand that what's nice about Day is that you get your own development package that sits right on your own box. It's awesome in every single way. You don't need a development environment or a server or anything. It installs right on your laptop or PC or whatever. It has its own little local host and is fantastic in that way. The problem is, is that when we originally got it, they were trying to push through SPN to get code changes and do branches and all the other things that SPNs good for. Well, UC-IT, being .net shop was not using SPN for code checking and check out so there was a lot of drama that went into trying to get us to talk to each other well. And literally, it was taking four to five hours per person to set up a development while right around the laptop.  And that was a huge barrier to people playing because it would get to the two-hour mark and it would not work and they no longer want to play ball because they got busy days just like everybody else.

Well, now, it's a simple install. But before, someone in the group had figured out how to correct install it, was literally walking across campus with a flash drive with the install and installing it on this set of developers' computers. Which is super cool and, I think, is a testament to people wanting to bring this core group together.

Audience: Sorry.

Brian Warner: Yeah.

Audience: You guys use a virtual control system then?

Brian Warner: The way that we do it right now is that, folks do development independently. So everybody gets together...

I want to answer this question.

You know, we... None of us has this as primary job. We each have university and college level commitments to do things but this is, you know, we are working towards a whole. You need a component, I need a component, why don't we both work together, right? So we each work independently on our own boxes. "I'll send some codes, you video, whatever, you'll send it back to me." Once we decided that it functions correctly, we'll send it out to the code builder. The code builder puts it into QA. It gets tested. It goes up... Oh, I'm sorry, there's a dev, then it goes to the QA and then it goes in production.

Donna Hamilton:  Or two weeks wait...

Brian Warner: Right.

Donna Hamilton:  We were doing it every week because we have so many things that need to be fixed each time. But now we've two weeks, which Jill houses part-time to actually develop but we were just like...

Brian Warner: But what this independent development does do is... While we're saying that we've may have knocked down a bunch of barriers between the silos, they're all on their own, all now. And even between the friendships and the handholding, the hi-five and what we're doing right now, there's still some drama. So Day has this concept of components. You have a little toolbar, you click and you drag on your page, poof, there's a text component, I can type it in. There's an image component, I can put an image in it, so on, so forth.

Well, every department, every college, every website on campus has to be different. Why? Because they want it, right? And up to now, there's been literally a server under somebody's desk and by server, I mean, a computer that's been rotated out, that's sitting under somebody's desk, that's connected to the internet and that's what's hosting the website. And it's written in PHP 3.

There hasn't been any control over design up to now. And so, smaller things that we've not really been able to enforce is super consistent in design. You know, we're pushing brand new elements across but in terms of every webpage looking the same, not so much. You know, College of Nursing looks different than College of Business looks different than College of Law. There's unifying elements but...

So say for example, UC-IT, they wanted to have a text component that have a red bar across the top on it. And College of Business wanted to have one that have a black line on the left of it, and so and so forth. You have each of these colleges that are all building, I mean literally, functionality-wise, the same component. It just might have an image next to it or it might have a wavy line or whatever. And so we've been trying to discourage that and to build the one way, the one text component that has checkboxes or whatever on UC-IT that has CSS selector so that you can add whatever you want to it. That's been a bit of a fight. Because even though people want to play ball, they still want to be their own thing.

Kay has a cool one. All right. And this is basic project management at this point but we're talking about something that's really, really large-scale at UC. It's one thing to say, "Hey, we're rolling out a new website and let's do the project management with that." Or do project management across colleges and departments that will not talk to each other and they try to convince that kind of collaboration. It's been hard and so you really... I mean, this is really important to recruit this kind of champions. And really those seven developers that Donna has mentioned. All those folks to go out and shape in the cars with a sword and the shield and take the lumps when maybe it doesn't work exactly the way you expect to but we can build on that.

I happen to be on this champion role to go along and help and mentor the developers that are maybe not so savvy. You know, they have the talent, they just don't necessarily understand exactly what to do just yet.  We came from a .net shop and Day is Java which angered IT like furiously, like thunderbolts and lightning and craziness and we had no Java at all for some campus. Dismantled.

So how do you deal with that?  How do you launch a content management in 14 months with zero Java understanding? So it took a lot of ...

Pictures, Donna.

Yeah. It took a lot of... Somebody would get up on the current Java, buy some books or whatever and take a seminar off at Lynda.com, and then it would be a tutoring session for everybody else. And if you don't have that kind of "Hey come with me," I don't feel like it was going to work. And we really didn't have that initially. We just kind of hodge-podge stuff until we really understood we got to wrap our arms around it.

Unpredictable life cycle for development. So there was this one time that the group said, "Hey, what we need is a list component that does list item. We want items to be feed through RSS. Maybe it's a recourse of navigation so when I add pages, automatically the navigation works. Then we want to do XYZ things."  So this guy right here said, "Sure, I've got you and I'll go ahead and do that development." So, I hear he went out in three days and brought for the next code meeting with "Whack, there it is!" And they were "Uhum, well, this is what we wanted. Our expectations have now changed and now we also needed to do whatever crazy thing."  And that happens actually quite a bit, is that we'll hand something out and someone will spend the time to build it and we won’t end up using it.

Donna Hamilton: At the time, it marked the beginning... we built something and it comes out and Roland would say, "That's going to become a problem," instead of having to change directions.

Brian Warner: Sure. And you know, it change a little bit of strategy here in terms of how should we get content into the system and how should it move from place to place and so on. But the good thing is, is that I've never lost a piece of code. I've always have been able to re-purpose that for something else but especially in the beginning, until you really define strategy. And I don’t know that you can define one without actually getting your feet dirty and walking around in the mud and understanding how things are working.

Oh, there's other time too, and this is really good. So we had this browser streaming, flash streaming, media servers on campus and we take a lot  of video. Seems like the hip thing the kids are into nowadays, is watching videos on the internet. So we had a video component, it wasn't very cool, and so I built a new one. It does all the social media stuff and it sends email and it does a lot of hip cool things. Well, the problem is that when I was coding it, it left a hanging comma in the Javascript which only appears if you check some of the conditional boxes. Should that have been found in QA? Probably. But at this point we've been moving so fast that this little hang in comma was missed. Why? Because it was only tested on IE's AIEA in a buff, Google, Firefox, Opera, blah-bleh-bleh-blah-blah. All these browsers are very forgiving of this hanging comma.

So what happens if you’re the President and you're looking at your Convocation video the day after you give the speech at Freshman Convocation, and you click on the link and it goes to a 404. And when I say link, I mean you click the play button on the video and it goes to a 404 page because you're using IE 7. Pow! Yeah, someone gets yelled at. So that's an emergency fix.

[Laughter]

Yeah. So I mean, that was a slightly unpredictable thing. We literally had to fix up and in production in two hours and that's to figure out what was wrong with it, get it to QA and Dev and make sure it was working properly with those environments getting it live.

But you know, these are lessons learned. Even though we have a fairly robust testing environment, things get through. So, and here's the thing. Is that we still are not pleasing everybody. We have a lot of buy-in. We have a lot of folks, a lot of colleges and departments that are not playing ball right now.

How many sites do we have in there?

Sixty. That's a lot. And these are not little rinky-dink sites. They are massive hundred page sites. Example... But still we were talking about a lot of web stuff at very, very short amount of time, and we still manage to 'not' make everybody happy.

For example, one of our colleges had gone off the reservation. They built their own very, very robust content management system. They had scheduling and it had product ordering and all kinds of other crazy stuff. That's not something that we're prepared to support just yet on our new content management.  You know, we're trying to build things as fast as we can but they want it now. Cool, gotcha, and we'll get there.

Or one of the leaders of IT across campus isn’t just super happy with the language that we're using. Not happy with Java, the .net developers. Got you too, but there wasn't a product that did what we wanted to do that is in the .net environment at that moment. That Day really had the sort of experience that they has. That's why we chose them.

You know I feel like regardless of the particular product, these concepts will work across whatever content management system that you're...  I assume everybody's using content management or something? Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah.

Well, yeah, at the end of the day, we had a lot of headaches but we've learned a lot of good lessons and sometimes you just got to keep them coming. But we're all making something beautiful, is that we went from having websites that were liquid and fixed-width and purple and yellow and ridiculous to now having a lot of brand new experiences that have a lot of the Web 2.0 things that the incoming students really expect. Facebook integration, cool. Twitter and all the fun stuff to have out of today's collegial websites and what's nice is we're all doing it together.

Donna Hamilton: Okay, your turn. Any questions? You want to share with each other what you're doing at your university for content management?

Audience: Can we get a look at some of the results?

Brian Warner: Sure.

Donna Hamilton: We can get online and comment.

Brian Warner: Using the power of the internet, I think we can help you.

So does anybody else have that... I'm just going to throw away a question out there 'cause I think it's fun. I assume that you all have campusOne? You have a hodge-podge of content management system?

Audience: Hodge- podge.

Brian Warner: Hodge- podge?

Audience: Hodge podge... and we're protocol. For similar reasons, we need the tools that we need to do what they do. In NYU, the University Central just like seven months ago released their Day CMS.

Brian Warner: Oh, really.

Audience: For everybody to come on board if they want to. We're not coming on for some of the reasons  we talked about but clearly that's the right solution.

Brian Warner: Sure. Anyone else? Sherry? Gary?

Audience: I'm with Cornell. We have a centrally managed CMS and they're also allowing to do...

Brian Warner: Do whatever what they want.

Audience: But there's visual guidelines there.

Brian Warner: Sure. Is there...

Donna Hamilton: We're all kind of looking at the web version so we're not quite, and a stretched and it's... But this is Brian's College.

Here's the example, we got this content sliders here.  And you see mine's slightly different than the College Conservatories of Music. These are actually are separate components and I'm part of the problem I just described, is that I needed to be special too, because I have a dean that's very exacting in what she wants. But still the goal is to have one component that can do quite a few things but still provide that user experience for folks that are a less savvy. But then, we'll have to check like a thousand boxes to get the results that we want.

Was that Engineering's?

Donna Hamilton: You notice that they all look quite a lot different although they do all have a new standard. So it is a false assumption but then you need running skins for the site.

Audience: Sure.

Brian Warner: Yeah. You know the content slider? This one, in the one from... Yeah, there's actually three of this fall that you've seen thus far are actually the same component. They just have CSS changes and check boxes for different Javascripts and so on and so forth.

Donna Hamilton: And that's where it's timed, really targeted, because every time you do a coding, you think that somebody has to support that. And every time we'll upgrade the software, then that's another thing we have to check. So we're trying really hard to minimize road development.

Brian Warner: Yeah, and that's... I mean, I said, you have centralized ITs? That controlled like the console that can see everything?

Audience: For the schools or centers or whatever that are playing with you, can they utilize any of your assets? Or like, is there a way to make Day talk to other systems or to have other systems talk to it?

Brian Warner: Yeah. They can push you out and scan the API. I mean, we can get Day in and out how they want. I mean, one of the biggest things is that while we collected some money from folks, it was a relatively small amount of money as compared to some of the custom works that UC-IT wants. So I feel like the barrier for people entering is not necessarily monetary one. So I feel like, at this point, people... They don't want to get in because they're scared. I feel that's the truth in it.

Donna Hamilton: Actually, we have so many people on the list that we can get from them. So we're not really trying to recruit them if they don't want to come. We have a college and a library system that is just massive. It's just wanting to come on, however HR real nobody. Your HR's size probably one of my very... So we have more business on weekends to deal with for awhile.

Brian Warner: Alright. What got you?

Audience: The branches that's a code base, is there sort of... since everybody collaborated on that?

Donna Hamilton: Really, it’s in my area that's kind of odd.

Brian Warner: What's funny is that Donna's Web Communications Group is part of University Communications which not UC-IT. And so, the person that manages the code base and the quality control, that actually is one of Donna's folks.

Audience: So if there's something broken, they kind of...

Donna Hamilton: Yeah, the way we partner really kind of tell everyone to come around. Just all the software and people, we don't need the IT for it. So between them, about two or three of them, they work it out.

Brian Warner: If you're not using Skype now... Yeah. That's what's up. We have a question up here?

Audience: Is there anything that Day doesn't do?

Brian Warner: Yeah.

Audience: ... every day like... That's a major shortcoming why that is a reason people don't come on.  

Brian Warner: Yeah. I mean it doesn't have... Like for example, our College of Business has that really cool event entry system which Day has.

Audience: Right.

Donna Hamilton: Let's just say that though.

Brian Warner: Right, it's true. And there is...

Donna Hamilton: We have the social collaboration package. We have it done. It does everything that we want to do, we just have not a chance to go to that.  

Brian Warner: What it won't do right now for Donna is a bit of a limitation and it's our fault. And because we're so decentralized, is that Day kind of expects you to have a centralized database source. So let's say that you're Proctor & Gamble, you probably have a farm and that's where all the data goes. We don't have that there. I mean literally people have had servers on their desk so I'm not even kidding about that, that's what happens. And so, say I want to create a format, I want that to write to my database and I want to do it the secure manner, data don't really has a way to connect to a database from a component just yet. And we're looking into that as it stands right now but I'm not convinced that it's possible just yet.

So what Day kind of want you to do is to bite to the content... I know we're not supposed pimping our Day but Day sets all the Java content repository, so it's building nodes. And so when you're entering stuff at your forum, it wants to build nodes actually within the system and I'm just not quite convinced that I want to hold data in that way but...

What's up? Question? Yeah, okay.

Audience: You have any problem where you lose a lot of talent...

Donna Hamilton: Actually, I'm the one... I think what happened is that our resources since the IT areas and the usual content and when that happens they say, "Yikes, how are we going to deal with this stuff." We don't have to run a server. We don't have to develop a content management system So I think that's one of the reasons we are giving the people who are in the position. All of it is in the content management system...

[Noise]

Brian Warner: And he's requesting that now.

Donna Hamilton: Yeah, and it's really been... the university as a whole because we're... They're noticing more and more that it is a lot faster. I don’t think they even kind of...

Brian Warner: In your perspective, it makes sense to centralize the developments. Right now, you're using developments in various places. It makes sense either their end for security purposes than your end, for the coordination purposes. The two would bring together...

Donna Hamilton: Yeah. In ideal world, I think so for the university, I would do that if I wanted to but in my lifetime, it's close to impossible. I don't think they'll have to that process.

Brian Warner: I feel like that having developers from different background definitely brings a lot of diversity in terms of thoughts and ideas to some of the crazy components we come up with.

Donna Hamilton: But like Brian said, they all have their own jobs so I'm basically taking part of their time. Right? 

Audience: Yeah.

Donna Hamilton: I can't say this is what we do, and we have to do it and it should be done by now. No.

Audience: So if there's an emergency situation as you described, you can call them up because you know too well at any point in time? 

Donna Hamilton: Yeah. If it was his... Yeah, if it was his, I'll definitely call him up.

Brian Warner: I mean, one of the things we're trying to encourage is we know we're going to build a component anyway.  Why don't you build a component that maybe is a little bit more vanilla with some check boxes and customization on advance tab so that we can roll that into a base level code. Everybody can have it. And so, there's a lot of crazy things that's going on in there right now. Click and drag and drop, MP3  players on the page or video players on YouTube, Twitter feeds or whatever.

Donna Hamilton: I think that we're going to repurpose it to when the College Business says, "Well, we can't use that because we needed to do custom search." Well, almost always, they'll say, "We need custom search and we're going to need the codes to be special." Almost always, three times. Someone else, as soon as they say, "Oh, why are you looking at me not you." I think it's going to be an eye opener for a lot of the areas working in that, "Oh, we are really all alike." You know what it means.

Since you've been in Cincinnati, then you will notice billboards that's on kind of the fourth floor.

Audience: That's a...

Donna Hamilton: The one that is right on top? Watching behind that path to the airport and at the airport, and see the Cincinnati... is on top of it.

Thank you for coming and our ...

[Applause]

Hold on. There's a presentation up on the....