Engineering Intranet

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Engineering Intranet Presented by Paul
Davis Project Web site intranet.engr.cornell.
edu/intranet/IT/collegeIntranet
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Goals for the Intranet

• Develop a Website to support Faculty and Staff in
  doing administrative parts of their jobs.
• To provide Infrastructure to Support College's
  Best Practices Deliverables .
• To provide intranet to academic departments, not
  just the Dean's office.
• Phase I
• One stop shopping" for information about
  administrative processes in several areas.
• Almanac of reference materials such as data
  tables, reports, and a college fact book

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Vision How Do I / FAQOne stop shopping for
Information

• Address needs from the users perspective
• Use the language of the reader.
• Complete authoritative information for each
  area covered
• If the topic area is covered on the intranet, you
  shouldnt have to look elsewhere.
• Easy to find what you need
• excellent navigation
• Best source of information on Campus
• But dont rewrite stuff available elsewhere, link
  to it
• Not simply a catalog of existing materials
• Decide what we want first. If its not available,
  write it.

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Audiences

• Customers
• E.g. someone who needs to buy something
• Need text written in their language
• Presented from their perspective
• Many people will read each page
• Should be written well
• Processors
• Only 10 or 30 people for each topic (e.g. all
  purchasing professionals in the college)
• Will be writing for other people like you
• Can be much more informal

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Pilot is Addressing Five Topic Areas

• Human Resources
• Graduate Program Administration
• Safety (Addressing safety manual)
• Purchasing (part of finance)
• Almanac (fact book, etc.)

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Intranet Content and Best Practice Team
Responsibilities

• Identify your audiences and the information they
  need
• Prioritize pages to write
• Write the content or find someone to write it
• Develop site map and navigation
• Identify and make changes as needed
• Audience driven improvement
• Determine how well you are meeting your audiences
  needs
• Improve information navigation as needed

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Oversight Team Responsibilities

• Overall project management Coordination
• Technology
• Overall navigation
• Maintaining consistency across site
• Providing tools and training you need
• Phasing of the project

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How Do I Answers to FAQOne stop shopping for
Information

• Address needs from the users perspective
• Use the language of the reader.
• Complete authoritative information for each
  area covered
• If the topic area is covered on the intranet, you
  shouldnt have to look elsewhere.
• Easy to find what you need
• excellent navigation
• Best source of information on Campus
• But dont rewrite stuff available elsewhere, link
  to it
• Not simply a catalog of existing materials
• Decide what we want first. If its not available,
  write it.

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Navigation Choosing Job Function(s)
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Navigation Homepage
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Navigation Second level Nav Page
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Navigation Choice Page
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Template Answer Page
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Later Phases

• Staff and Department Directories
• Manage department, committee and other types of
  memberships, print mailing labels, create email
  lists, etc.
• Access control
• Use memberships from directories (described
  above) to limit access to pages or subsites
• Project and committee sub sites
• Have a place for everyone on a committee to post
  and share documents so you dont have to email
  them around all the time
• Other administrative tools
• We are starting specification of a space
  inventory system

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Intranet Collaboration Model

• Web Financials
• Started in one dept
• Grew to CALS
• Then grew to many colleges
• Finally grew to campus
• GAPS
• Developed in ECE dept
• Grew to College of Engineering
• Now outside units using it too
• Both leveraged local knowledge and grew based on
  demand

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Two Adoption Options

• Take Our Code
• Well give you our code
• You can hire same person we are using at CIT to
  support your effort
• Can join us in hosting at CIT
• Join us on our server
• You can pilot with us on our server
• You can hire same person we are using at CIT to
  support your effort on our servers
• This allows more interconnection of content (but
  more coordination)
• This is the plan for EHSs safety manual

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Business Reasons We Want to Work With CIT

• Ability for others to adopt our "outsourcing"
  agreement with CIT easily.
• CS hosting for groups with special needs is an
  issue we likely need to address centrally and I'm
  the first up.
• WFP guidelines/recommended practices are to host
  with CIT.
• Growing expectation that CIT will meet academic
  units needs.

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Our Constraints

• Cost relative to our backup plan to host with
  ECE using a Windows environment.
• Time Hosting direction is only thing project is
  waiting on.
• We think we need relatively high level of control
  on the web server (less on dbase server).
• Need to copy user database for whatever CS
  instance we're hosted on.
• Ability to migrate from MS SQL to Oracle but not
  from Oracle to MS SQL

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Status of the Project

• Tech spec is complete
• Graphic design is complete
• Mockup load test of site against Oracle is
  complete
• Oracle specific code is complete (will need to
  re-write for MS SQL server)
• Content is beginning to come in
• ...waiting on hosting direction for final sign
  off to implement

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Questions?

• Any Questions?
• More information is at the project website
• intranet.engr.cornell.edu/intranet/it/collegeIntra
  net/
• Current page designs
• This powerpoint presentation
• Technical specification
• Hosting goals document