Portal User Group

1
Portal User Group

• February 2007

2
Staff Changes

• Glenn Tremblay leaving Mass.Gov as of Friday.
• Important that you use the E2E system rather than
  email or phone.
• We will be short staffed until we can backfill.
• We will do our best to support you during this
  transition period.

3
Statistics

• Analog
• Deployed and fully operational.
• Bug fixes done December rerun, January
  published yesterday
• Feedback has been minimal but mostly positive
• Clicktracks
• Currently tuning and testing internally at
  Mass.Gov
• Clearly requires a high learning curve
• Our goal is to figure out a way to leverage the
  data best in a way we can support.
• We are getting more information from Analog than
  we originally planned which minimizes the need to
  use a tool like Clicktracks.
• This is not a high priority compared to other
  projects.
• Email Joe Galluccio with any ideas for
  statistical analysis that would produce
  actionable result

4
CMA minor changes

• Recent minor changes
• Added year to archive landing pages and news and
  updates landing pages.
• Modified heading tags on some landing pages to
  make them semantically correct and improve
  accessibility
• Added podcast archive module to Governors site.
• Minor change tonight
• Minichunk format correction
• Upcoming within 1 to 2 weeks
• Breadcrumb on news and updates and archive
  landing pages will show proper location in the
  navigation tree.

5
CMA Significant Bug Fix

• When you edit content in Teamsite that is already
  in production, it can be deployed to the
  production environment automatically under
  certain conditions.
• Deferred publishing for feature stories, archive
  modules and news and updates
• Reprioritizing items or renaming categories
• There will likely be a modification to the
  Teamsite submit process to fix this issue.
• This is a major issue and we plan to have it
  fixed within 5 weeks.

6
Teamsite SSL

• We have a minority of customers that have
  problems with uploading files using Teamsite SSL.
• We cannot restrict use of non-SSL unless these
  problems are resolved.
• Problems are not related to settings and appear
  to be specific to sites.
• This makes it very difficult and time consuming
  to address. It requires networking skills at
  ITD and agency sites.
• Glenn had been managing this problem. We will
  need to backfill before we can continue pursuing
  this issue.

7
Apache Redirect Simplification

• The new statistics software showed that there
  were a number of multiple redirects occurring.
• This caused excess traffic between browsers and
  the web servers. It also distorted statistics.
• Change was made on Wednesday February 7.
• You might see some change in your web metrics as
  a result.

8
Teamsite Upgrade

• Production deployment target is late June.
• We have a sandbox server that has recently been
  setup
• We are still assessing user impact but it will be
  minimal.
• Most noticeable change will be the improved
  WYSIWYG editor.
• Behind the scenes changes will include support
  for updated Java JRE on client and Firefox
  browser. IE7 support likely to follow quickly.

9
Other Projects

• Accessibility Fix
• Adding H1 and H2 to constituency pages.
• No visible change to pages.
• Timeframe is 4 to 6 weeks.
• Alert Application Fix
• Email bug specific to sites.
• Timeframe is 6 to 8 weeks.
• ASP query application server upgrade
• Timeframe 2 to 4 months
• Non Portalized Banner Creation
• Upgrade of OpenDeploy to latest supported
  version.
• No user visibility. Will be done after Teamsite
  Upgrade

10
Portal Stability

• One major portal outage and CMA outage occurred
  during the last month.
• Memory usage settings for the portal and its
  database connections were tuned and are being
  monitored.
• We are planning the upgrade Vignette Application
  Portal to the most recent version.
• Improved performance and stability.
• Significant project, but no user visibility.

11
Portal Maintenance

• We do scheduled weekly portal maintenance on
  Tuesdays at 930 pm that often produces a brief
  portal outage.
• We are working aggressively with the Middleware
  team to find ways to eliminate a visible outage
  to the public.
• We are working to try new options and we are
  making progress.

12
Mass.Gov QA Environment

• We are ramping up a project to build a QA
  environment that will accurately mirror the
  production environment.
• Goal is to ensure that changes do not have a
  negative impact on production.
• This is critical to us maintaining uptime and
  providing recoverability.
• May involve a disaster recovery capability.
• Involves multiple groups at the data center and
  throughout ITD.
• This will be a long project 6 months.
• More information later.

13
Portal Technology Reconfiguration

• We are beginning an effort to segment portal code
  in a way that improves the architecture and
  performance of the portal.
• This will take time but will result in improved
  performance, more flexibility and less downtime
  during maintenance.
• Completely transparent. No impact to users or
  content authors.
• This has already started and will continue for 2
  to 3 months.

14
Enhancement Planning

• CMA Enhancements and many fixes have been on hold
  during major projects for the past 18 months.
• Major source of frustration for customers.
• We are updating a master list of possible
  enhancements and changes and are reviewing
  internally.
• But.

15
Resource Limitations

• Based on recent history and the number of ongoing
  projects, we dont have the capacity to implement
  significant CMA enhancements or changes
  effectively.
• We are looking to augment our technical staff so
  that we can address long standing needs.
• Impossible given current budget climate.
• We will be looking to leverage IT Bond 4.