Drupal, ITS Website, Moodle, Windows7, Help and Outages

Drupal
Drupal is open-source software that publishes, manages, and organizes a wide variety of content on a website. Drupal is used by the US government, the Whitehouse, MTV and thousands of other organizations to manage their websites.  The College is currently using Ingeniux to manage our website.  After careful study and endorsement by the College Web Advisory Group we are in the process of joining the elite organizations mentioned above as we start migrating our websites to Drupal.
 
Drupal will give us more flexibility and has more built-in functionality such as blogs, collaborative authoring environments, forums, podcasting, and picture galleries.  This is a massive project and will take over a year as we have to migrate the more than 7,000 web pages that comprise our web presence.  ITS and OMC  are working together to migrate pages and content.  Any new project, such as the new Admission site, will constructed in Drupal.
 
Chartwells was the first site migrated to Drupal. It debuted last week.  To view the new Chartwells website visit http://chartwells.noctrl.edu/
 
ITS Website
The second web site to be migrated to Drupal was our own.  All of the information on the website has been updated and has been reorganized.  One of the Drupal features that we implemented was filtered content.  If you login as a faculty, staff, or student you will get filtered content.  Another addition is comments can be made directly on the website to help us improve it or to let us know what you think about any ITS related issue or project.  Please login and let us know what you think of the new site.  To view the new ITS site visit: https://its.noctrl.edu/
 
Outages
Just a reminder, if there are any outages ITS will notify the campus community.  And, we will also notify you when the systems are back in order.  There have been no outages this week and all systems have performed as they should.
 
Help
Often times ITS staff must leave their desks to fix user problems so calling a staff member directly does not ensure that your problem will be resolved in a timely manner. An ITS staff member may also be ill or on vacation.   The best way to ensure that you will get your problem resolved is to email the Help Desk.  All email and phone calls are placed into RT Tracker.  Many times during a day, members of the ITS staff check RT tracker to identify problems that need resolution; so your request is heard and properly categorized.  This way you have many eyes looking to resolve the problem rather than just one.
 
For instance, today there are 262 tickets in RT Tracker:  101 tickets to the Help Desk in general, 80 for Datatel, 31 for the Web and 50 for projects.
 
As a reminder our priority for fixing problems is Institutional; Instructional; Departmental; Individual who cannot complete their work due to technology problems; Individual who can do some of their work with technology problems.
 
Moodle
At the present time we have 15 faculty who have volunteered to try Moodle. Faculty members from every division volunteered.  We will be setting up a discussion group on Moodle to talk about Moodle.  We are also looking at the possibility of providing some hands on training during the fall term with actual usage by the test group starting Winter term.  Some faculty are testing the waters with Moodle this summer.  We will keep the campus community updated on what is happening.
 
Windows 7 Migration Update
An inventory of all computers on campus has been completed; 950 computers.  We  are still working on the 108 laptops.  Half of the PCs will not be able to run Windows 7.  In addition, the almost 400 different software programs that run on the network are being inventoried to determine which will be able to run on Windows 7.  So far we've identified several that will not work.  ITS staff will be contacting faculty who use software programs that will not run on Windows 7 to determine what they would like to do.
 
ITS has visited every PC that will be able to run Windows 7 and added more memory to those PCs.  The standard amount of memory will now be 4 MB.  Windows XP had a memory capacity of 3 MB.