Goals for next semester:
I’m going to finish the administrator and user evaluations of our blogware options. From there, I plan to consult with the others in my little project group and select a software platform. After that, I’m going to bring in a few designers to talk about the interface for the blog, in the hopes that it can be created in a way that folks will use it.
Then, we start filling it with stuff. I have old QnA information that I’ve saved for just this purpose….
There have been some interesting developments in a few days time. Overall, the project is glacial, but there have been some rapid-fire developments interspersed among the nothingness.
According to our techie, there are THREE blogware installations up, which is TWO more than there were last week. I've been granted administrator access to at least one of them, so I'm going to be spending this week (before Thursday) going through and evaluating them both from the user's perspective and for an administrator.
I'm guessing that I won't be around forever, so I'm really looking for something easy-to-administer, and without that administrator access I couldn't really look at that.
One installation also has the blog-by-email feature that I've been touting as the "killer ap" for this project. My group has been through a lot in the past year; the changes in software and process have fundamentally changed the way their job is done. I didn't want to make any more changes that cut that deeply.
The hope is that integration, where they don't have to change the program they use to communicate, will enable everyone to use it as a resource and something worth doing without having to learn anything new; something they've had more than their fill of in the past year. Blog-by-email would allow them to contribute to the blog using Outlook, which is how they are used to communicating.
This semester has provided me with quite a few institutional challenges in getting this K-log project up and running.
The toughest part has proven finding the right people with the proper skills and the willingness to say "yes" to get some software on the right servers and configured so that we can evaluate. I'm not sure if that process has ended, but we are now at a point where we can at least move forward with evaluation. It has taken FAR longer than I"m comfortable with and it has involved some serious discussions with consultants about deadlines and accountability.
In some ways it's been beneficial because the glacial pace of evaluation and installation has given the group time to really think about the features they're looking at and the types of information they're going to want to get out of this.
As of now, there are two pieces of blogware up and ready for evaluation; Plone and WordPress. Ultimately there will be two more, for a total of 4.
My hope is that, after the holidays, we'll have some serious time to evaluate each system both in terns of easy of administration (CRUCIAL) and ease of use for end-users (the rest of the group).