Meeting Minutes
January 23, 2003

Present
Mac Avery, Jeff Buffington (for Robert Dixon), Linda Crouch, Bob Fryberger, Malinda Miller-Huey, Bryan Moll, Gary Pollock, Judy Poynter, Bonnie Templeton, Barbara Todd, Paula Vaughan, Terry Vaughan

Portal Project discussions and presentations

• At a recent meeting, Student Affairs members expressed concerns about the resources required to move all of their web services to the portal. Response to concern: Moving to the portal immediately is not a requirement. One component of the project is to develop specifications so that departments can adapt their existing web services and features to the portal framework. Currently, there is no project funding to support conversion of all campus web services to the portal; departments would need to contribute resources. The project should offer a presentation to this group.
  
• Dennis did a brief presentation for the SIS Governance Board. Though generally well-received, the individual campuses did not appreciate seeing “My CU” as the header logo for the UCB portal. This needs to be changed.

Design Options
Will Kubie of Web Communications presented three design options for Core Team review:

1. Columnar presentation with headings in purple.
2. Columnar presentation with headings in a shaded background
3. Columnar presentation with unique colors per column.

Comments about the design options included:

• Preference for being able to distinguish unique channels.
• Preference for grouping like subjects per column and color.
• Concern about the links in the banner header that would take the user outside the portal even though still logged into the portal behind the scenes. (whereas linking from within a portal channel would give developers more control over the user’s session)
• Concern about straying from the uPortal standard (logout button in the header banner, icons for webmail, preferences and logout, and color columns are all outside the uPortal standard).
• Concern about investing time developing the most difficult option without knowing if this would be a well-received option, or developing all three options without knowing if all three would be well-received.

Decision

• Web Communications would prefer to build the specifications for the most difficult design first (color columns) and spec the other two options from there.
• Core would like broader input, preferably through a student focus group, perhaps through a survey.

Demo Site
Paula demo’d the demo site. Some of it is real function, some is mock up. General presentation was well-received by Core.

Announcements task force

• The announcements channel, customized for the individual student, is a high priority item for both students and the Vice Chancellor.
• Building an announcement submission, review and publishing process will require a fair amount of analysis due to the number of groups involved, the need to determine what is mandatory vs. optional, the impact on and/or coordination with Ememo and Buff Bulletins, and related policy work currently being done by the Committee on Electronic Communications.
• Volunteers for the announcements task force: Linda Crouch, Malinda Miller-Huey, Gary Pollock (or designee), Bonnie Templeton, Barbara Todd, with Paula tangentially involved.
• Action Item: Task force should provide an update at the next Core Meeting and have formal recommendations prepared by February 16th from which technical programming and design work can commence.

Events task force

• Events will require analysis work because of the number of independent calendars being maintained on campus and the need to coordinate amongst all of these groups for the submission, review and publishing of campus events.
• It is highly unlikely that a complete process reengineering could be accomplished in time for the prototype, perhaps not even by fall. But, an events submissions/publish prototype should be available in time for the portal prototype. Candidates for inclusion in this prototype include Community Affairs (the current campus events calendar), UCSU student groups, and the Rec Center (club sports, intramurals).
• Volunteers for the events task force: Malinda Miller-Huey, Pat Jensen, Josh Lopez, Bryan Moll and Paula Vaughan.
• Action Item: Task force should provide an update at the next Core Meeting.

Homework
Each core team member should give some thought about who should be the audience for the prototype release.

Next Meeting
Thursday, February 6th, 2 p.m., Telecomm Conference Room