The last two weeks leading up to the National Youth Gathering were a little insane. I think they’re pretty well wrapping things up so I can look back now and laugh about the whole process. The quick story is that we decided to turn the admission counselors laptops into web servers so they could run a whole website without “the internets”. The problem is, Windows is not the best platform to run a server on. So I had to trouble shoot the process about 35 times. (The last one being over the phone after they were in Florida). But we got it all working!

Students were greeted with a flash movie of about 20 of Drew’s famous pictures of the University throughout all seasons and activities. At any time, students could interrupt the movie to fill out a form requesting more information about the university–including requesting that Comet add them to facebook or myspace. When they submit the form, it resets to the flash movie.

All the info is stored on a flat file on the laptops and we will be able to load them into our system when the counselors get back.

It looks great and is even a little fun. I’m just blown away that the biggest hassle in the whole process was beating Windows into submission!

(You’ll have to ask Brock for a translation).

I am touching all my active projects and either finishing them up or passing them on to those who will cary them forward. This week I begin cross-training with Micah, squeezing every last drop of information about the web at CSP out of his long-haired head. It’s always fun learning new things, but it’s also a little strange to let go of old projects. Whether you realize it or not, you really do invest a lot of energy and time into them, and they become like little pets.

Goodbye little pets.

Our Google Apps pilot group is off to a great start with around 22 volunteers already signed up. There is a wiki page for the migration process to move from Microsoft Outlook to Google Apps that will hopefully aid pilot group members in testing the full functionality of their CSP Google Accounts.

After about 4 - 5 months of troubleshooting this application with Meeting Maker’s engineers, Concordia’s SAVii site is finally back online. SAVii is the web interface to Concordia’s Scheduler+ software, which is used to schedule classrooms and other rooms around the campus.

VMWare came to the rescue allowing a clean installation of the software on a virtual machine that would not interfere with the day to day operations of our other web servers.

Remember sitting in 114 a while back impersonating a student in chat for a demonstration?  I have taken that demo and partnered it with a Discussion Board demo.  The goal is to give perspective students an opportunity to “sit in” on each of these very important elements of WebCT.

Currently, these demos can be found at:

http://concordia.csp.edu/WebCT/_Documents/_Captivate/_Students/dbdemo.htm

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I’m working on a design for our Support wiki.

A little history: At one point we used the wiki only for documenting internal process at the Help Desk. Over time it became apparent that our internal documentation would be useful for the whole university. (Why should we hoard the steps for forwarding your email to another account?) The problem is, I have permission to use the design currently on the wiki for internal use only. So, I’m working on making the wiki look more like the rest of CSP.

It’s not playing nice though–I’m combing through the PHP line by line to figure out why it doesn’t want to load the code the way it should. It could be as simple as a single missing ‘>’ or ‘}’. Once it loads up, I’ll just spend a little time adjusting the CSS to make everything pretty.