Classified Staff

The Plan for Coop's future use of the web

Thursday, March 18, 2010

To: All Cooperative Extension staff

Subject: The Plan for Coop’s future use of the web

I would like to take this opportunity to provide you with an overview of the changes that are planned for Cooperative Extension’s web presence.

Let’s start with our current presence on http://www.uwex.edu/ces. As it exists today, there is a lot of “stuff” on our web site. It is a mix of educational programming content, administrative policy, minutes, etc., internal events (conferences, team documents), and whatever else someone decides to put on the site. As a result, it is difficult to find something. Based on strategic planning work, looking at best practices of industry, and other Cooperative Extension services around the country, we have decided to make some changes to how we present ourselves on the web.

The first step we initiated was to separate our “business” content from our educational or “product” content. To do this we are going to build an Intranet. This will be an internal, password protected system with built-in collaboration tools, document storage and many other features. This projected was actually started several years ago, but given the UW-Extension/UW Colleges integration and the subsequent infrastructure changes needed to address that, this project has been delayed until now. This October at the All Colleague Conference we will launch the New Coop Network. It will be within the context of this Coop Network the processes identified that replace the Planning and Reporting system will deployed.

We are also looking at ways that partners will be able to have controlled access certain parts of our Coop Network (it’s called an Extranet). This will allow these partners to login and collaborate on document creation, participate in discussion etc. all in a managed way that gives them access to what they need, but prevents them from seeing or accessing other content.

At the same time as the planning for Intranet was occurring, the Web 2.0 movement began to take off. We were receiving more and more requests to provide access to be able to do blogs, podcasts, embed video and other Web 2.0 features. Contribute, used by many to update their web sites does not easily allow for adopting these new technologies and the server technology we have available for writing code is not equipped to handle these requests. After evaluating options we settled on WordPress and created the FYI server (http://fyi.uwex.edu) for hosting new sites. In the 9 months since its launch over 100 sites have been created. This service will be an integral part of our presence as we move forward.

You may have also noticed another WordPress server, Coop Connection (http://blogs.ces.uwex.edu). FYI contains content relevant to our educational programming. Coop Connection contains content related to our business operations (e.g. the site I know everyone has visited – The Dean’s Blog).

The county web sites use Contribute, sit on a server with the legacy programming language and cannot easily take advantage of current technologies – and I’m not talking bleeding edge, these are well established standards used for content publishing, sharing, and reuse that have been used for years. For each person who uses Contribute it cost a minimum of $51. This can add up to quite a bit over time when upgrades occur etc. To be able to take advantage of new technologies, to decrease costs and minimize the number of web content editing tools, we will be moving the county web sites to WordPress. We have developed a new WordPress County Theme which will provide you with more flexibility and control over the look and feel of the current Contribute template. At the Dept. Head Conference’s resource fair, we demo’d the theme and received good feedback. We are making some technical changes and are beginning to plan how we will do the migration and training. We are looking to start sometime in May and finish up by the October launch of the Coop Network. County offices will be receiving an email with more detail.

Once we have the Coop Network and get our business processes and content creation/storage moving along in that environment we will begin the process of reworking our public educational content presence. Our vision at this time is to create a portal that can advantage of the content sharing and reuse available via Web 2.0 technologies to get the public to your content. Beyond that we don’t have a lot of detail.

I hope this gives you a sense of the big picture on where things are headed. Of course, ask if you have questions.

Thanks,

Greg

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