[182] in IS Home Pages
re: Changing top page for certificates
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ginny Williams)
Tue Aug 25 17:42:20 1998
Date: Tue, 25 Aug 1998 17:43:28 -0500
To: is-home@MIT.EDU
From: Ginny Williams <ginnyw@MIT.EDU>
Cc: jag@MIT.EDU, Rob Smyser <smyser@MIT.EDU>, ridgway@MIT.EDU
There is a problem with undertaking this right now. There are around 1100
new frosh and 1200 new graduate students. Orientation activities begin
tomorrow 8/26. The documenation is already printed. It's too late.
The hundreds of new students coming to campus this week are "stakeholders"
in the process, in fact they are origin of the majority of our processes
here. Among several thousand other tasks they have to accomplish, including
finding a place to live, and acclimating themselves to MIT, they need to be
able to navigate through our web pages and all the documentation they
receive in order to get their accounts up and running. We need to make
things as easy as possible for them.
As part of my work at the MCC I spent several years in the midst of fall
orientation, and I know how hectic and confusing this time is for these
students. If you're not willing to wait until mid-September to make this
change, I propose that we wait until at least registration day (September
8), when orientation officially ends and we're confident that all the
students are back on campus. If you'd like to change the heading of the
page to point more prominently to the new toc page, I have no objection to
that. I do have an objection to breaking the visual link between the
Athena documentation and our web pages. No teacher would ever want that to
be the case, and nearly all the incoming frosh take the Athena minicourses.
They're given hourly for the first four days of orientation and then
frequently after that for the next two weeks (Oliver, please correct me if
I'm wrong about the two weeks). If we were thinking of doing this we
should have done it before the documentation was printed, but since it is
already done, we should show consideration for those teaching the Athena
minicourses and staffing the clusters and wait.
For everyone providing services to the students this is an absolutely crazy
two weeks. We should not have to make them explain to every confused
student that instead of going to http://web.mit.edu/is/help/cert/index.html
for instructions they need to go one level below. Don't you think they
might wonder why *our* very own documentation doesn't conform to *our* very
own web pages and why we made this change during rush? I hope I'm not
coming off sounding harsh, I'm ot meaning to be, I've just been through
this before and I know how crazy it is not only for the students but for
those who are here to help them.
ginny
>
>I think we *should* update http://web.mit.edu/is/help/cert/index.html to
>include valuable information for users, namely the table of contents.
>Notice that I say update rather than "switch" the pages. It's a
>philosophical difference.
>
>Many people will be returning to campus in the next couple of weeks and
>need to get new certificates, as well as troubleshoot possible problems.
>The way I see it, this page is a pointer into what people need to know
>about certificates at MIT. The body of knowledge has grown over the past
>year, and I think the best we can do for people is to give them quick
>access to the variety of pages on the topic.
>
>Jag and I discussed this issue with Robyn and Lee last week, and also asked
>some stakeholders what their preference would be. We got support for
>updating the page from Joanne Stevenson (WebSIS), Bob Murray (SAP), and
>Susan M-Azary and Jonathan Ives (Integration).
>
>Of course we don't want any links to break. It turns out that using our
>handy-dandy test engine Ultraseek, there are NO web pages pointing to an
>anchor reference within index.html. This means no link would break.
>
>There are 56 pages on web.mit.edu that link to is/help/cert, and most of
>them are IS pages. Additionally, 10 other pages on mit.edu domain link to
>the document. (URLs below).
>
>It would be labor intensive to write to the 66 page maintainers, because
>we'd have to go into each page and search for the contact.
>
>I was planning to check with Jeff Schiller next, then write to infosys that
>the page had been updated. (writing to infosys was suggested by Jonathan
>Ives).
>
>What do you think?
>
>-Suzana
>
>
