[397] in Project_DB
notes, 12/15
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mike Barker)
Tue Dec 15 21:21:51 1998
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 1998 21:21:00 -0500
To: project-DB@MIT.EDU
From: Mike Barker <mbarker@MIT.EDU>
Attending: Greg Anderson, Susan Minai-Azary, Bob Ferrara, Mike Barker
We held a short meeting following OCMG today.
First, we agreed that only small changes should be introduced to the
database at this point. These should be HTML or table additions, not
requiring re-doing the schema or extensive programming.
We agreed to post requests for such changes to the project-DB list. This
will allow people to know what changes have been proposed and comment on
them. In most cases, we should attempt to resolve the comments on the list.
Technical members of the list are encouraged to provide feedback on the
level of effort, complexity, and "technical reasonableness" of proposed
changes. In many cases people suggesting changes do not know how extensive
a change may be.
After there has been sufficient time for comment or feedback, and any
difficulties have been resolved, we would like to ask Bill Cattey to act as
the "gatekeeper" or "queuing mechanism" and make appropriate assignments to
the technical staff. We realize that the staff reads the list, but we would
like to not make changes until the feedback has been taking care of.
It may be worth noting that requesting a change does not automatically mean
that a change will be considered a) in scope at this time or b) appropriate
given the IS wide use of the database. In other words, we do not expect to
make all changes.
Second, we discussed some desired changes.
1. Could the top page (the table listing projects) include a column with
the home page or project notebook entry in a clickable format? E.g. <A
HREF="http://web.mit.edu/pismere/www/"> Home Page </A>
2. Bob will provide a list of recommended field changes. In most cases
these are fields which are thought to be unused, and the suggestion is to
remove these from the displays (whether or not to remove them from the
database is up to the technical staff).
3. It would be desirable to allow "formatted text" email entries into the
project database. (This is probably not within the range of "small" changes)
4. We should probably review the fields and allowed values to determine
which parts are overly "IS-centric" and consider generalizing to better
support other IT organizations.
Mike
