[221] in magellan
Events Calendar Discovery Project Report for 7/1/99
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Deborah A. Levinson)
Thu Jul 1 14:09:56 1999
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Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 14:08:59 -0400
To: magellan@mit.edu
From: "Deborah A. Levinson" <debby@MIT.EDU>
Cc: events-team@mit.edu
Project Name: Events Calendar
Project Leader: Debby Levinson
Report Date: 7/1/99
Project Notebook: http://web.mit.edu/cwis/projects/eventscalendar/
Accomplishments past period
- Completed interview summary report
<http://web.mit.edu/cwis/projects/eventscalendar/report.html>
- Met with the Integration Team to discuss their requirements for an events
calendar system and make sure we were on the right track. (We are ;-)
- Met with sponsor Kathryn Willmore to discuss results of interviews and
find out if there was anything further she wanted us to do on the project.
(See below.)
- Completed feature matrix for all evaluated products
<http://web.mit.edu/cwis/projects/eventscalendar/feature-matrix-filled.html>
- Based on information from feature matrix, narrowed the field from seven
products to only two: TechCalendar and Amplitude Systems' EventsCenter.
Goals for the coming period
- Contact the University of Virginia for a best-practices discussion
related to their online events system.
- Contact Amplitude Systems for further product information.
- Contact Doug Heimburger and Boris Zbarsky for further TechCalendar
information.
- Schedule time with Scott Thorne to do data modeling.
- At Kathryn Willmore's request, schedule focus group with the Information
Group to present interview summary results and get their opinions on an
authorization policy.
Issues
- Build vs. Buy rears its ugly head again. Which is the better solution --
using free software that meets MIT's security and infrastructure
requirements, but will probably require some rewriting and extra support;
or purchasing software that we'd have to shoehorn into our security and
infrastructure requirements? At least we've narrowed it down to two
products ...
Key learnings
- Lots of great information in our interview summary report. For example,
most people still rely on paper mail to advertise their events, with email
a very close second. Lectures, by far, are the most-sponsored kind of
event. And most people find out about campus events by 1) bulletin boards,
2) email, and 3) the spotlight on web.mit.edu :-)
Team dynamics
- good
Additional comments
- Wow! We're on target to finish on time! (Now I've jinxed it ...)
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Debby Levinson
Electronic Publishing Consultant
MIT Campus Wide Information Systems
debby@mit.edu
http://web.mit.edu/debby/www/
Humanity has an amazing inability to plan. Not too many
generations ago, when our relatives lived by hunting and
gathering, the inability to plan for the next season meant
death. Planners survived. The clueless died. But today,
Homo Sapiens eats at McDonalds - for the moment, planning
and survival are not strongly linked. --David Isenberg
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