Just finished the Word Press 2.7 upgrade and realized I haven’t posted in quite some time. Maybe it’s my twitter addiction that is keeping me from posting. It may be those microblog tweets are sapping my capability to put together a coherent post. I have friends with similar experiences (although Paul seems to have recovered and is blogging full steam again). Anyway, let me ramble on for a bit and see what come of it.
Since my last post, we went live with the new slice.unc.edu and the associated student organization sites. From a technical standpoint, one of the most interesting bits is our integration of Shibboleth into Joomla. Accomplished via the excellent work of Sam Moffatt and some internal folks here at UNC who helped get the Apache – Shibboleth config right we now have single sign on across all student org sites. We’ve been working this into other sites with the Division of Student Affairs as well and I think it will have a very nice positive impact for lots of our user community. Our adoption rates look pretty good so far and when the students get back in January we’ll kick off a series of training sessions to help further adoption and give people some help where we can. We certainly can’t satisfy every desire of the 600+ organizations involved, but I do think we have put up a solid and reliable platform that is quite powerful and will help to increase visibility and communication for our active student orgs.
I presented on this implementation at UNC CAUSE and had a lot of interest from those able to stay awake during my presentation. I think one of the more rewarding aspects is we have been able to sustain a relationship with student government for several years now. I’ve also seen technology and slice and student orgs in particular, make their way into student body president candidate platforms. I like to hope that represents a positive development and a desire to keep the relationship alive as administrations come and go. I certainly value the input I get from students and try to return the favor by delivering services they can use with a minimal amount of effort.
Tags: student orgs