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And we're live. Alrighty okay, well hi everyone and welcome to
Cal State S4 and our first live webcast I am Traci I am the project
coordinator here at Cal State S4
today I am joined by Greg Pool he is the lead
staff for web support services here at
Cal State Monterey Bay
and also has a lot of stuff going on
So what we're going to be talking about today, and this will be the first
of hopefully several webcasts that we do for all of you, but today we're going
to be talking specifically about the three
web sites that we give any campus as they start out
in Cal State S4 and those would be Dev
Test, and Live. I'm gonna have Greg go over those little bit to get more
familiar
with those three sites in case you're a little confused by them
so just kinda starting out Greg um
you know, when we talk about campuses is going to live
you know we mean getting started out in Cal State S4, what exactly do
we mean when we say going live?
So we started a process with a campus
that has kind of helped shepherd them through
organizing a team on campus working on authentication and integration, and
issues that will come up in creating a series of sites that gets to the
point where they can actually have a live web site,
that they would offer to the public, their campus, their staff and faculty.
To get there you have to make it happen, to develop it, really.
That's right, so
what we've done your behalf is this our developers your Monterey Bay
specifically Kevin Miller has created a code base and we put that code
over on a server in a company that we've partnered with called
Pantheon. That's being paid out of the Chancellor's Office and Pantheon offers
kinda what is called
cloud computing it means it's a server that you don't have to have in your
server room but it provides all the benefits
of being able to have industry level
you know load and and server issues taken care of for you
so what we like to do when we're dealing with
large software solutions that affect thousands of people is we like to have
three different instances of how we make software. We start with
this concept of having a development site, something
where you can start very small
and kinda test with and it would really in this case be for the Keymasters the
people we've indicated as the point of contact for the campus. It might also
involve some of that start-up staff
that staff that might be working temporarily to work on issues
of integration
with their student information system and with authentication and
in that dev instance it's where you get to kick the tires for the first time
It's where you get to explore and see
put in some either real or fake site data or community partner data
maybe integrate with your campus
student information system or maybe put in fake data that we provide
but give you that sense of how it would work
if it were live. Once that instance is kinda created and you want to offer that the rest
of your campus
we would then create what's called the test instance. This is where essentially your
campus can begin
logging in with its campus authentication methods. So here at Monterey Bay
we use what's called an Otter ID and all students know
how to login to all our systems using that. So we would work to make
to make authentication work here we also try to work to make
integration work here with your system, which is something we probably already did in DEV
and also all the work that you might have done in DEV,
if you've collected a lot a site information because you had a campus
program staff enter it all in, we can just simply drag and drop the database from
Dev to test in a very small
amount of time you've got an exact copy of
DEV over in TEST. This is where eventually you would begin
training your folks on campus este as they come on board for the first time
Then at some point you say -- thumbs up, we're ready to go,
We're ready to pilot, everything's working - authentication, integration,
my campus is happy, I've got a lot of site data. I want that all moved over to a
live instance. We will kinda drag and drop that data over
to live, and live is now where the public, in addition to the campus and the keymaster,
can actually see information. So this is where you would eventually have some...
especially if you were like engagement dot humboldt dot edu, or something like that...I think we
just launched uh Broncoserv at
at Pomona just yesterday. So they've gone and done
their own domain and it's pointing to that live instance.
And along the way we're able to move things and and make things available
talk about here
in just a second. Right, and in the mean time, even once your campus has gone live
you still have your test site and your DEV site. It still exists, so that it you need to
go do trainings - say with a staff member
who is confused, or a faculty member, you can use that test site
and still got data in it, but you're not going to be affecting your live data.
That's right, in fact we just replicate things so you have an exact copy
of test that is what you have in live. And you can train and make mistakes, and do
whatever you need to do.
Now...so, yeah. You have that ability to
kind of go whereever you want to go for whatever reason.
Okay. And so then when it comes to updating
the software essentially, which is in the cloud we also
update all three of these website. So go then through how these three sites then
affect the
update process. Sure. There's two times when we would wanna make
substantial changes um to the software code base that would affect
everybody, including Monterey Bay, using Cal State S4.
The first is when we would have updates or new features -- things that
we we fixed or you found and asked us to fix
And we do a lot of testing on our end just to find these kinds of things.
These are usually little
interface things that didn't work, or we never tested or
or never never saw before because were weren't in a certain section.
As we make those kinda changes, we'll drop those into your DEV instance first
and that's where your key master in that small group can actually look at those
changes
and get a sense up what's actually
um, the changes that have actually been made. And you get to test there and say yes that
fixes it for me, super. And at some point you'd say
maybe after a few days, thumbs up, can you move that over to TEST so i can show my
campus,
Or skip test I just wanna put that in my live instance right now
in which case we would just drag and drop the code base from DEV
over to live. And that's literally drag and drop, and it is something that Traci's
been trained to do.
working with in Pantheon. The other instance
would be when there's a security flaw that's shown up
Quite frankly this hasn't happened yet because you do a lot of
this kind of testing for vulnerabilities
when we're building the software before it ever gets made public
but in the event that there is something that we missed for whatever reason
we can make that change in all instances dev, test, and live
at - you know - immediately so that your site's not left vulnerable for whatever reason
and you're protected
and up to date. So far, haven't had to do that yet though.
This is my favorite slide. That's perfect
everyone's happy in LIVE.
well okay, so it were to kind of sum it up in layman's terms, because
you're kind of techy - um - as a user
what should you be working in
if a new staff member were to be coming along, and say well which one am I supposed to be working in.
So let's say you have a new coordinator of community partner or community engagement
and this person brand new to your campus and you've been using house Cal State S4
where would you put down to train em up? I would suggest putting them in to test
and letting him play with all the real data from live, which we can make
available
and, let them come kind of train up to the point where they feel comfortable
and then at some point, you know, get them an account
in the live version and have them do real work on a regular basis
so i think as new staff come in, as people need to be refreshed - whatever
I would do that in TEST. yep. The ketymaster will work the majority of the time in DEV
and everybody else works in live. Yeah I considered the dev site -
once everything is up and running in line - the dev sites kind of like
the keymaster's playground. yeah I think that's right.
Okay that's very helpful and you know the other thing you can do is have them
watch this
webcast because we are live right now
but we are recording as well so for any of you who
aren't joining us live, we'll have this recorded and available on our YouTube
channel
as well as on our Google+
channel and all those links we'll have available off of Cal State S4.com
Yeah. And you know as we continue to develop these webcasts really
just a reminder for all of you who are working with and in
Cal State S4, these are for you, so if you have a topic you really want us
to address or cover,
that's what we're really going to try to do is make this
hopefully as interactive as possible too. So
you'll be able to ask questions if you would like during the
webcast or send us questions via e-mail We can answer them
right while we're on line or we can
answer them offline as well but the idea here is that we make sure that
Cal State S4 works well for everybody.
And we're hoping to have a couple and guests come up from Humboldt and
Stansilasu, and describe their experiences
as to how they've been successfully able to do my live pilots this fall
Yes, which is really exciting. So we're here, we are also of course
at Cal State S4 dot com is our support site which is also a great place to get
more information
There is even a post on there about the difference between the DEV LIVE and
TEST sites.
That's also a nice helpful clarifier
All right anything else? nope. Thanks Traci. Thank you Greg, and thank you everybody for joining us
BYE