Institutional Knowledge

Right before finals week last semester, the university registrar asked that a brief announcement be placed just above the link to PeopleSoft in the Portal. The announcement let students know that grades would post on January 8. It went up on December 18, the second day of finals.

The result on January 8 was the busiest Portal day ever. (Pat or Scott will hopefully speak to the details of the usage numbers and Portal system performance.)

Clearly, the message was in the right place for a sufficient amount of time and helped to fulfill the compelling need of students to see their grades as soon as they were available. This was the first semester that the message went up at the beginning of finals week. It was also the first time that the message was nearly alone in terms of other content in the channel. My guess is that those were the chief contributing factors to the effectiveness of the announcement.

It’s also interesting to note where this information wasn’t publicized:

• It didn’t go out in the finals week edition of the Student Announcements.
• It wasn’t in any of the finals week Campus Announcements.
• The Student Records site didn’t mention it.
• We didn’t put it on the Student Computing front page.

I mention those places not to criticize them for not having the information. Instead, it is to point out that while it might have been nice to have the information in those places, it is far more powerful to have the information as close to the point of contact for the user as possible.

Just out of curiosity, I thought I would compare page-views during dead week and the first part of finals for the campus home page from Spring ‘07 and Fall ‘07. It’s interesting how closely the numbers compare to each other.

Word of the Week is finals schedule

Finals Week! Winter Break is just around the corner…

Update

Here’s a nice little graph that tracks the popularity of query “finals schedule”

A few weeks ago, Pat and I wrote a guest blog titled Supply and Demand: A wiki adoption story at CSU Chico, for Atlassian about our experiences with the Confluence pilot project. Read Part 1 of the three part series at Atlassian Blog.

Update

• Part 2 of our guest blog
• Part 2 of our guest blog

That’s right, it’s time to trek to Rochester, NY to learn and chat with other web nerds who work in the Ivory Towers of Academia™. Unfortunately I didn’t get my travel plans in order soon enough to submit any presentations. Now, I’m not one to let little details like that shut me up. So, if you want to chat about:

• Confluence (Enterprise wiki)
• JIRA (Issue tracking and project management)
• Ruby on Rails
• uPortal

My name is Patrick Berry. I’m short, blonde, and wear glasses. I should be easy to track down.