Institutional Knowledge

It’s inevitable. You’re developing a web application and the “need” arises for it to send e-mail. Now, we’re not trying to sound too dismissive of e-mail, but lets face it, e-mail has a number of flaws.

1. SMTP is not a real-time protocol. There is absolutely no guarantee of delivery and most applications that send e-mail are not aware of bounces.
2. Spam is a problem. Everywhere. The tools put in place to battle spam will inevitably treat one of your messages as spam.
3. E-mail overload is an even bigger problem, even if you “solve” the spam problem you are often just tossing more needles in the ever-growing haystack that is the INBOX.

These are issues we see time and time again when some kind of workflow or notification scheme needs to be put into place. What are the alternatives? The easiest is probably RSS, but that assumes that the users are already using some form of RSS reader. Luckily mail programs are starting to incorporate syndication formats and present them to people with the e-mail interface they know and love/loathe.

But at the end of the day you decide that you really do have to send e-mail, the best thing to do is to keep it short. That is, if you want people to actually read the e-mail.

Our friend Stewart Mader is putting out 21 Days of Wiki Adoption videos. Even if you are already going with your wiki project, there will be some episodes worth watching.

Rock on, Stewart.

Metrics are a funny thing. We have 4 main ways of looking at the portal. We have concurrent users, which we measure at 5 minute intervals. We track logins and unique users on a daily basis. We have Google Analytics. Last but not least, we also track how many people click through to PeopleSoft through our CAS access logs. For instance, here is what the first day of spring term looked like in terms of concurrent users on a hourly basis.

Yeah, it was hopping. You can even seen the network outage we had late that night (yeah, that was fun). This is just a snapshot though. It just tells us that, in general, it was really busy.

Our login stats also show that Monday was indeed very, very busy with 31,984 logins made by 13,412 users. A good number to have, but it doesn’t say much. We don’t currently run an analysis to get a real logins per user average.

Google Analytics shows us where people went in the portal but not where they went when they were leaving the portal.

We know there are three main destinations: PeopleSoft, WebCT/Blackboard Vista, and webmail. Because of the way we send users to PeopleSoft from the portal, we have good numbers — although they are not tied to unique users.

Clearly the first day of the term (the 28th) shows a lot of activity. We rack up +70k clicks for only 13,412 users and 31,984 logins. The performance of the PeopleSoft system suffered a little that day, which is what really prompted us to start trying to tie all these numbers together.

While nothing is definitive, it seems that the performance problems were due to a number of issues — as you would expect in an enterprise system like PeopleSoft. With ~32k logins and some poor statistical assumptions you get just over 2 clicks into PeopleSoft per login and users logging in at least twice during the day.

The questions that these numbers can’t answer for us are many. Is the system usable? Are usability problems leading people to login more times than they would in a perfect world? Are students needing to login frequently on the first day to find or adjust their schedule? All of these will remain “unknown unknows” until we actually talk to students.

What do we know from these numbers? The first day of school is busy.

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 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.

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”

Word of the Week is finals schedule

The top three search queries from last week were

1. finals schedule
2. vista
3. library

I’m guessing that students are turning in assignments to WebCT Vista in preparation for finals and looking to study or finish group projects in the library.

Mulling through some more data, here’s a look at the Campus web server statistics from the last 6 months compared with the previous 6 months.

• Internet Explorer users declined by 14%
• Firefox users grew by 1.8%
• Safari users grew by 6%
• Windows users declined 12%~
• Mac users increased 10%~
• Users with monitors set to 1680×1050 grew 30%~
• Users with monitors set to 800×600 fell 25%
• Users with monitors set to 1024×768 fell 26%

Here are some fun facts from the last twelve months.

• Over 1.3 million visitors viewed the CSU Chico web site
• Those visitors generated over 12.7 million measured pageviews
• Each visitor viewed an average of 1.48 pages
• Visitors spent an average of 2 minutes and 11 seconds on the web site
• 27% of all traffic originated from Google.
• 13% of the keywords used to find CSU Chico was chico state
• 72% of visitors used Internet Explorer
• 34% of visitors were from on-campus
• Outside of the US, India was the second highest location for visitors with 0.21%

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