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08-08-08 Update: Sponsor System Further Delayed

Date: August 8, 2008 11:50:15 AM EDT
To: mcommunity.updates@umich.edu, fln@umich.edu, acsf@umich.edu, macsig@umich.edu, win2000@umich.edu, unix.admins@umich.edu, novell.admins@umich.edu, www-sig@umich.edu
Subject: MCommunity Update: Sponsor System Further Delayed

Hello,

We have decided to delay release of the MCommunity Sponsor System a little longer. The Sponsor System will allow authorized U-M staff members to create online identities, including uniqnames, for people who are affiliated with the University but who do not appear in any of the official University data feeds.

We are finishing up some details now in preparation for having the ITCS Accounts Office do system testing; staff members will run through a series of scripted tasks using test data.

After that, the Accounts Office will use the Sponsor System for several weeks to be sure everything is working as planned before making it available to sponsorship administrators. So far, 24 people have signed up to be sponsorship administrators.

Implementation of MCommunity is going well overall. Our biggest challenges often involve synchronization between MCommunity and our legacy systems rather than MCommunity itself. We remain committed to keeping both legacy and new systems running in parallel for some time to ensure a smooth transition.

Below are details about the status of the various project components. As always, if you have questions, please contact us.

Regards,
 -- M-Community Project Leads
    (MCommunity.leads@umich.edu)

Data Feeds from Authoritative Sources into MCommunity

MCommunity is routinely creating entries for Ann Arbor faculty, staff, and students; Dearborn faculty, staff, and students; Flint faculty and staff; retirees; and alumni.

• Our live feed from M-Pathways has been stable for about a month. It successfully handled the start-of-term, high-volume load.
• Nightly data feeds from Dearborn are stable. We hope to move to a live feed by spring or summer 2009.
• Nightly feeds of alumni data from the Data Warehouse are now working well. A problem with this feed had been causing complete data uploads instead of updates of just the new data. This has just been resolved.

Data Feed from MCommunity to U-M Online Directory

We had hoped to be updating the U-M Online Directory from MCommunity by now. However, this has been delayed because of the recently resolved problem with the alumni data feed listed above. We are continuing our legacy process of updating the directory via a data feed from M-Pathways and hope to begin updating the directory from MCommunity soon. The update process must be tested using a shadow copy of the directory for a couple of weeks before moving it to production.

Sponsor System

Release of the Sponsor System has been delayed. The system will be released to departmental sponsorship administrators when we are sure it is working well in production for the Accounts Office.

• We are in the final stages of front-end web development and are cleaning up some user interface issues.
• Next, we will do system testing. Accounts Office staff members will run through a series of scripted tasks in our test (QA) environment using test data.
• Rollout will be to the ITCS Accounts Office first, then to departmental sponsorship administrators.
• We are planning for some enhancements, including uniqname self-registration for sponsored affiliates, around the start of 2009.

Programmatic Access

• We plan to provide programmatic access to the Sponsor System for system administrators through a web service and a command-line utility early in 2009.
• Also early in 2009, we expect to have the MCommunity LDAP Tree up and running, along with a command-line utility that system administrators can use to access it.

MCommunity Directory (White Pages on the Web)

• We had planned to replace the web interface to the U-M Online Directory with a web interface to MCommunity for users in December. This will be delayed for about three months or so.
• We will likely run the two interfaces in parallel for several months rather than simply replacing one with the other as originally planned.
• Michigan Marketing & Design has begun working on the user interface design.

Departmental Roles Management

• A tool that allows departments to manage departmental roles information in MCommunity is planned for summer 2009.

Service Provisioning

• We are planning for a rollout of the use of MCommunity for provisioning of ITCS's standard computing services, as well as some other campus services, somewhere around summer 2009.

 

Information and Technology Services