This is the workspace of the team that maintains the IS&T Public Facing Measures page.
Brief Overview
An excel template is attached here. It provides predefined tables and graphs for team members to update with new values on a quarterly basis. Excel provides an easy path to exporting the graphs as PNGs/GIFs through the file / save as web publishing wizard. The resullting files are copied to the measures locker in AFS, where they can be copied into Drupal by the production@mit.edu team.. The production team wants to be notified of the new files by receiving an email of the mockup2.htm file produced by Excel.
How To Release a New Version
The graphs on the web page are generated from Excel with its Save As Web feature. As part of creating an html replica of the worksheet page, png and gif renditions of the graphs are copied to a folder related to the excel workbook. We send the htm file to production@mit.edu and ask them to integrated the newly produced graphics into Drupal in the right places for display on the page.
To update the excel worksheet, download a copy of the workbook mockup2.xlsx from the IS&T Measures wiki page to a local folder on your machine. Open it in excel and update data tables until you're done. Then put the book back. If you are adding a new time period, you want to copy all but the oldest up a line, then update the newest label and data. This rolls the oldest data off of the table and out of the chart. See Rob if you don't what this would mean.
The measures locker in AFS is the target location for the graphics files. On a PC running afs, mount /afs/athena/project/measures as M: and file save as web the worksheet to M:\pfm2010\mockup2.htm. Email the resulting report to production; they will follow the embedded links to the graphics source files. They will use the png version.for greater color depth (32 bits instead of 8 for gif). See http://web.mit.edu/measures/pfm2010/mockup2.htm for the latest export of the worksheet and graphs.
Finally, upload the mockup2.xlsx back into the wiki with the Browse and Attach buttons.
(Sadly there is no record-locking on the spreadsheet, but past versions are archived and can be retrieved if there is a collision.)
Metrics Definitions and Means of Production
Definitions
These pages describe all the necessary assumptions about each measure, along with the default "story", current target value, issuss and assumptons that provide nuanced understanding of the thing.
Contributing Data
The group will swarm collaboratively to update their sections of a single central spreadsheet, mockup.xls, attached to this page. Contributors should download the spreadsheet, change it, and then put it back. There is no file-locking in the wiki environment, but there is preservation of past versions. (We'll have to see how this works out in practice.)
Each measure will have a table in the excel sheet and a matching graph in the uniform style. Contributors will simply update their data in the table and the graphs will auto-update.
We need a way to communicate the new readings for updating the text in the left column of the Drupal page. We may be able to use linked cells to create an emailable chunk of text to send to production. Or we can just go in ourselves and author revisions to the Drupal page.
Generating the graphs
Once we have a definiitive size and style for each graph, with an understood % reduction (or not) to get the best results in the Drupal page, the excel graphs will never be reformatted again.
The way to get excel graphs available to the web is to File / Save As Web and auto-publish the worksheet. It will create a folder of JPGs in a folder called mockup_files on the machine used to produce it. That spot is now and should remain the measures afs locker -- /afs/athena/project/measures/ . So the graphs end up in /afs/athena/project/measures/pfm2010/mockup_files/
Editorial Perspective -- consistency, style, etc.
Colors
The main colors in the charts need to be the MIT grey and MIT red, as close as we can get to them. For more data ranges than that, we go to the Excel default rainbow of blues, purples and greens. The most we need seems to be five.