Inclusive of:
1. Stellar Brand Collaboration Services
2. Content Services
1. Stellar Brand Collaboration Services
Definition
The Stellar brand provides an enterprise-level environment enabling:
...
..via a set of secure, complimentary, cross-linkable tools. Stellar brand tools can be used alone or in combination.
Goals/Vision
Vision: A branded Learning and Collaboration environment, including..
...
..with all integrated with well-defined and stable core user identity, group, and authorization services.
Value / Benefits
- Collaboration tools make all participants more productive.
- Science and engineering increasingly span multiple disciplines. The ability to collaborate across disciplinary, administrative, and institutional boundaries is key to future progress.
- Facilitate communication between students working abroad and campus and international initiatives such as MISTI, SMA, MIT-Portugal, MASDAR.
- Involving alumni and mentors in classes.
Current State
- Blog - no current enterprise service
- Discussion forum - no current enterprise service; former service (MIT Forums) was decommissioned without replacement
- ad-hoc Web conferencing - no current enterprise service
- ad-hoc video conferencing - no current enterprise service (Openfire plugin?)
- Instant messaging
- Openfire (Jabber) - in production
- Social networking - no current enterprise service
- Wiki Service - enterprise service in production
- increasing usage
- loose integration with current Stellar
- users and groups stored locally, mirroring Moira
- Clearspace - going into pilot
- wiki, blog, discussion, lightweight document management, social networking
- Stellar core functions
- users and groups are maintained in application
- Web page creation - current enterprise service is inadequate
- do it yourself - AFS lockers, Dreamweaver
- Digital media management - no current production service; Thalia in pilot
- @Stellar - portal-like entry point to course management system
- Course Guide - discovery mechanism for courses
- Mobile access to resources - currently limited (some Stellar functionality)
End State
The 'Stellar' Content and Collaboration environment is recognized Institute-wide as a suite of powerful, reliable, and easy to use services.
...
Members of the community use components of the environment in their everyday work, classes, and social groups.
Gaps
- Need to do continue investigation, evaluation, possible pilots re:
- Social bookmarking (e.g. Scuttle)
- Enterprise tagging options
- Web conferencing (e.g. dim-dim; local instance?)
- ad-hoc video conferencing (e.g. Openfire plugin?)
Approach - e.g., working with community and others in IS&T
- Work with IS&T Identity management team to identify and implement standard services (LDAP, web service)
- Work with IS&T Identity management team and relevant Institute entities to identify and address FERPA and MIT policy/privacy issues with regard to collaboration tools
- Identify and work with academic, research, community and administrative stakeholders
- Take better advantage of research being done at the institute
- Facilitate community development of individual tools that interoperate with our core applications
- support the best outright
- re-do and implement others that are promising but need work
- Engage more directly with experts in the community
Drivers (Tech trends/Biz trends, etc)
- Online Collaboration
- Social Networking
- Synchronous and asynchronous e-learning modes
- Extending the campus community
- Relationship with OCW
Dependencies/Assumptions
- Well-defined, standardized, and stable core user identity and authorization services
- user info and user presence information availability
Risks
- Velocity of development, quality, convenience and availability of hosted services and/or of commercial and 'cloud' products can make our efforts seem to be a barrier
- Cost
- Brand dilution
Conceptual Architecture
( Craig to fill in )
Ending slide: twist on Values/Benefits
Comments (Hide)Craig says:
What the separation of content services as independent loses is that most of the used function in current Stellar is around materials / content. We could say it's collaboration between instructors, presented to a potentially limited audience, but the ideal would be for all content: Stellar, Thalia, and Quickpages, to share a common content store, so we need to clarify that overlap. Posted by Arti Sharma at Jun 18, 2008 10:00 | Edit | Remove | Reply To ThisAdd Comment
2. Content Services
Definition
Content Services are a set of web-based tools and web services for sharing, organizing, and storing content.
Goals/Vision
Vision: An environment for sharing, organizing and storing content, including..
...
..all integrated with IS&T's common services for user identity, group management, and authorization.
Value / Benefits
- Secure and stable digital resource storage
- Encourage use and re-use between applications
- Easier, more efficient creation and maintenance of web content for the community
- Sharing and privacy control
- Keep prestigious content in an MIT site, which adds credibility to the author and more prestige to MIT (i.e. don't make your Nobel prize winner use Flickr)
Current State
- Web page creation - current methods are inadequate
- do it yourself - AFS lockers, Dreamweaver, consultants
- consultants usually costs departments $2K-$7K
- DIY makes a big project out of a simple site
- Digital media management - no current production service; Thalia in pilot
- Departments currently each create one-off solutions
- Most common is a server under someone's desk
- No standards of metadata
- No means to collaborate, publish or share content
End State
- QuickPages is in production providing easy web page production for the community
- Digital media management - Thalia is in production
- Thalia back end services are consumed by other applications like Moodle
- Thalia goes open source and is further developed by outside community
Gaps
Approach - e.g., working with community and others in IS&T
- Work with Stellar and other IS&T teams on integration
- Work with academic, research, community and administrative stakeholders. At present these include PSB, DCAD, ACCORD and others.
- Use IAP, IT Partners, ACCORD and other venues to publicize content services for broader adoption.
- Assist MIT developers in building applications which consume our media APIs
- Consult with Kerberos team for best practices in making a project Open Source and building outside community involvement.
- Partner with DCAD, PSB and the Help Desk for customer interaction and support
Drivers (Tech trends/Biz trends, etc)
- need for stable, secure storage
- this is how people do their work now
- web is the medium of choice
- people throw up millions of images on flickr
- it's impossible to keep track of digital resources without tools
- these digital resources have an intrinsic value to the Institute
Dependencies/Assumptions
relies on:
- network operations being able able to support services at the level they need e.g. Thalia redundancy
- common services being available and stable
- where 3rd party software in use, presupposes that it may be adapted to use our common services
- users being aware of content services
Risks
- see above
- Shared services we integrate with might be confusing or difficult to users -- e.g. managing Moira groups is not intuitive or user friendly
- Standard risks from using third party or open source components
- Ability to scale to meet demand, given limited resources
- Losing focus - many customers with divergent needs
- Dependence on multiple services create more potential points of failure
- More consumers of our services requires more resources on our part for:
- maintenance
- new functionality requests
- support
- infrastructure: equipment, power, overhead
- Technologies change. That's a given, not a risk. We need to anticipate and plan for that.
Conceptual Architecture
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