April through June 2008
- Touchstone continues to be one of our most important projects. In spite of family emergencies that cost several person weeks of work, development has been largely on schedule. There have been issues around setting up staging and production systems -- slowly but surely these are being resolved. Functional testing is in good shape, stress and load-testing awaits the training and consulting services available with the purchase of the new StressTester tool from Reflective Solutions. We have been intensely engaged with the key customers (esp Stellar, Clearspace) to make sure that they have the functionality that they need to go live in the fall in a phased approach. The full production system will probably not be handed over to OIS to maintain until October or so.
- Web infrastructure and developer support of web service projects has used some extra resources in the last quarter -- a new Geo Codes service provider has been needed, DSPS has helped with issues on the new Roles app. The team has been tasked with integrating Clearspace with MIT infrastructure services and this has impacted work on other projects.
- Athena 10 is on schedule for a fall preview, at the expense of developer tools work.
- The priority of integrating Clearspace with MIT infrastructure has delayed work on Touchstone database configuration and PHP systems for the SDLS, QuickPages, and IS&T website.
- With the departure of the senior developer from the Stellar team, a resource was loaned from DSPS to complete the gradebook work required for the fall.
- IS&T website went before TAP, findings require that the team prove the high availability/slashdot-resistant architecture for Drupal and resubmit this to TAP. This will involve some cost in both time and money that must be spent on this proof of concept before the actual site development can begin. No date can yet be committed for delivery of the IS&T website. However, site map work and functional specification is still on-going, as well as migration planning, as this would be needed regardless of the future CMS platform.
- Alumni Association website still has major outstanding bugs, one of the most severe seems to be fixed in the most recent stable release of Alfresco (2.1 SP 3), so we will begin a process of integrating our modifications with that SP3 and testing it in a staging environment before rolling it out to Alumni.
- Thalia is preparing a final release before going into production. Official production is dependent on "system readiness" configuration with the shared MySQL cluster and more thorough runbook documentation and automated procedures. Clearspace integration has delayed some of the app support team work necessary, but Thalia is still expected to be live by the fall.
- QuickPages is partly backburnered due to higher priorities, but work is still on-going.
- SDLS still has ongoing work, is affected by the higher prioritization of Clearspace by the app support team.