Archive for the ‘Apps’ Category
October 1st, 2009 | 
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In case you fine folks missed it, you have got to check out NC State’s new twitter site, http://twitter.ncsu.edu. It is a joint project between our group and Web Communications that was launched on September 8th, and we now have over 60 organizations tweeting on campus and you can find them all here.
While everyone working on the project thought it was really cool, I think we were all pleasantly surprised by the awesome reaction that we have gotten from other folks in the Higher Education community. The day after we launched the site, the twitterverse was buzzing about the site. Here are just a few tweets that I found particularly encouraging.
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Ever wondered where you can find the most up-to-date goings on at NC State? Well, we’ve got your answer! NC State on Twitter (http://twitter.ncsu.edu) lists the tweets from all of the official campus Twitter accounts. Everything from the library to WKNC to the Wolfpack Club. Even your very own Outreach Technology! NC State on Twitter allows you to find out what’s happening at NC State right now.
Visit twitter.ncsu.edu now and start following NC State!
If you’re in charge of a campus organization that has a Twitter account and isn’t listed on the “Campus is Tweeting” page, make sure you email web_feedback@ncsu.edu to get your organization listed.
After several months of preparation and planning, we’re proud to announce the launch of the new NC State Mobile website – a collaborative project encompassing the efforts of groups all across campus.
The NC State mobile presence is a convenient place to find campus news and contacts while on the go. You can find the closest bus stop and watch a video on NCSU’s mobile YouTube channel while you wait!
The new NC State mobile site supports any type of web enabled device from the most basic cell phone to the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.
No matter where you are, you can get your NC State fix with ease.
We’re already at work on improving your mobile NC State experience, too. Soon, we’ll be adding features like maps, dining hall menu information, and sports scores.
Check it out now at m.ncsu.edu from any mobile device!
This is another article in our series aimed at introducing our readers to some of the applications that we work on. A lot of the applications we write go unnoticed by the masses because they are aimed at a specific workflow or group, so we thought it would be cool to let everyone know what we are up to!
About a year and a half ago, our central IT organization decided to create a new way for students, staff, and faculty to get help with their computers. Previously, the support model had been to call the Help Desk with a problem, and the Help Desk would schedule a technician to come to the student’s dorm and help them out. While this worked for a good many years, it left out a good chunk of our students didn’t live on campus. It was decided that a new walk-in center (WIC) would be opened where customers could come in, drop off their computers, have technicians fix them, then come pick them up. The walk-in center would also be responsible for more user-facing services like password resets and software pickup, tasks that were normally handled by the Help Desk.
In order to implement the WIC’s new support model, our group was asked to devise a system to help them track computers and keep up with tasks. This system, named Crosswalk, would be totally responsible for managing any and all actions where technicians in the walk-in center helped a customer.
This is the first article in a series introducing our readers to some of the applications that we work on. A lot of the applications we write go unnoticed by the masses because they are targeted at a specific workflow or person, so we thought it would be cool to let everyone know what we are up to!
If you have been building applications long enough, you know that there are some things that you have to do with EVERY app you create. Authentication, authorization, user management, etc. No matter what the purpose of the app, you always have to deal with these things, and you are continually re-creating the same basic functionality with every new app. Perhaps it is a little different from app to app, but the concept is the same.
Perhaps we were totally late to the game, but we noticed this trend soon after we got into the Zend Framework. Zend Framework solved a lot of these problems for us. They had mechanisms for dealing with authentication and authorization, databases, forms, etc. It was great, so we created our first Zend Framework app, Billboard.
After we had totally drank the Zend Framework koolaid, we started working on another new app and realized that we wanted some of the interfaces we created in Billboard for our new app, so we went to the billboard project, copied what we needed, and moved on. That worked great until we found a bug in our login page. We fixed it, but the bug was still in our Billboard project. Quickly we changed projects and fixed the bug there. That is fine if we only have 2 projects, but we were planning to run all our projects with Zend Framework. What to do?
We here at Outreach Technology are big into open source software. If you’re not familiar with the concept of open source, the Open Source Initiative defines it as “a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.”
That’s exactly what we’re interested in for our digital sign management software, Billboard. We’ve been wanting to make it a real-life open source application that anyone can contribute to and join for a long time now and we’ve finally gotten the time to get it off the ground. Because there is some confusion on NC State’s campus about the differing hosted versions of the software, we are referring to our new open source version as BillboardCE, or Billboard Community Edition. This will ensure there is no confusion about version numbers.
Announcing our newest product, Lifecycle. Lifecycle’s focus is to help groups manage projects after they have been released into the wild.
In our world, a project is never really “Done”. There are always enhancements and changes to be made, so we began to take a look to see what was out there to help us manage the day-to-day maintenance of all of our applications. There are lots of bug tracking tools, and lots of project management tools, but none fit the bill. Bug tracking tools were often bloated and slow (see Mantis). Project management tools were more focused on managing the project as though it would have an end date. So we decided to write our own little tool to manage all our projects in one place.
Another issue Lifecycle solves for us is communication. We would make changes to code, but our users would never really know unless we told them through IM or email or whatever. Lifecycle makes this interaction a lot easier by introducing Changelogs. Changelogs are filed every time we make a change to production code. An RSS feed can be customized to show only the projects you are interested in, and then you can subscribe to that and always be kept up-to-date on what we are doing. Changelogs can also, optionally, be posted to Twitter to further the reach of your update notices.
We are also proud to announce that our Design, Education and Outreach team will be using Lifecycle to manage their projects. Also, the NCSU Library will be testing it out for us as well.
We hope this product will be available for download soon as OSS. Stay tuned!
As you can see, things look a little different around here. That is because we decided to migrate from our home-grown website solution to Wordpress. There are lots of reasons for this, but mainly because we want to focus more on content and less on trying to keep up a code base.
A lot of our utilities were also tightly integrated into the other website. These utilities are not gone, they have just moved. If you are looking to file an issue with one of your applications, you can go to the temporary home of our old website at http://webapps.ncsu.edu/pm/.
Hopefully this move will make us more likely to write more, and bug fix the website less 
Around the first of the year, our group was commissioned by the OIT Education group to create an application that would help them manage the workshops that they teach to our campus community. The project was multifaceted, entertaining, and pretty big.
We started on the project in mid January, with a pretty hard deadline. We were racing the clock so that the Education group wouldn’t have to pay for another year of service with an existing off-campus vendor who was running the software they currently used (which wasn’t very awesome).
So we have a new domain now, http://webapps.ncsu.edu. We figured this would be better than the itdapps5 and itdapps domains that we once had. The reasons behind the move are that we are no longer ITD (we are now under OIT) and we wanted to consolidate all our apps in one place for easier management.
One of the things that sparked this move was our long-overdue transition of all our applications from PHP4 to PHP5. This was/is no small feat. We have to transfer over about 16 applications that are all used in some way or another. I keep telling myself "one day, one app at a time".
We are also working on hiring a new person (as our post about 2 months ago stated). Things are coming along with it, but it is a slow process. Hopefully we will be introducing them here soon.
BTW, please update your rss feeds to the new one. The old htdocs one doesn’t work any more.
till next time…