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p>The Ed Techie: What Mailbox limits reveal:

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Grainne posted recently about the frustration of continually getting the ‘Your mailbox is over its size limit’ in our OU email accounts. I can’t tell you how annoying this – sometimes I am just trying to send a quick response to someone before I have to dash out of the door, but it won’t let me because I have to find and delete any attachment over 2K to free up space. Grrrr.

(Discovered this site through the Edublogs Awards.)

It’s interesting to see the comments on the gist of this article — in terms of how reasonable the restriction or attitude behind it are. IT usage restrictions always seem to generate two separate camps of apologists and critics. Apologists focus on the rational behind it, the need to balance services with resources, and limitations of the technology or workflow. Critics tend to express frustration over inconvenience, limitations, or restrictions that make their work harder, or prevent them from performing a specific action, or in a particular way.

While I can’t claim to have a solution to IT limits (regrettably, my superpowers don’t seem up to the task) I do notice that we seem to have an opportunity for dialog. IT Governance is an increasingly hot topic, particularly with institutions struggling to prioritize during lean budget years. We clearly have a pool of customers who are more than willing to tell us what they think is important.

I think the need to create dialog highlights one of the reasons a number of us found Collier’s MyUMBC feedback feature so compelling. By integrating feedback submission forms into every page, portal visitors are encouraged to communicate their reactions and thoughts (even about email quotas ) making the barrier to contribution very low. At the same time, while many of us have feedback forms that email teams, the MyUMBC example of integrating the admin panel & tools to ease followup/contact make it easy to go back, and mine through the data, or engage customers in dialog regarding their experiences with the product or service.

I’m happy to say that Jenn’s work on the feedback portlet stemming from the JA-SIG Unconference seems likely to move uPortal (and maybe someday Sakai or other portlet containers ) further in the direction of built in mechanisms to collect these user sentiments and provide information so we can work to better address our users concerns, experiences, and frustrations.

So, the JA-SIG un-conference (even the working sessions) is over, giving me a chance to do some thinking and reflection about the event and its aftermath.

Overall, the attendance, interest, and excitement demonstrated by all of the participants was pretty overwhelming. We had both more individuals, institutions, and organizations represented than we ever would have anticipated for an inaugural event. Even JA-SIG product deployers like Collier from UMBC and FLUID were well represented. While everyone undoubtedly came away from the event with different thoughts, two items struck me as particularly exciting.

MyUMBC

Collier demonstrated the MyUMBC work he’s been doing. While not uPortal based, the reactions related to the functionality of his portal ranged from “wow, I want it” to “you built that yourself?” to “don’t show that to my users or they’ll want it.” A couple of thoughts on why everyone in attendance found Collier’s work so compelling:

• Presentation: Collier threw away the assumption a portal must allow users to add/remove/re-arrange content. This dramatically simplified his problem domain, and allows him to capitalize on web-design techniques to tune his layout and presentation.
• Focus: MyUMBC is focused on end-user tools, not building frameworks. While in many portal project 75% of the time seems to be spent bringing up the platform, and making changes there, Collier spent 75% of his time building tools for news, events, favorites, etc.
• Integration: MyUMBC has a number of tools and concepts that serve to knit the experience together — the favorite stars, the dashboard on the start page, navigation cues all make the experience feel integrated
• Feedback & Monitoring: MyUMBC built a feedback system integrated into every page, and a lightweight dashboard to extract key statistics from that system. As a result, feedback is easy (~6000 in less than 6 months) and mining the data for trends is also correspondingly easy. This combined with standard tools like Google Analytics support a nice feedback-response loop while requiring minimal custom tooling.

Portlets

JA-SIG and uPortal have always been very focused on building out uPortal as a portal Framework. A consistent thread throughout the un-conference however (partly sparked by MyUMBC) is a bubbling thread of focusing on portlets and tools. I think there’s a growing recognition in the community that the tools are what users are visiting a portal for in the first place — and an area we have not focused as much attention on in the past.

In particular, collaborative efforts in the portlet space received a lot of discussion at several different sessions. LMS, SIS, Library, and other areas all seem to be places where schools have repeatedly re-invented the wheel. Collier’s demonstration of the return from focusing on tools, and the timing related to the talk on JA-SIG project incubation I think have all contributed to an atmosphere where people are highly interested in collaborating higher up the stack.