Upgrades to UAA-themed OU Campus sites, July 25-30

by Michelle Saport  |   

UAA IT Services Web Team will be upgrading the underlying framework for our UAA-themed OU Campus sites Thursday, July 25 through Tuesday, July 30, 2019. The sites include:

We've done extensive testing in our development environment but updating the snippets and forms must be done manually after the upgraded framework is in place. Because of the manual steps our team needs to take to complete the upgrade, we ask that you please avoid editing the sites in OU Campus while we're working on them if you are a web author. The following is our schedule:

  • 7/25: Upgrade intranet, training, and blogs. Republishing the sites may roll over into 7/26.
  • 7/26: Upgrade anchorage. Republishing the anchorage website is a manual and time-intensive task due to the quantity of pages so we've allocated 7/26-7/30 to complete this.

Updates about this process can be found on the Website Maintenance page.

What to expect during the upgrade process:

  • The website may have brief intermittent outages as necessary files are replaced but it will not impact any of the content.
  • Webpages will not look correct until republished through the CMS after the upgrade is in place as the web team republishes pages over the weekend.
  • Some forms will not look correct until manually upgraded and republished.

What to expect after the upgrade:

  • More accessible pages.
  • Consolidated snippets.
  • More layout options on some snippets.

The websites were not redesigned but will have a cleaner look and feel with more subtle colors on some of the snippets. Many of these color enhancements enhance accessibility by using the appropriate color contrasts. This upgrade will allow us to create more efficient workflows so we can work collaboratively with you to achieve the website goals of your department and the University going forward. For a more complete list of enhancements and changes please see the Release Notes.

Known issues:

  • Site logos may not appear correctly. We will no longer be able to support the "svg" file type for our logos and we've modified the size and spacing a bit. Advancement is working with us to provide the correct file type/size and we'll work with you to get department specific logos updated after the upgrades are complete.

Getting help: We've done a significant amount of testing to ensure your content continues to display correctly but there's a lot of content and testing every nested snippet scenario is impractical. If we missed something, please contact the Technical Support Center (907-786-4646 or uaa.techsupport@alaska.edu) and they'll open a ticket with our team. Please hold off on reporting issues until the site upgrade is complete as we work through implementation.

We recommend you reserve some time to review your pages early next week to validate any significantly complex pages you have authored. The Web Apps team will be validating highly trafficked pages but will not have sufficient time to validate all 9000+ web pages.

Additional training: We'll be adding training opportunities and Open Labs for Web Authors to learn about the new snippet options. Keep an eye on your inbox for more information.

Thank you, UAA Web Team

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