Table of Contents:

Invitees:

Chip Dalby, Hadas Niv, Mark Foster, Christian Pama, Les Cottrell.

  • Hadas was needed to understand the requirements and provide guidance for KB  articles. She provided the following guidance in advance and so did not need to attend
    • There are no formal guidelines. Hadas provided the following suggestions:

      • If the audience is SLAC windows users, KB is preferred. A limited set of Unix users cannot log into ServiceNow. 

      • If it is for the Networking team, it can be anywhere they want.
      • There are no requirements for KB – licensed users just write them and publish them. Some ask their team to review and edit, others do not.

      • It can be a URL to Confluence, or a copy.

        • The team should decide what is best.

        • If a URL - the user may need to log in again (to Confluence).

        • If a copy - it will have to be maintained in both places.

Attendees:

Chip, Mark, Christiane, Les

Agenda

Reason for meeting

The networking home web page at http://networking.slac.stanford.edu/ is currently written using Microsoft's Expression Web application. This is no longer supported by Microsoft so I have agreed with Ben to port the page to Drupal.  At the same time we (Chip Dalby and I) have identified some updates are needed to the contents (e.g. remove/replace broken links, I have taken care of the broken links in Expression Web in preparation for the port).   There are also links to about 5 pages in Confluence that are possible ServiceNow Knowledge Base (KB) articles.  One already is, it is https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/NetMan/How+to+Connect+to+SLAC+VPN and is maintained by Andy.  The remaining four are:

If they are to go to KB, then Hadas would like Networking to review the content to ensure its accuracy. Else we can just leave the links to Confluence space.

While we are at it, there are a couple of other pages linked from networking.slac.stanford.edu that may need review:

It might be nice to also update the photo.

Guidelines for KB articles:

  • See Hadas' Guidelines for ServiceNow KB articles.
  • KB is suitable for items that are static (do not often require updating). Managing changing content is hard in KB.
  • KB should be high level, have low technical detail, not suitable for planning, progress, changing processes etc.
  • KB is part of ServiceNow which was introduced to help reduce the existing fractured view of computing at SLAC such that user did not know where to look.
  • Use of the KB is not enforced, it is up to the content provider.
  • Networking is heavily invested in Confluence.
  •  Confluence is easier to manage, search and update.

Discussion

We added some extra (to Hadas') guidelines for KB vs Confluence (see above).

We looked at the four pages (linked under services in networking.slac.stanford.edu) and agreed:

  • Les will make the first pass at re-organizing (e.g. stripping out just the networking parts), review, recommend and edit
    • Organizing includes Internal vs external and moving some things to a  space for networkers
  • Pass to Mark for further review
  • At a future meeting discuss and decide how to move forward with each page

Drupal:

  • Was chosen since it is heavily used at Stanford and energy.gov and is also open source
  • The idea is that it is architected so customers can find information
  • Chip is considering dividing the networking customer-facing information into a SLAC user space, and an external user (e.g. visitors, or anonymous) space with cross-links
    • The spreadsheet has a column for this.
    • A cyber concern is leaking of information on how the network is built/works etc. and other information to bad actors who take advantage of the information to penetrate the site.
  • There was a discussion on how someone knows a web page is current, most recent update date, generic contact, submit suggestions/questions etc..
    • This is important for maintaining the trust of users
    • There is an implication that the organization needs to commit to continuous management, maintenance and updating of web pages

Photo:

  • The photo needs updating.
  • Chip mentioned that they can support a carousel of photos, which are updated on a regular basis.
  • Mark pointed out that we do not spend a lot of time introducing new features which are photogenic or have resources for constantly updating user-facing web photos.
    • He, therefore, recommends a static/timeless photo, whose main purpose is to remind the viewer what page they are on.

Forms and Policies web pages

  • We ran out of time to discuss these in any detail.  As an interim:
    • Change the policies web page title from Policies to Guidelines, make internal, and until approved and is static, maintain in Confluence.
    • The forms link point to two web forms, 
      • Network node and IP address request from which exists no longer exists.
        • Maybe it should be replaced with a link to NetDB which already exists under services.
      • The other is for network operations and for Ethernet installs for Office computers 
        • This raises the question of where network operations sites from the user point of view

Action items

Les will:

  • Capture and distill the discussion etc. from this meeting and create minutes.  - DONE
  • Make the first pass at re-organizing (e.g. stripping out just the networking parts) the 4 web services page, and review and edit.
    • Pass the results to Mark for review
  • Review the Internal/external access attribute in the spreadsheet

Chip will:

  • Review the VUE center to see if there are networking items in there that need to be referenced in the networking page.
  • Provision a pre-production Drupal website(s) for networking, so we can get experience.
  • As needed provide an introduction to editing/organizing in Drupal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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