redesigning lclark.edu

alumni directories

Alumni Directories

Morgan recently wrote a post on the redesign blog about all the different types of content/pages that we currently have on the Lewis & Clark website and Boot chimed in with some concerns over the alumni directory.

For those of you unaware about our alumni directory, it is a web app written some years ago that gets nightly dumps of alumni data from Benefactor so that alumni can log in and update us with their current addresses and the like.

But the website launch is not the only thing that will impact this service. Seven days before the website launch, Benefactor will be replaced with new software called Raiser’s Edge — so the main data source for the service will be changing. Another major issue is the age and functionality of the service. Given the strides the web has made in interactivity over the last five or more years, I think we all can agree that this service could use a major overhaul, or complete replacement.

So, JC Minton and I have been batting about ideas about what to do about this service. We will most certainly replace it with something more functional at some point — the question is when. I think given that we’re both in the midst of a huge launch, my expectation is that we’ll ask Wayne to rewrite the nightly dump to the existing web server and that we’ll continue to make that service available through it’s current incarnation. Maybe something like:

http://old.lclark.edu/cgi-bin/alumdir/

Then, after we’re both out from under the launches, we’ll look at how much better we can make the alumni directory with the new software both JC and I will then have and see what the best new incarnation will be and go from there. Eventually, this would also be dovetailed into a alumni “community” product too, so that discussion, set to begin again around August, would supersede/impact the life of this service.

Also posted at: https://media.zendesk.com/forums/22045/entries/31009

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