Collecting money on-line for events

David Clover  26 April 2012 04:03:16 PM

All large organisations are able to collect money securely from a credit or debit card online as part of a booking or purchasing process and The Open University is no exception. We now have a Faculty utility that allows people organising conferences and events to collect sign-up information from potential delegates and clients, and then pass them online through to WorldPay via a University-designed secure API where they can make credit or debit card transactions safely.

This means that staff in various departments who are organising events don't have to engage with insecure 'Cardholder not present' telephone conversations about taking credit card details and those signing up can get immediate confirmation of their acceptance onto the event. The system makes collecting money and participant details efficient and cost-effective.

We have so far provided 5 separate environments for collecting fees for conferences and events and it's working smoothly. At the time of writing the system has collected £14,000.

Here's an example of an online form that's been used recently for an event in the Mathematics and Statistics Department.:

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We are now putting the final touches to an information module (shown above) so that organisers can download the most recent list for their event as an Excel sheet. They can then use it to create lists, labels, mail and email merges to help them to manage the event itself.

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Collecting email in a mixed environment

David Clover  18 April 2012 12:19:55 PM

Some changes  in the way our University Enterprise email operates has meant that we recently needed to find a new way to collect 'agent' emails that are designed to trigger workflow processes on our IBM Domino environment. We don't use Domino as a corporate mail hub or for personal email at all here, that's all handled by Exchange 2010. But we do use our 8.5.3 Domino server in the Faculty to support a variety of workflow processes driven by web or desktop Notes clients and they require an inbound flow of emails to work. Up to now, emails have arrived at a software switch at our internet border which maps the inbound address of an email to one of several mail servers on campus - including Exchange, Domino, First Class and UNIX. In future, Exchange 2010 will handle all incoming email and this means that in our University environment, every mail entity now requires its own centrally-mounted Exchange mailbox.

We could have set up 'push' rules on all the Exchange boxes (there are quite a lot) to pass the messages across, but this would have meant a lot of work in creating separate mail profiles and rules for every item (and we have about 30 or more to convert). If the Domino server should be offline for maintenance at any point, that would have meant a lot of Non-Delivery-Notices and failed emails being pushed out from Exchange which is something we didn't want. The fail-safe answer was clearly to 'pull' these emails off the Exchange mailboxes from within the Domino server itself. To the rescue came Andy Brunner's excellent (and free) POP3 Collect Utility which we've installed and configured on our Domino server. Because it is possible to collect email from an Exchange Mailbox via POP3, Andy's utility is set up to poll a number of Exchange boxes, collect the email and delete it from the Exchange server on collection to avoid exceeding mailbox quotas. The POP3Collect utility then simply routes it on to the appropriate 'functional' mailbox on our Domino server and the workflow is carried out normally. Andy's utility requires some Java software to be installed on the server, and we needed to make some firewall tweaks to allow it to 'see' the SSL POP3 port properly on the Exchange end. The POP3Collect utility has a simple database (POP3Collect.nsf) which contains the configuration for connecting to the remote POP3 server and creating accounts. Once the mailbox is created in Exchange, adding a new account is then a few moments work. There's a simple syntax for collecting email using POP3 (or indeed IMAP) from 'functional' MS Exchange mailboxes. You have to set the username as 'domain-name/username/boxname'. The password used will be that for 'username' so we add an Active Directory 'service' account as the username to the permissions on the Exchange mailbox. Those credentials are the ones then used to authorise collection from the POP3Collect utility at the Domino end. So we are very quickly and quietly back in business thanks to Mr Brunner and his most useful free gift!

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Mobilising with XPages

David Clover  13 April 2012 02:44:42 PM

We've been having a go at creating mobile web-apps using the new Domino XPages mobile Upgrade Pack utilities and these are proving very successful and easy to do.

We've also picked up the excellent online TLCC Mobile Xpages Development course and so far we have created a handy Campus Directory Lookup app which accumulates and presents information from a variety of campus sources, in some cases enhancing the information with local Faculty data. The same app can populate iOS, Android and Blackberry devices with no extra coding. And simply by adding an .xsp component to the app, you can also create a working online test environment using a web browser.
 

We have also experimented with the new 8.5.3 Discussion (StdXLDiscussion) template. This turns out to be mobile and desktop web-enabled immediately out of the box with no extra configuration. We've just discovered that we can even populate it automatically using an inbound email. It's tools like these which really show that we can take our robust existing easy-to-manage Domino technology and use it with no difficulty in the new mobile environment.

The ability to take existing sets of data, capitalise on existing skills and technology and quickly enable them for any of three mobile platforms with a small amount of development work is really useful, and we'll be trying other a number of ideas out soon.

Many thanks to my hard-working colleague Henryk for the work done so far.

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Breaking the cultural causes of risk

David Clover  13 January 2012 02:42:52 PM

I found this excellent and thought-provoking video on the ZDNet website, but as it's so good, I'm posting it here too. It's well worth watching. Professor Gerald Mars provides very clear and effective insights.

Gerald Mars, PhD, BA, FRAI is an applied anthropologist, currently Visiting Professor at London Metropolitan University, Brunel and Newcastle Business School, and has held similar appointments at Hong Kong, Bradford and Cranfield. He has published nine books, including Cheats at Work (1982) and The World of Waiters (1984), and over sixty papers. He has been retained as consultant to British Airways, BT, P&O and (for 17 years) to Unilever, among others. In 2003 he was awarded the Royal Anthropological Institute's Lucy Mair Medal "to honour consistent excellence in applied anthropology".



I found I could readily recognise the four 'types' or subsidiary anthropological groups proposed by Prof. Mars in any large organisation and felt very 'at home' with the analysis. Of course he doesn't make recommendations as such, it's a purely descriptive analysis but it also examines how communication between groups goes wrong.

Understanding organisations and their response to threats and opportunities and the way in which they determine rules and enforce and carry out rule-based behaviours, provides a very clear insight into what happens when 'Institutional Risk' is faced and how it is dealt with and reacted to in the diffeernt cohorts.

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Building a website - Exemplar for new OU course ’Web Technologies’

David Clover  25 November 2011 02:59:34 PM

 We've recently been helping a production course team in an exciting new project which will become our new TT284 Web Technologies course in February 2012.

At its core the course will feature a documented description of how a brand-new website with a sporting theme is conceived, planned, developed and mounted on a robust fault-tolerant server in our server room here at the Faculty of Mathematics, Computing and Technology. There will be videos associated with the presentation showing the progress from user briefing through wireframe to concept and construction. And of course there will be an actual working website which will have a useful function in the University community. People taking the course will be able to see it grow and develop and being used in real time.

The 'exemplar' site will be developed using PHP, and will be data driven and content managed through a web interface. It may aggregate 'social media' as part of the dynamic content. It will be 'OU brand compliant' in terms of its look and feel.

The contribution from my IT Development Group has to been to take part in several round table discussions and 'direct to camera' voice-over sessions. In these we talk about the development, how it is going to work, be mounted and tested and how it is to be populated. It features video footage in which the users commissioning the site are seen working alongside the professional web development group who are doing the concept, design  and build for the site.

I hope that some of the high levels of interactivity and 'political' considerations that always arise in the course of planning a new site will come out of this project as instructional (perhaps even cautionary) material for would-be developers starting out on and managing a web development process for themselves. I've enjoyed working with Ian and John for the course team and Sian and the professional crew from the video production team for the various bits I have been involved in so far.

The site has to fit within our existing Faculty systems and we will be able to mount it behind our load balancing and reverse proxy front-end with an appropriate URL as part of the University's evolving 'Digital Landscape'.

Watch out for TT284 if you are at all interested in studying the practical aspects of building a new website using the latest techniques. You can even pre-register for the course now if you want to!

Here's a foretaste:

 

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Extending websites into DRUPAL technology - single sourcing data

David Clover  25 November 2011 12:56:29 PM

We are making good progress with the help of our colleague Jacques Roberts in developing new website models with the Drupal framework and the University's OUICE (sorry - this page available to OU internal viewers only) style templates.

The current project is to replace the existing DPP website with something more up to date and to follow that with the Materials Engineering website. Internal readers of this blog can review the current look and feel of the draft revised DPP website (development site open to internal viewers only at present) which is currently nearing completion in terms of visual design and style, though not yet of its fully developed content.



In particular, we are concentrating on how to present 'people' information efficiently. In our previous and extensive work with data-driven Content Managed sites using our very effective Notes/Domino framework - for example sites like Sysweb, Statistics and others - we have been able to automate the population of the 'people' and even some 'thematic' and 'news' pages from a database containing profile information, picture links and news content. This means that on adding or removing someone to or from a Department or group in the Faculty or changing content for a theme, project or news item, all related sites where the person, news or theme details appear are updated at the same time and consistently. Changing the web presentation model to Drupal has meant that we need to rethink and substantially re-engineer the data connections that make this so very easy for us to do in the Domino model. This means that we now have to largely redesign our 'people' database so that we can feed lists and content directly to Drupal sites using an XML feed as well as to Domino-driven sites, and this will require significant development and testing.

On the plus side, when this is done successfully and when the web-based editing interface for users is ready we will be able to update 'people' pages and their pictures wherever they appear and on whatever site (in differing web-delivery technologies) with a single and central change to flags and content on their Faculty record.

With the help of the technical staff in the OU Library we are already doing something like this very successfully in relation to the 'ORO' (Open Research Online) Research Output items relating to people and areas. Under each 'Person' item in the DPP website (and in our Domino-driven sites) the current list of publicaitons appears automatically. here's a DPP (Drupal) example (click the 'Publications' tab) and here a Statistics (Domino) example. We hope to be able to refine the ORO feed selection criteria so that we can include ORO selections against 'keywords' on the ORO item itself to make tailored subsets of publications appear in appropriate pages and areas on all our sites. We've already, with the help of our developers managed to syndicate the 'News' about research which we are accumulating on our MCT-Research website to other sites. A recent example is shown the Acoustics site.

There is some way to go still in creating a successful first site for a research group (the DPP model) in Drupal, but once we are confident that we have mastered the techniques, in particular the 'single sourcing' of data such as that we are planning for people and pictures, we'll be able to start work on converting the sites for other groups too.
 

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CKEditor Plugins - Calendar Entries

David Clover  24 November 2011 02:34:21 PM

We have been unravelling the CKEditor Plugin module syntax so that we can add features to the useful toolbar that it presents for inline editing of text in web browsers.

This means that we can add new features, in this case a method for creating an iCalendar item which users can click on to create a link on a page which will turn into a celandar entry on their chosen default system when clicked. This will be useful when we are showing information on our new MCT-Research website about upcoming events and seminars.

This has turned out to be somewhat trickier than we expected, but Henryk now has it working and we will be adding it as a tool to our Faculty Intranet and other sites soon.

We are comparing the operation of this tool with the TinyMCE framework, conceptually similar to CKEditor, which we use on our Faculty Intranet

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IBM Domino/Notes/XWork 8.5.3 is here

David Clover  11 October 2011 10:21:00 AM

After a false start, we now have the latest IBM Domino/Notes 8.5.3 versions running on both server and client ends. This blog is now being served from our newly installed 8.5.3 server.

We had some small teething troubles to start with on the client side (though not the server) and we raised a PMR about the installer not working. Having downloaded the installers, as we thought correctly, we found that they would not unpack or install on a Windows 7 or Mac OSX machine. The unpacker from the same executable worked just fine on Windows XP. Similarly the Mac OSX .dmg file presented as a validated installable disk image, but gave errors and would not run when activated.

We checked the downloads carefully, and then grabbed them again, this time using the USA distribution site instead of the one in Ireland, and made sure that the Java-based Download Manager reported a fully successful download. This we discovered could only be done (we don't know why) on a Windows XP machine - which we fortunately have at least one of in the office.

Whatever the cause of the first failure, that appeared to give us properly working executables and the Mac version now presents 'correct' fonts to the world working just as well there as the Windows version does on Windows 7 and XP. We have yet to look at the Linux installers for Red Hat and Ubuntu, but I'd expect them to be OK too. So we'll now start to unpack and examine the new features and goodies.

Impressively, the 8.5.3. server install 'just worked' and took about 4 minutes - after which we had a fully operational 8.5.3 server upgraded and in place. Domino installs and upgrades have 'just worked' since our original 4.5 system way back in 1997 and have always been just as quick and trouble-free. Would that all enterprise software upgrades were as easy. Some of the competitors require very lengthy and costly 'migrations' even for minor point changes - which we've never had to worry about with this platform.

At last IBM has worked out what a powerful application server system it has on its hands and has made available a low cost 'XWork' server which can provide benefit to small and large organisations using the excellent XPages technology it has developed and which we have been working closely with over the last year. A good move on their part.

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If THIS then THAT

David Clover  14 September 2011 10:55:49 AM

Such a simple idea, but one that ought to get a lot of interest quite quickly.

The construction of conditional programming statements is how all programs work and have worked since the dawn of the computer age, but in the new social world of the internet, there's a new and free tool that lets you create links between elements of social networking such as Google Reader, Facebook, Twitter and all the rest of those useful but so far largely unlinked tools.

This may be a force for good - or indeed a force for creating evil clutter and muddle across the 'Social Space' of the Internet - much will depend on how it's used.

But it's certainly worth a look - and it may become big - perhaps indispensable - very quickly. You can read about it in various blogs across the world. There's a good summary at Webmonkey or you can take a look on Google.

• If This then That

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MCT Research Website released

David Clover  6 July 2011 02:36:38 PM

The new MCT Faculty Research website at http://mct-research.open.ac.uk is now released for indexing and crawling by Internet search engines. The site has been created and released under the direction of Professor Uwe Grimm as Associate Dean (Research and Enterprise).

The site is designed to provide a focus for the Faculty's Research and Enterprise activity as well as providing background information and basic links for upcoming REF panels.

The project to create the site started in May 2009, and although programming against the original specification was completed by the end of 2009, substantial work was required to populate the pages with information related to projects, themes, and other aspects and this proved very difficult to obtain. A new effort to obtain engagement by research groups with the content was started in early 2011, and a great deal has now been added.

The content of the site is not intended to be static. Each page has a nominated 'Owner' whose details are shown, and to whom enquiries and observations about the content can be directed. The site features an online web-editing interface which is accessible to nominated content editors. The content databases which lie behind it can potentially be made available to other sites using Web Services. Final touches to the Integration of content from a single source is already being undertaken with the site for the Centre for Research in Computing.

The new site includes dynamic XML feeds from Open Research Online relating to research papers published by members of the Faculty, and a utility for publishing news items related to Research which can be proposed by any member of Faculty staff and syndicated to other websites using RSS/XML.

The site also features Student Stories and various downloadable resources including podcasts.

The technical aspects of the site are under the direction of David Clover as IT Development Manager and Jacques Roberts as Faculty Web Content Co-ordinator for the Faculty.

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