How do you inventory your portal?
Just curious... how is everybody taking inventory of their portal?
More specifically, we have a need to "print everything" (log in as someone with every role and print every tab) for editing purposes. Anyone got any tips for that?
Use the Channel Manger:
I just use the Channel Manager. You can copy and paste the Channel Name and description into a spreadsheet, then label what group each Channel publishes too.
That allows you sort them by user groups, which is nice.
The printing of tabs is fine for a visual. If you have to figure out where in a tab each Channel is located. It depends on your audience really. If you go with the spread sheet method, you can add a column that list on what tab and what position each Channel is located.
So in my situation I would have 5 columns:
Channel Name | Description | User Group | Tab Name | Tab Location
Hope this helps,
Robert Eickleberry
Portal Administrator/Developer
reickleberry@watc.edu
www.watc.edu
More info
What are you trying to do with this information? Do you want an inventory of what roles own which channels, or is this for training purposes, etc?
In this case, it's for an
In this case, it's for an audit of all our portal content. We also have a need for people to be able to 'claim' ownership of channels that contain content belonging to them (which means, given the set of end users I'm working with, printing things out).
Suggestions
We do several different things to audit our channels through a helper website that we wrote out of necessity for some higher functionality than the tools (or lack thereof) that come with the Portal. Our helper application allows users to edit channel fragments based on their role and the channel's owner outside of the TCC editor, manage users, send announcements, etc.
Because we store all this information cached in a database, we can write reports on the number of channels, the number of fragments for each channel, the number of channels a particular group owns, the most recently edited and created channels, etc. Soon we want to place descriptions, and ratings on each channel so that we have metrics on user feedback for all the channels, which will allow us to review the channels at the bottom of the stack.
In terms of channel content, we have policies and guidelines about what content is and is not acceptable for channel-ization, and we enforce these policies through a cron job that check for offensive content, and a lot of manual review. To try and keep channels relevant, we offer ongoing training opportunities, as well as actively seek channel suggestions to / from all of our departments.
As far as usage statistics go, we can tally the number of subscriptions to particular channels, and we can tell what traffic occurs on which tabs. Unfortunately we have no way to determine what channels a user interacts with on a given tab however.
I know that this is a mile-high overview of our auditing structure, but I didn't want to get very specific without knowing what in particular you were seeking. I would love to share some of what we have done with you if you are interested. Feel free to contact me via email at bensimpson@clayton.edu