I have had an interesting week, you can see on the main blog that we have finally got a brand together for the project & that fits within the universitys branding. Once we get the final copy from Marketing I will be putting it up on the project websites. I did look at whether I could change the forum look and feel to match the reds from the main project site & blogs (no), if adverts can be removed (again no), and can we get urls to open in a new window automatically (…no). On a positative note I now have a google calendar available on the forums which lets the management team see when meetings are being planned relating to the project.
On the note of websites and forums we are now looking at whether we are using the right tools or not. This has stemmed from two areas. One is the university now has its own installation of Elgg which can allow the use of university accounts to access particular communities and share documents, blogs and external information (such as RSS feeds from this blog) and can be personalised more than the forum we are using at the moment. The other is the fact that it is difficult to save and store your own copy of documents from the web once they are in our repository.
Will this have a big impact on the use of the repository itself? Is there a better way of getting documents out of HIVE so that you can:
- avoid the redirect page
- allow people to right click on the link straight to the document using Save As
Anyway those are my thoughts for the day 🙂