In May 2016 we launched a survey to invite participation from everyone who uses EdWeb CMS, or plays a part in the management of websites delivered through EdWeb. Participants had 5 votes to pick functionality that was most important or critical to them. We used the results to help us prioritise the development work for EdWeb.

Staff taking part in this survey actually has a really big impact for us. Prioritising work from a long list is difficult and we have a lot of stakeholders we need to take into consideration. Getting clear results from a survey such as this is incredibly important and makes prioritisation much easier for us.

Unfortunately we can’t do everything. This is because we also have to take care of a number of different critical developments and can’t always direct all resource to building new features or improving existing ones.

Also we can’t mark all work as complete as some work is likely to be on-going due to the size of the work needed.

Survey results – the top 5 items and their development progress

1 – Content removal – INCOMPLETE

Top of the list was the ability to remove content from the CMS to reduce unnecessary clutter in the EdWeb content tree editor. Whilst we haven’t addressed this yet, with the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulations in May 2018, it’s something we’ll need to address fairly shortly. We are going to need a way of easily removing any references to people if they request this and in certain situations unpublishing content might not be sufficient. Obviously we have manual ways to achieve this but we need to make this easier and simpler to do.

2 – Social media integration – COMPLETE

Our first wave of work on integrating social media sharing functionality is now complete and is being used extensively across the site. The next step is to add some monitoring capability and greater editorial control over what pages the buttons appear.

3 – Events publishing – IN PROGRESS

Our current project is developing an automated view of events. This will be from EdWeb initially but we want to start the process of being able to aggregate and display events from external systems such as the Talks Seminar site and the University’s Event Booking system. We’ll be deploying this in the first part of 2018.

4 – Integrating external services – SIGNIFICANT PROGRESS MADE

We want to make it easier for Editors in EdWeb to add services such as Google Maps, YouTube videos and Twitter feeds. At the moment this involves getting code from systems external to EdWeb and pasting this in. We have made some significant first steps by creating a significantly easier and more granular process of adding complex code (JavaScript) to pages to allow functionality such as live chat, email marketing integration and the ability to serve targeted advertising.

5 – PURE research data integrations -COMPLETE

Firstly we have created a template for staff profiles that could display a member of staff’s research publications from the PURE research data. We then expanded this to make it easier for students to also make profiles and extended the PURE data capabilities to allow research activities to be displayed as well as publications. While this has currently been marked as complete there is still potentially a lot more work we can do in this area.

So out of the top 5 we have completed or have made significant progress on 3 items, we are currently working on another and the final item is something we are in the process of starting to address. We are about to launch our second community EdWeb survey and will be in touch via email.

The full results of the first survey are available on our blog:

EdWeb feature prioritisation survey results

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