EXECUTIVE SUMMARY PROJECT SIMON

BACKGROUND
This proposal was developed in response to numerous requests for intranet functionality and in response
to usage data and feedback from users about the Universitys public website. To meet these needs, we
propose a four-phase solution codenamed Project Simon. This proposal is developed initially for campus
leadership input and then will be vetted with key constituencies, including college/school technical
liaisons, throughout this semester.
KEY NEEDS AND SOLUTIONS
Problem 1
The public website serves too many audiences to serve the most appropriate ones well.
Information for the public is not segregated from internal information for faculty and staff; it may
be advisable to restrict access to portions of our websites to only university personnel.
Solution 1
Create an intranet home website, portal, or gateway, organized as a one-stop-shop that provides
better internal campus communications and easier access to the information and services faculty
and staff need to get their work done. This will free the public website from serving internal faculty
and staff information needs and allow it to be re-designed to target prospective students, patients,
alumni, donors and other audiences. This intranet will provide secure web access to internal
university information for faculty, staff, and approved external users and links to other portals.
Phase 1a: The SharePoint infrastructure that supports the public web will be augmented and
divided into our public websites serving our external audiences and internal websites, or an
intranet, to provide secure access to information properly internal to the university for all faculty,
staff and approved external participants according to their security access privileges.
The project will begin by expanding our infrastructure and hiring staff summer 2012 and launching
a homepage or portal to the campus intranet by early fall. This process will be guided by the
governance group and the homepage will be revised based on feedback and analytics and relaunched before January 2012.
Phase 1b: Beginning in early fall 2012, select major business and academic support units
(Chancellor, VCs, major units such as HR and Faculty Affairs) will engage with University Web
Services (UWS) to separate and reorganize the information they want on the web into sites for
public and internal audiences. An intranet governance group will decide the order in which units
will engage in this process, and assess whether certain intranet features or applications (below) will
be prioritized ahead of these units - for example, whether creating the HR intranet site should be
prioritized before or after a database of university policies.
Phase 1c: Once all major business and academic support units can present their internal
information on a faculty/staff intranet, the public homepage will be redesigned to address only
public audiences.
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Problem 2
Many schools, colleges and units have expressed the need for a local intranet to conduct the internal
business of their organization. They have a need for departmental document collections, discussion
groups, calendars, committee websites and other typical intranet functions. Some have launched
their own intranets or contracted with others to provide them. This is not as cost effective, causes
duplication of effort, and provides more institutional risk from both security and data availability
considerations as compared to providing unit intranets as a central service.
Solution 2
ATEL's Academic Information Systems & Development (AIS&D) unit will provide a free service to host
a unit intranet, based on the central SharePoint Enterprise infrastructure, for those schools/colleges
and senior level administrative units (VCs) that desire and can support them. Participation is 100%
voluntary. The service will be based on the campus SharePoint Enterprise infrastructure and the
service model for these intranets will be similar to securing such service from a vendor, only with no
charge. Each unit will identify an administrator and backup staff to run their local intranet to be
trained in SharePoint and serve as the liaison between that unit and AIS&D for those features of the
intranet that AIS&D supports.
University Web Services will provide templates that local units can use to develop their intranets and
provide both live training and extensive online self-serve training materials. Unit administrators, as is
typical of the current role of LAN Administrator, will be responsible for managing their local intranet
and supporting their local users. These administrators will have access to the ATEL helpdesk for
"tier-two" technical issues. If units do not have a technical administrator they can purchase those
services from ATEL or other campus and/or approved commercial providers. The standard set of
infrastructure resources and services will be available without charge. It will include access to all
SharePoint Enterprise Services except those few such as the central term store and mysites that need
to be deployed institution-wide. Services and resource use beyond the standard ones (e.g.,
additional storage), if desired, will be priced on a fee-for-service basis. This service will be available
on a first-come basis beginning in August-September 2012.
Problem 3
The University has many ongoing activities and project needs that require multiple people to work
collaboratively across units and with other people in different locations, often asynchronously. The
work of these groups can be conducted much more effectively if they have better information
management and technology tools and web-based collaborative workspaces for sharing and
communicating rather than relying on just email and telephones. Furthermore, these cross-unit
activities, such as standing university committees and projects (e.g., P20, IPE, etc), often do not
have access to technical or LAN admin support to provide these tools for their group.
Solution 3
Deploy intranet websites for all university-wide committees, projects and initiatives. These sites will
have collaboration, discussion boards, document management, and similar features which create
web-based work environments for teams, collaborators, and business and academic support units to
share and conduct business together electronically.
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Problem 4
The university has limited resources to develop web applications that use technology to conduct
the business of the university more efficiently and effectively. Traditional web application
development is costly and constrains our use of technology tools for business process
automation, business intelligence, performance dashboards, staff networking and talent
utilization, targeted communications, electronic records management, and web forms based data
collection which could improve how we conduct the business of the university.
Solution 4
Create a SharePoint-based application development foundation or "platform" on which code or
code-less and 3rd party solutions can be built for our university intranet for less than traditional
web application development. Such an infrastructure, with an appropriate governance and
support model, will provide a scalable foundation for the evolution of intranet features and web
applications. Moreover, SharePoint is deeply integrated with other institutional-wide
technologies such as Microsoft Office, Exchange, and Live@edu and has compatible services to
integrate with other institutional systems.

SCHEDULE
Project Simon will begin immediately. The university intranet will be launched in early fall 2012 and
modified based on feedback and analytic data in time for spring classes. Timing for revisions to the
public homepage, migration of business units to the intranet, and feature and application development
will be subject to prioritization by the intranet governance group. Unit intranets for individual
schools/colleges will be deployed on a first-come basis beginning in August-September. Collaborative
workspaces for all university-wide committees and projects will be available by early fall 2012.

BUDGET

The proposed annual budget for this scope of services and deployment timeline is $300,864.
Additional one-time startup costs come to $74,990.
We recommend a contingency budget of $100,000 to scale support if usage exceeds estimates or
leadership accelerates application development or the migration of business units to the intranet.

RISK
Individuals now responsible for their units public web presence would exercise responsibility for
separating their public from their intranet content and maintaining both. Unit staff will be responsible
for supporting their own local intranets and end users, or contracting for that support. While all faculty
and staff may attend training, University Web Services will only support 2 technical staff liaisons per
college for helpdesk tickets. Not all schools/colleges may have the resources or structures to meet the
requirements for unit intranets immediately or the commitment to divide their content between public
and intranet sites. This plan and budget requires such a distribution of authority and responsibility.
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