Overview

We have had a very busy past month, with lots of progress on all fronts.  We are rather deep into application development, finalizing UI plans and transitioning to design work, and are aggressively reaching out to expand the user base of the DMPTool.  During this time, we’ve also come to the realization that our project timeline was imperfect, and we are more realistically looking at a full completion at the beginning of February 2014.  We’ve added a few extra pieces of design, testing, and data porting which weren’t originally included, but which we see as critical.

Technical Team

During the past month the development team has been focused and has completed functionality for the profile, administrator, institution, and authorization pages, authorization and role assignments, and has been doing significant testing.  The team will soon move the application over to a stage environment for further testing.  The UI sub-team has spent significant time on wireframe revision to cover all anticipated immediate use cases.  These wireframes are now in transition to a design vendor for development of the graphical design version for the end user.

Communications/Outreach Team

The outreach team is now actively recruiting new institutions to enable Shibboleth authentication, and has already had a very positive response.  All of this work is being tracked through a customer relationship management (CRM) system, which makes coordination of communications across the team far more efficient than previously.   The first major push has been on ARL institutions to work on advancing that metric.    The third advisory board meetings have been scheduled for August and September.  The team has also increased presentations on the project over the past month, with Carly Strasser and Amber Budden presenting at the annual Ecological Society of America conference, and Sarah Shreeves presenting at the CLIR Data Curation Fellows meeting and at the BePress Digital Commons meeting.   We have also submitted proposals to the Digital Library Federation Forum (accepted), the American Geophysical Union meeting (waiting), the HubZero HUBBub meeting (accepted), and the Research Data Alliance Plenary 2 (about to submit).

Metrics

As many of the metrics are dependent upon the release of the new version, we have no progress to report on those.  The metrics involving growth of our ARL and Shibboleth user bases are advancing now with dedicated focus from the outreach team, and we expect to see improved numbers on those by next month.  Our metrics for doubling user in user numbers and plans are nearly complete, and may be reached by the end of August.

Overall Project

We are presently right in the middle of the most work intensive period of the project across all areas, and expect to report significant advancements by next month.   As noted in the beginning, the schedule has been adjusted slightly, and delivery of a production version of the new tool should be expected for February 2014 instead of our original November date.