DMPTool2 Project – October 2013 Report

Overview

DMPTool2 continues to take shape and we are now shifting more into planning for release and promotion.

Technical Team

The development team is presently focused on connecting the HTML presentation layer to the application layer and bringing the second version to reality!   We will share this as soon as it is ready for consumption.

We are presently in the midst of organizing plans for the first round of usability testing to be conducted at the DataONE All Hands Meeting in the 3rd week of October and then a broader round of testing across our community in the last week of October and first week of November.  These tests will be focused on the new administrative user interface.  We will then conduct similar tests on the researcher interface in later November.

We have spent a considerable amount of time thinking about how to transition from the old to the new tool.  At this time, we plan to initially release access to the administrative interface in early December to allow institutions to configure their content.  We will then make the new version available to all users in early January and allow researchers to still access the first version if they prefer.  In late February we will complete the transition and turn off the first version.  We will be handling a migration of data from the first to second version, but do not have specifics on that yet.

Communications/Outreach Team

Most notably perhaps, we reached our 100th institution with customized content during the past month.  This is a big deal and helps to gain additional traction and momentum for building this community.  On the outreach activity front, we have presentations of the new DMPTool in planning for the upcoming November DLF Forum, the December CNI Forum, and the February IDCC conference.

Metrics

No major update on metrics since the last report.

Overall Project

We are on schedule to release a final production version in February 2014.

DMPTool2 Project – September 2013 Report

Overview

DMPTool2 is starting to shape-up and is moving into the period where the application and user interface will come together and we’ll start to see a real, live new version!

Technical Team

Over the past month we have seen tremendous advances in development of the application and user interface design.  The application has now been developed for the core functional areas around institutional profiles and creation of a DMP.  During this period, the team has worked with an outside vendor to develop and refine the entire user interface, matching quality design aspects with new functionality in the application.   The team has also been evaluating and incorporating enhancement requests from the community via the BitBucket issue-tracking page.

Communications/Outreach Team

The team has refined the outreach strategy over the past month and begun a relatively aggressive outreach and recruitment campaign to meet project goals and also increase awareness and use of the tool.  Responses were at first a bit slow, presumably due to summer vacations and semester starts, but we have recently been getting great responses and working with institutions on setup of Shibboleth and configuration of customized guidance.  We are very encouraged by these enthusiastic new users.  Additionally, we are now just shy of 100 institutions with this level of configuration/use.    

Metrics

We continue to make progress on reaching our project metrics.  Most notably this month, we have now completed 4 out of 6 conference presentations, have almost reached our goal of doubling the user base to reach 6,000 users, and have exceeded our goal of doubling plans created to exceed 5,000 plans.  Our main metric focus now is recruiting 50% of Shibboleth capable institutions and 75% of ARL institutions.

Overall Project

Our project timeline has undergone some minor revision, and we now expect to release a complete beta version in December 2013, a second beta version in January 2014, and a final production version in February 2014.

DMPTool2 Project — August 2013 Report

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.