This week at the Digital Library Federation’s 2013 Forum in Austin, Texas the DMPTool team was given the opportunity to present some of the major changes coming in the DMPTool2. Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be posting in-depth feature highlights of how we’re improving the tool and what that will mean for DMP authors, tool administrators, and data support staff.

The new DMPTool home page, with updated content.

An extremely noticeable change comes in the form of the updated dashboard, with completely new visuals and a more robust way to create DMPs, administer the tool, and find best practices and guidance. In-progress data management plans, institution specific resources, DMPs for review, and useful templates will all be accessible from a single, user homepage. Similarly, creating your data management plan is easier to navigate, with a clear overview of where you are in the process and easy access to examples and prepopulated plans.

The DMPTool guidance page, with help from funders and your institution.

One of the most requested changes to the tool was a way to customize the help text provided from within the user interface. The DMPTool2 dashboard provides administrators with ways to not only customize the help text, links, and contact information but also the templates themselves. Users will have access to a centralized Funder Guidance page complete with links to basic templates, guidelines, and sample plans.

These changes will not only improve the tool itself, but also provide an easy way to centralize the information relevant to the researchers who will be using the tool. Making it as easy as possible to not only write a plan, but also find high quality information and resources is a central goal of this project.

The institution profile page – you can even upload your logo!

For administrators, making major and incremental changes to the institution specific information your researchers can access will be possible directly through the interface. Administrators will be able to customize their institution’s information, provide example answers and help text, and link to libguides and other resources at pivotal points in the DMP’s creation. Making this kind of customization faster and easier will allow the specialists that administrate the tool to respond quickly to their users needs and feedback, and use the DMPTool not only as a way to help write data management plans, but also as an information source for anyone at their institution who interacts with the changing world of research grant writing.

Next time, we’ll be going over the ways the DMPTool lets you collaborate within your institution and publish your work to create quality data management plans.

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 3^rd 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 100^th 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.

We have added a one-page overview of the features for users and administrators currently in development for the DMPTool 2 to our bitbucket wiki. Designed to complement the more technically oriented requirements documentation, we will be keeping the overview up-to-date as the scope of development changes. The features overview can be found on the DMPTool 2 page on our bitbucket wiki, or you can simply download the PDF directly.

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.