InterLab 2002 Site Reports

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InterLab 2002 Site Reports
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• What are the site reports good for?
• Letting our fellow web developers and managers
  know what's going on at their sister institutions
• Providing a starting point for helpful
  information exchanges and inter-site cooperation
• Planting the seed of an idea, a new approach, a
  collaboration, or an opportunity to lend someone
  a hand

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Demographics
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Number of staff using your internal website The
number of staff using internal websites ranges
from about 100 to 13,000. The average-size
internal site has about 4000 users.
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Total IT budget for Laboratory About half the
sites have something to report in this area.
Responses break down into two groups folks who
seem to be reporting site-wide totals come up
with figures that range from 20-65M. Those who
seem to be reporting funding levels for "core" or
"central" site support offer figures that range
from 175-350K. To get a real handle on the
funding issue, we would probably have to ask a
lot more questions, define a lot more terms, and
involve a lot more people.
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Percentage of Laboratory IT budget
outsourced Most sites didn't report in this
category. The ones that did were divided evenly
among those who outsource from 0-5 of their IT
and those who outsource 30-50 of their IT.
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Number of static (HTML, PDF) pages on
Laboratory's internal site Responses in this
category range from 1000 pages to 500,000 pages.
The average response is about 100,000 pages.
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Number of static (HTML, PDF) pages on
Laboratory's public site Responses in this
category range from 500 pages to 285,000 pages.
The average response is about 145,000 pages.
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• Level of staff effort spent encouraging or
  enforcing website standards
• Central web staff often have responsibility for
  "core" or high-level pages. In these cases,
  peripheral (divisional, departmental) sites are
  usually the responsibility of line management.
• Other sites have a committee or organizational
  representatives that oversees standards.
• Sometimes responsibility for standards is so
  distributed that no one seems to have
  responsibility.
• Sites that answered in terms of the number of
  staff devoted to standards enforcement indicated
  that two to seven individuals were involved to
  some extent.

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Lab-Supported Tools
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Tools for Users
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Browser(s) and version The vast majority of
folks are using either IE 5 or later and Netscape
4.7--with a smattering of more recent versions of
Netscape and Mozilla. There is an obvious trend
toward Explorer and away from Netscape. There
also seems to be a small undercurrent of Mozilla
adoption.
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Email client(s) We're a pretty diversified group
in terms of the email clients we use. The most
popular clients are various forms of Microsoft
Outlook, Netscape, and Eudora. The most obvious
trend in this area is a gradual migration to
Outlook.
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Site search engine(s) A surprisingly high number
of our sites use Inktomi to index their public or
internal sites. Other search products include
Verity, SQL Server, Infoseek, FrontPage, and
home-grown solutions. There seems to be an
interest in investigating the Google enterprise
search product.
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Anti-virus software (desktop) About 40 of the
reporting sites used a Norton product as their
desktop anti-virus solution. Other choices
include TrendMicro, McAfee, NAV, Virus Scan, Net
Shield, Virex, and InnoculateIT.
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Anti-virus software (server) The most popular
response in this area was "no response. That
could mean we're not using much in the way of
server-based anti-virus software however, it
seems more likely that respondents just weren't
able to locate this information in time to
respond. Among the sites that did respond, Norton
was the most popular choice. Other solutions
include VirusWall, Bro, Sophos, TrendMicro,
InnoculateIT, Exchange Server, Sybari, and PMDF
stripping.
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Anti-spam software (desktop) Apparently the vast
majority of our respondents either don't use
desktop anti-spam tools or aren't sure what users
at their sites are doing in this area. A number
of folks indicated that this is a subject that's
under consideration.
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Anti-spam software (server) As with desktop spam
solutions, server-based solutions are currently
being considered by a number of sites. The sites
that have implemented solution use, in no
particular order, Spamwall, Brightmail,
TrendMicro eManager, and combinations of manual
and mail administrator techniques.
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Tools for Developers
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WYSIWYG web page development tool(s) Most sites
report fairly heavy use of Dreamweaver,
FrontPage, and HomeSite. Other tools include
GoLive, Composer, Word, and WebTop.
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Text web page development tool(s) The hardcore
code crunchers among us will be happy to know
that the feature-free Notepad is the most
commonly mentioned text tool. BBedit and HomeSite
are also commonly used. Other text editors
mentioned include Emacs, Cold Fusion Studio,
WordPad, Word, PfEdit, and TextPad.
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Programming language(s) for web applications The
most commonly reported programming languages are
Java, Perl, ASP, Cold Fusion, and JSP. Other
solutions include C, Javascript, Basis, Rexx,
J2EE, Web Services, PHP, PL/SQL, VBScript, Lasso,
and Tango.
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Programming tools for web applications Cold
Fusion Studio is used at about a third of the
sites. Other less widely used tools include
Dreamweaver, Visual Interdev, Visual Basic,
JDeveloper, Eclipse, Lasso, Tango, and Visual
Studio.
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Databases for web applications Most sites
indicate that they used Oracle, Access, or some
variety of SQL for their web applications. Other
choices include Ingress, FileMaker, Basis, and
Sybase.
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Tools for Website Managers
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Describe webserver environments Various flavors
of Windows (NT, W2K, XP) seem to be the most
common server operating systems however Unix
seems to be the OS of choice for central servers.
IBM was also mentioned in the OS category.
Webservers seemed to be predominately Apache and
IIS, with iPlanet, Linux, and IES also being
mentioned.
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Is your site management distributed or
centralized? We're pretty evenly divided between
labs that classify themselves as centrally
managed and those whose site management is
distributed. Several respondents indicated they
had a centrally managed "core" on their public
and/or internal sites, but that responsibility
for the rest of their web resources was
distributed.
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What content management tools are most often used
to manage your site? A wide variety of content
management tools were reported--most of the
non-enterprise variety. Dreamweaver and FrontPage
were mentioned most often. Other reported tools
include HomeSite, varieties of FTP, Stellant (in
a pilot project), NetObjects Team Fusion, Visual
SourceSafe, CVS, and home-grown tools. Several
sites indicated they were in the process of
looking for enterprise-scale content management
solutions.
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Does your site use portal software? Only LLNL
and LANL have implemented portals. Those sites
contemplating portals seem most often to be
aiming at a broad initial implementation
followed, perhaps, by more specialized
applications.
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Are portals implemented enterprise-wide or are
they used in selected areas? Of the two
implementations, LLNL's is enterprise-wide and
directed at all employees LANL's is
enterprise-wide and directed at managers. As
mentioned above most of the sites considering
portals seem to be leaning toward a broad initial
implementation.
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Describe any tools you use for evaluating and
testing sites (usability, accessibility,
compliance with HTML coding standards, checking
links, etc.) Of the many quality assurance tools
mentioned in the site reports, only Bobby, W3
Validator Tools, and Dreamweaver appeared in
multiple reports. The others include Webtester,
Cold Fusion Studio HTML Validator, Watchfire,
WebTrends, Dr. HTML, Jaws, LinkBot, HTML Tidy,
VisCheck, WAVE, CSE HTML Validator, Astra Site
Manager, FrontPage, and various custom scripts.
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• How has your site approached compliance with
  accessibility standards (Section 508)?
• Progress toward compliance with 508 standards
  comes in many shapes and sizes
• Paying little attention
• Evolving toward compliance
• Applying standards inconsistently
• Linking 508 efforts to search engine optimization
• Developing strategies and requirements
• Encouraging developers to make a good faith
  effort
• Providing guidelines
• Providing training
• Using text-only pages and tab-enabled forms
• Making 508 compliance part of the review process
• Requiring designers to use 508 testing tools
• Requiring Bobby compliance

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• Describe test and development environment for web
  sites, beyond individual desktop workstations.
• There seem to be several different kinds of test
  and development environments
• Development and/or review environment that
  mirrors production
• Non-mirror development and/or review environment
• Mirror site for testing/version control of
  non-executable content
• Two- or three-tier environment for application
  environment

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What software/tools/utilities are are used to
manage the "publishing" of finished
sites? Managing the publishing of finished sites
is handled in a variety of ways. The most
popular options include home-grown
review/approval/publishing applications and
several flavors of FTP. It should be noted that,
while FTP is often used to publish sites, a
number of sites are discouraging its use or
phasing it out. Other publishing tools/utilities
(some of which are also FTP-based) include
FrontPage, Dreamweaver, SCP, WinSCP, TelnetSSH,
CVS, Unix rsync, PVCS, WebDav, and OpenAFS.
Several sites also reported using "filer"
software that enabled them to copy content from
the desktop to the server or to edit files on the
server.
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Dont forget to take a look at the individual
site reports. Thanks for sharing.