BU Networked Information Services

I do really muchso need to sit down and catalog all the cool stuff that I did while at Boston University's NIS, but in the meantime, I will highlight a few significant projects (and significant roles) I performed during my 3+ years at BU.

Research at Boston University

Worked as project manager (my first time doing this) and did so rather successfully. It has (as everything does) change slightly over the years (my code was better), but I put down the core organization and setup of this subsite of BU. It was big, but it turned out nice

BU Today

My first really big break. This was (with the exception of the CMS, calendar application, and classifieds application) all my coding in the orginal form, and I was in charge of managing the project from start (or at least NIS's start) to launch. This includes all the CSS and layout (it was instisted on being nested tables, etc. at the time) and all the install and implementation of the application components. The Office of New Media came up with a design and worked with partial specifications with the Marketing & Communications office and I worked through the rest with all parties. In the end, I was offered (since I was a graduating student consultant) a position at New Media, but turned it down, since it was woefully underpaid (compared to even what I was getting as a very specialized grad-student worker) and underdutied (e.g. I would be at the bottom of the process).

BU School of Management

Another massive undertaking - reorganizing, working with the school for new content and outlines, and getting a completely new site underway on BU's central servers (rather than a dinky little school-run one in one of their cabinets). The design (even though there was one proposed by a designer in our office) was contracted to the design company that made their print colateral, so I had to take (again) another's design and make it sing. I coded some application components and again tied everything into various calendars and content management systems (while being project manager).

BU School of Law

This was an epic undertaking, indeed. Spanning sites and subsites, this project encompassed over 5000 pages, massive reorganization and a lot of work on all levels. The design was worked on in-house, so although I didn't design the site, I provided technical and production consulting so that it would fit into the general plan of attack. This is the first big all-CSS/semantic site on BU property and I did basically all of the template coding, application integration, some of the graphics work, and much of the copy-editing beyond the management of several staff members and two temps. The site was the first to launch with my 508 compliant, unobtrusive JS dropdown menuing system. Which I think is kind of nice.

BUniverse

After the success of BU Today, both in terms of the project and with the BU community loving a daily news magazine, Marketing & Communications wanted to expand this with a video archive. Rounding up my teammate, Joe Winter (responsible for a custom Content Management System for BU Today - now used throughout the University) and some help from resident multimedia expert, George Gaudette, we took the BU Today brand to a new, all-CSS layout, Flash-server based, media archive, using a new, custom CMS for video management. It didn't launch with as big of a bang in the community, but it was definitely well-received and we were pleased with the results.

MyBU

Although I never saw it to launch, I was project lead for NIS-end work (since it was a cooperative project with BU UIS - who handle secure records). This was a uPortal-based student portal system, pulling together student records and tools, University calendars and news, RSS functions, and a bunch of other things, to one customizable interface. Aside from managing the project from the NIS-end, I worked on the interface customization, documentation, and oversaw the production of channels pulling from other resources. In the process, I did manage to make a cool AJAX-based public interface, but it was seen as a bit too cool and user-friendly for uPortal (which is more static and solid for customizing), so hopefully that code was put to use elsewhere at BU.