Phone, Web Conferencing and Email are all inferior

As I sit here in the Detroit airport facing a 4 hour delay and scheduled arrival back in Portland at 2AM PST, it would be easy for me to rail against the need for face to face visits, but I won’t. It’s incredibly valuable to get together with the team who is ultimately responsible for delivering solutions and countless updates of those solutions to a user base that is always asking for more. In fact, my visit with just such a team this week at University of Michigan only serves to reinforce my belief that there is no replacement for the occasional face-to-face get together. Phone, Web Conferencing, and Email are all inferior to physical presence.

Context is king when it comes to security

This friendly little reminder comes via Scott Mann from University of South Florida:

I found something in our site that I wanted to pass along for the benefit of your developers (yes, we’re still finding stuff).  Today’s issue is that we were getting email failures for people we knew had access to projects.  They were failing on the Reschedule activity which is supposed to notify the PI and reviewers that the project has been moved to another meeting.  Unfortunately, the notifications were configured on the activity, whose read policy properly blocks the PI since the form displays the names of reviewers.  Since the notification’s context is the activity, and the recipient does not have access to the activity, the notification fails. It’s an easy mistake to make, but a good lesson for understanding the impact of activity security and the importance of context.

First let me say thanks to Scott for his contribution. It’s nice when others write my blog posts for me. ;-) This is a first but hopefully not the last (hint, hint, nudge, nudge). Scott is absolutely right and makes a point that I think deserves further elaboration.

Tips for managing WebrCommon files

Today’s post is short and sweet and I hope will save you a headache or two down the road. It’s related to managing the contents of your WebrCommon directory.

Tip #1
As most of you have already upgraded to Extranet 5.6 or are actively working your way there, it’s a good opportunity to emphasize that the best way to add or update your WebrCommon files is through Site Designer. This is especially true with Extranet 5.6 because, as of that release, the Click Commerce Extranet framework actually manages two locations for the WebrCommon files. In the past you were able to get away with simply dropping files directly into appropriate directory in the Windows file system. With the addition of the new location, this isn’t enough and can lead you to scratching your head about why your newly updated custom.css file doesn’t seem to be working. If you drag the file into Site Designer, on the other hand, all the locations are updated correctly. More information about the changes to WebrCommon in Extranet 5.6 can be found in this article: HOWTO: Manage the Webrcommon Directory in Extranet 5.6

Even in Extranet 5.5.3, there are benefits to dragging and dropping in Site Designer. Using this approach instead of direct file system access will avoid issues related to WebrCommon files that have their file attributes or permissions set in such a way as to break backup/restore or use within your site. Dropping the files into WebrCommon via Site Designer causes them to set up correctly.

It’s as easy as Drag-and-Drop.

Tip #2
Since you are updating the contents of your WebrCommon directory, I can safely assume that you are doing this in your development store that is integrated with Source Control (right?…please tell me I’m right!). This means that any new files need to be added to your version repository as well. In most cases, Process Studio is the tool you use to do this, but there is one exception and that is with Binary files such as images. In the case of binary files you should use the Visual Source Safe client directly to add or update them. This is because Process Studio makes the assumption that files are textual. This assumption doesn’t work too well when they aren’t and can result in images not looking right. Once in source control, however, there are no concerns about them being included in your next configuration update and being correctly applied to your test and production stores. Support for binary files will be added to Process Studio with the release of Extranet 6.0.

Cheers!

Three paths to an authenticated session, Part 4: Single Sign-On

If you’re just joining this topic, take a peek at:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Built-In Authentication
Part 3: Delegated Authentication
Your users interact with more than one online application within your institution. To do otherwise is just plain unusual these days. Perhaps you have one application for IRB processes and another for Grants. Then there’s your information portal, ordering system, Accounting System, HR system and a whole host of other possible applications. This is the reality of today’s world. While the universal goal is to put everything a user needs within arms reach, the unfortunate truth is that the Swiss Army knife approach to life in a research Institution is difficult to achieve in a single application. Next best thing is integrating different applications.
Click Commerce Extranet certainly is a great step in that direction because it enables you to put many Research related activities under one roof, but there will always be other systems. Once we accept this, the real question is how do we make this easier on the users? One pain point is the need to continually have to identify yourself to each system by logging in. Thankfully this is a very easy problem to solve by implementing Enterprise Single Sign-On (ESSO).