We Have a Name!
After many hours of careful deliberation, and at least one false start, we have settled on Oxford Mosaic for the name of our Drupal Web CMS Platform! We are very happy with the name, which we believe represents both the way sites are constructed from a mosaic of widgets and the mosiac of different sites we hope to host on our platform. We also like the nod back to one of the World Wide Web's first browsers.
New Web Platform
The development of the first version of the new platform is now feature-complete and has been released as a Private Preview to a small group of users that have been heavily involved with us during its development. These users are now in the process of building the first production sites and we are busy taking feedback and tweaking the platform in response to real world use.
Service Rollout
We are delighted to report that, at its meeting of 6 June, the University’s IT Committee approved funding for a follow-on project starting next month, to support the design and implementation of a new service, to be called Oxford Mosaic, for rolling-out the Web CMS platform for use across the University. This work will provide a pricing structure, online training, processes for feature request and development and other work to enable the new service to go live on a properly supported, secure footing suitable for sustainable, long-term use.
Public Preview
While we are working on developing the Service, we will move the new core platform into Public Preview, and at this point Early Adopters will be able to request new sites and start the process of building their sites on the new core platform. Sites which come onto the platform in this period will be supported on a ‘reasonable endeavours’ basis by the Project team.
The Public Preview phase will commence once we have progressed the initial service design work, in the next month or so, sufficiently far to be able to provide indicative figures of the likely future pricing model for the Service. We are well aware that potential service users need clarity on charging to inform their planning before making a commitment to the new platform and we want to be in a position to give guidance on this before opening the platform to wider use. Later this month we will be offering a demo of the Platform to potential Early Adopters: further information and details of how to book a place for this session will be circulated shortly.
Users joining the Public Preview will not be charged until the service enters General Availability. We will be providing further demos and workshops during the Public Preview phase to enable users to learn how to work with the new Platform.
General Availability
Once the work over the next 6 months to define and implement the Service is concluded, it will be possible to extend use of the platform more widely and it will enter General Availability, becoming a fully supported Service.
Pilot Platform End of Life
After the platform enters General Availability there will be an extended period of time - we anticipate a minimum of 6 months - for Pilot sites to be migrated to the new platform. The duration of this period will be confirmed at the end of the service definition work.
When the Pilot platform becomes End of Life we will be able to generate a static HTML site for those Pilot users who have chosen not to migrate their sites.
