Director, Web Resources
Office of The Vice President for Development
(2000-2002)
- The Development Intranet for internal communications and volunteer coordination
- The “Giving” site for donor information on philanthropy at UM
- “Michigan Online Giving” – secure transaction site for annual giving into unit annual giving programs (embedded in most unit sites – centralized transaction processing)
- “Leaders and Best” – a Web version of a regular (“glossy”) publication designed for major donors
- “Senior Gift” – for Senior Class - a challenge-giving site to support the annual UM-MSU giving competition
- “Women in Philanthropy” a site providing the history of women in philanthropy, listings of hundreds of major gifts to higher-ed and non-profits, many useful references, compiled by Ann Castle, a consultant who worked forSlate.com, The United Nations and the White House Conference on Philanthropy. Transferred to the UM as a gift by Ms. Castle’s husband after her death in 2000.
The development of the Intranet site was the most challenging. Development badly needed a secure communications network before the next campaign launch that would enable staff from many different units (and network/file store architectures) to communicate in a persistent manner and to publish and exchange information. Many development staff are on the road a significant portion of the time, so this had to be a web-based service.
The architecture involved:
- A distributed publishing model. Designated editors from all units and central departments would have publishing and editing privileges.
- Secure access. A Velociraptor firewall, with Cosign integration to an authorization manager that handled access for multiple roles for staff.
- Access for volunteers – non-staff campaign workers who need access to some, but not all information (another role that generated another user interface, on-the-fly.
- A simplified editing interface that would be easily understood by non-Web trained staff.
Design and development was done using in-house staff (COBOL programmers who were identified for career improvement training, who learned Cold Fusion and Oracle). The final design was a Cold-Fusion application running on Oracle. The Web service was run in Apache on Linux servers with fail-over capability, First production use began in December 2002, approximately 15 months after the project start.