dchen's blog

If you use RMS (Residential Management Systems) software, then be aware that their portal authentication isn't secure.  The portal authentication employs javascript functions to encode/decode user credentials.  That can be easily defeated.  We talked to RMS, and they admitted that is possible, but they don't have any other ways to do it.  So we came up our custom portal authentication method.  I heard RMS plans to improve their authentication next year.  Hopefully, they will implement more robust authentication method.

This wasn't an issue because I think most universities use it standalone.  You can tie it using LDAP/Active Directory nicely.  But when you integrate with portal and single sign-on, that is where security concern came.

2007 OHECC (Ohio Higher Education Computing Council) call for proposals open at http://ohecc.bgsu.edu/

Google has announced that due to extremely high demand, they have temporarily limited new account activations.  Well, they should since existing users have been waiting for days to get their stats show up.

Google has listed three common questions:

1. The 'Check Status' button is being reworked to check for properly installed tracking code. This should be fixed by the end of November.

2. The '+Add Profile' link has been temporarily removed until we increase capacity. We'll alert all current users when the feature is restored.

3. While we increase capacity, you may see longer than normal delays in data showing up in your reports. All data continues to be collected and no data has been lost.

More to come ...

CMS is a tool to help campus Webmasters manage content easier. University is a business entity about education, in that regard, CMS helps to market it with consistent look and feel as a single unit. I have looked many universities' website, most of them have different look and feel from college to college, department to department. After awhile, you started to wonder are they all related? I certainly understand each college/department have its own unique identity, it is nothing wrong to have your own identity, CMS can perserve that and still provide consistent look and feel across the entire campus.

CMS is only a tool, I think what is important to show is the benefits CMS can bring and make people realize themselves rather than enforcing some kind rule.

Well, I don't know the answer even though I have used CMS for awhile. I have mixed emotions about it. It certainly help me to mange the Web. But how to get users on board and use the centralized tool instead of each one working in its own silo? It's probably a policy issue ...

The Web is inheriantly unstructured, maybe the semantic web will help. We just have to wait before it becomes reality.

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