General update

I've been busy again (who isn't, these days?) And likely to be more so until we can hire someone to replace Shaun Gatherum, who will be missed around here.

The web conversion is moving along, mostly in the hands of individual people in various departments. I'm working on a way to make the new template function on our database server; right now, a lot of our database applications like the faculty/staff directory and the account lookup system still use the old template. I can make the new template work for non-secure connections to the database, but not secure ones as yet. This may not be fixable until the database server upgrade, but we'll see.

My other big project at the moment is trying to automate Windows domain user creation. You may or may not know that your WOU network usernamer and password actually apply to two different accounts; there's the Windows Domain account, which you use to log into your computer and access network drives, and there's also your LDAP account, which provides access to your email, and your blog, and secure folders on the website, and the forums, and most anything else on any of our servers.

The LDAP account is created automatically, but until recently we have had to create the matching domain account by hand, which is a pain. However, I recently found a way to automate at least part of the process, and am looking to automate the whole thing soon. This probably won't make much difference to anyone outside UCS, except that it might free up more of our time to help you.

Site security

We're changing some of our web shortcuts (such as http://www.wou.edu/blogadmin and http://www.wou.edu/newmail) to use the https protocol.

This is the same protocol that is used for financial transactions on websites such as PayPal and Amazon; it means that all information you send is encrypted so that it cannot be intercepted en route.

However, this seems to have exposed a bug in our blog server; when you go to post an entry, the system returns you to the login page. If this happens, you can change the "http:" in the page address to "https:" and you should be good to go. (You may have to do this twice when posting a blog entry.)

I'm working on a fix for this, though it might wait until I get the blog server software updated.