Most documents in LCMS (Luminis Content Management System) at IWU are web page documents. These documents are stored in a format that can be edited directly. When you click “edit” for a web page, the Edit-On Pro window loads up, which gives you all the tools you need to manipulate text, make links, and insert pictures.

But what happens when you need to edit or replace a picture, Word document or PDF? One way you might do this is:

1. Save a copy of the old file to your hard drive
2. Make your changes to the new file.
3. Import and submit the new file with a new name
4. Change all the referring pages to point to the new file
5. Submit all those same referring pages
6. Delete the old file

This is a totally functional way to go but leaves a few loopholes open. What if another web page links to your picture or PDF? Those links will be broken since you have changed to a file with a different name. What if you forget a couple of the 17 different places on your own site that refer to your form or document?

Even worse, what if you find a mistake in the new file and have to do it all over again? What if the picture needs to be cropped a little more? This method can be very tedious.

Instead, you might try using the “Checkout” feature. If you do this for a normal web page nothing will happen. If you check out a picture or some other file that Edit-On Pro can’t handle, something much cooler occurs.

LCMS will send a copy of the file in question to the hard drive of whatever computer you are using. It will be saved in the “C:/Documentum/Checkout” folder. (Vista users, you may have to “trust” iwu.edu servers to convince your computer to allow this. Call us if you need a hand working this out.)

Once the file is on your hard drive, you can edit it with whatever program you prefer. I like to use Photoshop Elements for images, and I have Adobe Acrobat Professional for working on PDFs. Once the file has been edited, save it in the same place you found it with the same name.

When you go back to LCMS, click “Checkin” which will automatically pull the new version from your hard drive. You can then add a comment to describe the changes you made. The new updated version will need to be submitted, but none of the pages that link to it need to be touched at all!

Another nifty trick is to check out a file, then replace it with another one. As long as the new file goes into the Documentum Checkout folder and has the same name as the file you checked out, LCMS doesn’t care. The new file will appear in the same place as the old, with the same name, keeping all links and image insertions intact. If for some reason you have specified a height and width value for an image in LCMS (something I don’t recommend) you will need to make your new image match those dimensions.

I have found in my travels that PDF is not very well understood on campus. I’ll try to clear up some of this confusion.

PDF is a file format that is essentially a virtual printout. It looks the same on each computer on which it is opened. Pagination, margins, fonts, and layout are all very consistent from place to place when you save a document as PDF. This means that a form or brochure that has been professionally done is best distributed as PDF.

Another reason to save files as PDF is that anyone can download a free PDF reader application. That means that you don’t have to worry about whether someone outside campus has Microsoft Word 2003 software.

Adobe sells software to create and modify PDF documents. This software allows you to make fillable forms that can be distributed and submitted electronically. Adobe provides a very nice comment markup system that can even work when people have the lowly free Reader application.

In most departments there is no need to pay for the Adobe software. We can use a free solution called PDF Creator that acts as a virtual printer. Any document or application that has a “print” option can then be turned into a PDF. This is a better option than scanning to PDF on a copy machine. This is because a copy machine takes a photographic image of your text. The resulting PDF is really just a picture, so you can’t cut or copy the text from it. This problem is resolved by using PDF Creator.

Rick and Patrick are planning a series of Training Workshops for the week of December 15. We will be using Microsoft Office 2007 but the tips and techniques we use will work in Office 2003 as well! Here is the breakdown day-by-day:

• Monday – Tips for MS Word: Check out Word 2007 while Rick and Patrick share a few techniques to save time while word processing. We will share our favorite tips and leave time to answer questions.
• Tuesday – Tips for MS Powerpoint: Take a look at Powerpoint 2007 and learn some tricks to improve the quality and efficiency of slide shows.
• Wednesday – MyIWU Course Tools: Get an overview of the collaboration tools available in MyIWU’s course and group pages. You don’t have to be a faculty member to use MyIWU to share files, share a calendar, e-mail a group, or distribute announcements – all you need is Patrick to show you how to get started.
• Thursday – Basics of Photo Editing: Learn some essential techniques for working with digital photos. Cropping, rotating, redeye, and color adjustment are skills you can use to improve photos for your department website or at home.

These sessions will be offered at 9am and repeated at 2pm each day in the Stevenson Hall Training Room.  Please contact Rick at rlindqui@iwu.edu if you plan on attending!

Patrick and I were in Chicago late last week for a presentation from Google. The Google rep was good but did not have a lot of deep insight into any of the specific areas of interest to higher ed. We did find out that Google donates advertisements to nonprofit groups, including colleges and universities.

You might think that after a pitch from Google I might be even more enthusiastic about the adoption of Google services at IWU. I’m actually even more skeptical now than I was before. Google isn’t able to engage in a long-term agreement, so there is no guarantee that free e-mail hosting and apps will continue to be free after 3 or 4 years. It wouldn’t be much fun to engage in a big migration to Google only to have to do it again in a few years.

This has started a healthy discussion about the positive and negative effects of this service. Why do we even provide e-mail hosting at all? Why not just create forwarding aliases to students’ existing e-mail?

The Google rep also explained that the eternal “beta” nature of their software is basically a software design philosophy. The current version is always the public version and updates, changes, and improvements are continually being worked on. This is a sound, positive, user-centered philosophy. I actually like this aspect of Google apps quite a bit. However I am a “power user” who is interested in adapting and learning. Many users are not so adventurous. I don’t think many of our users want to hunt around for features that may or may not have changed since yesterday. It actually sounds like our front-line staff would have a crazy moving target to support.

On the upside, Google is offering 7GB of mail storage per person as opposed to our 250MB. They have tons of data centers which means uptime and performance will probably be better than we can provide. On the downside, we are small fish in the big Google pond, with no financial stake in the deal. What leverage could we possibly have if the system goes away or doesn’t perform as promised?  A small university complaining about a free service to a huge company? I’m not sure the move to Google is right for us. I hope the discussion will continue among the campus community before any decisions are made.

There is a consultant on campus this week to evaluate our IT organization. His name is Gene Spencer. He will be holding an open forum for our campus community tomorrow, Tuesday Sept 16. It will be at 11am in the Ames Library’s Beckman Auditorium.

I hope you can all make it! Our IT staff is excited about the potential for changes that will benefit the whole campus!!