Eric Fraser

The new EECS website was launched today. There is a home EECS page at eecs.berkeley.edu as well as division home pages at cs.berkeley.edu and ee.berkeley.edu. A few of the many improvements include:

* More modern and professional appearance
* Streamlined and consistent navigation
* Increased use of images across the site to emphasize the culture of EECS
* Clear, easy-to-find information for our current and potential industrial connections
* Content Management in Drupal so that content can be updated directly on the site

This has been a year-and-a-half-long project that started by selecting a vendor (Kalamuna) to manage the discovery, design, and implementation process. The previous site had grown organically to a considerable complexity and size, requiring a complete overhaul. A large portion of the work has been to trim down content that was redundant, obsolete, or unnecessary. We hope to foster continuous improvement with the new implementation. If you have feedback about content, navigation, or feel, please let us know at webteam@eecs.berkeley.edu

I’d like to thank several people for their Herculean efforts:

* Chairs Tsu-Jae, Mike, and Randy, for their vision, leadership, and for dedicating resources to make this project a priority.
* Jan Pardoe for leading the project and keeping the vendors busy at all times and within budget.
* Maggie Crowley for managing and adapting massive amount of content and creating new content where needed.
* All the department staff and everyone else who helped out with content in their areas. We couldn���t have done it without you.

To facilitate the move to the new Drupal department web site (coming soon!), we are changing the server for ~ (tilde) home pages from www.eecs/www.cs to homepages.eecs/homepages.cs. This will be a two-stage transition. The homepages.eecs/homepages.cs servers are up and running now. If you are concerned, you can test your ~ homepage on those hosts

e.g. http://homepages.eecs.berkeley.edu/~fraser
or http://homepages.cs.berkeley.edu/~fraser

On Tuesday, May 24, we will set up redirects on www.eecs/www.cs so that all requests for ~ home pages are sent to the new servers. These redirects will use the permanent status, which lets search engines and browsers know that the new address is the correct one and should be used going forward. This ensures that there will be no issues with search engine results.
[Read more…] about Web ~ (tilde) Home Pages are Moving to New Server on 5/24/16

The College of Engineering is now offering no-cost WordPress website hosting to research groups, institutes, faculty labs, student groups and other units affiliated with Berkeley Engineering. Hosting is managed by WP Engine, a premier commercial vendor delivering WordPress hosting with speed, security, innovative technology and top-notch customer service.

If you’d like to request a do-it-yourself site on this hosting plan, please email coe-wp@berkeley.edu.

This service is best suited to standalone sites seeking the flexibility and ease of use that WordPress provides, but that don’t require the deep customization (nor the resulting development bandwidth) of a made-to-order HTML or Drupal website. Although the WP Engine-hosted sites will be within the berkeley.edu domain, the service is not intended to replace individual faculty pages within each department’s existing website.

While the college is providing the hosting service, this is otherwise a do-it-yourself web solution. Individual site owners are wholly responsible for their site’s content, design, themes, plugins and routine maintenance (like keeping plugins up to date). WordPress and WP Engine provide tools that make this maintenance one-click simple, but it will be up to you to use them. CoE will not be providing design or development services, or building or maintaining sites.

At the moment, this hosting service is best suited to migrating existing WordPress that are currently hosted elsewhere, or to creating simple new sites based on existing WordPress themes and designs (free or commercial). We have already launched 50 such sites, and WP Engine’s migration tools make the process fairly simple.

We’re also working on creating a custom Berkeley Engineering theme for WordPress, which will allow sites to follow the visual lead of the engineering.berkeley.edu site while gaining access to custom content types for people, courses, facilities, research and publications. Work on this custom theme is ongoing, and probably won’t be completed until the end of this semester. (Although you could create a new site now with a generic theme, and then convert it to the Berkeley Engineering theme at a later date, that will entail significantly more work than waiting to create the site directly into the the custom theme.)

If you are interested in taking advantage of this WordPress hosting opportunity, either now or after the Berkeley Engineering theme is completed, please email coe-wp@berkeley.edu to start the conversation.

A new ATT cell has been added to the top of Etcheverry Hall. You should see a dramatic improvement of signal strength throughout the Northwest corner of campus. It is still being tuned so there could be brief outages in the next few weeks.

Some additional details at:

http://ist.berkeley.edu/att/cellular-coverage-improvement

IRIS is beginning the process of migrating Email service to CalMail. This will be a multi-step process and is expected to take seven months to complete. At the end of that time, all users who receive email at an @eecs, @cs, or @erso address will do so using the CalMail service for department domains.

A list of Frequently Asked Questions related to the migration effort is being maintained, which will be updated with current information. It contains answers to many of the who, what, why, when, and how questions. If you have additional questions, please send them to help@eecs.

FAQ: https://iris.eecs.berkeley.edu/15-faq/CalMailMigrationFAQ.html

The first step of the process took place Tuesday 6/29/2010, at which time all incoming email began to be routed through the CalMail (MX) servers and then delivered to IRIS. No action was required on your part at that time and there should be no significant impact on email service. There will be some differences in behavior, however, such as additional headers applied by the CalMail Spam servers and a limit imposed on email larger than 50MiB. More detail is in the FAQ.

You will be contacted before any actions are required or taken on your part with respect to the migration of your email. These communications will happen throughout the seven month period.
[Read more…] about Email Service Migration to CalMail