My department has spent a lot of time over the last couple months looking at the web hosting services that we provide and trying to determine what they should look like. Never mind the fact that the core group of us feel we should be focusing on tools in support of teaching and learning…apparently just providing and supporting Blackboard is enough in that arena. It is our job, now, to recommend and ultimately, I assume, provide a solution (think set of services/applications) to meet an ill-defined set of web content needs across the University. So, I’ve spent the majority of my time recently toying with applications like Drupal and Wordpress as we collectively try to decide what combination we’re willing to support, why and how we plan on doing so.
I’m becoming increasingly frustrated with the amount of time I’m spending administering systems and applications and discussing how to meet such a broad set of needs with a limited (read manageable) set of systems. I haven’t been doing any development, and it appears that time left for development will become less and less as I spend more time dealing with the above.
It occurs to me that web hosting providers offer, more or less, everything our stakeholders may need…beyond what we’ll ever be able to provide and manage. Why, then, am I doing backflips to support a similar, albeit lacking, environment? Wouldn’t our time be better spent working on support of the configuration, integration and extension of some common set of these solutions, and let our clients choose the solution that best meets their web hosting needs? We, then, can focus on institutional services such as learning management systems, financials, event calendars, student portal, etc.
Update: I’ve been discussing this with my colleagues and keep flip-flopping on the issue. We trade some control with local hosting for what I believe may be ease of use and administration with external hosting. Locally we have ultimate choice in architecture and range of applications, but are limited in what we can do by staffing.
The clearest path (right now, anyway) is to focus on the departments and schools most in need of web hosting support and try to meet their needs with a limited set of locally supported solutions. Beyond that, clients will need to consider securing their own resources and solutions and, possibly, looking into external web hosting providers.
