Diane Meves:
Hi everyone, I'm Diane Meves with the Office of Marketing Communications and thank you for coming to do training with us. This will be recorded for future reference. We are packing in a lot of good training for the year 2025. Over the past few months, the university policy for websites has been undergoing a revision and this is some of the policy language excerpted here. The goal for this policy is to help us make better websites, and we're going to do that with consistent experiences, reinforcing that sites meet accessibility and security compliance, and we'll update and share web standards to improve our reputation. But this last bullet here, this is the part we are reviewing today. We're establishing roles, responsibilities, systems and processes for the people creating and managing our websites. And this is going to help us keep our websites in check. Late last year we reached out to all of you and collected website assignments for web leads and primary technical managers, per the upcoming policy.
So that's great, we've done that. And so today we are talking about the systems, the digital inventory system, and the processes that you'll use to manage and update the digital inventory system. We really hope this eventually gives us good data about our websites. The big picture is that we're expecting the university websites policy to be approved this spring, and so this component is one thing that gets us closer to that finish line. We started last year, we've done some usability testing and building, and now we're doing some training. So look for more information to come about the university websites policy and your role as a web lead.
To review how the digital inventory system works. Number one, we are building into the data that is already living within ServiceNow. So your digital accessibility coordinators have already done a lot of work to get good data in place, and so we've added you as web leads and primary technical managers to also access these records. All three roles have the ability to modify something in ServiceNow and add new websites. And so this is a shared space, so it's important to work together. This big bubble shown on the left is the myRME component of ServiceNow.
Next, step two, the data you are adding is being pulled into the website's inventory. From there we are sharing that data in a searchable report. That's bubble number three. Everyone in the university will be able to log in and look up a website or set of sites, so all staff will be able to search for URLs, keywords, people and units, and you can also export those lists. So it really operates as a nice way to give a who is, behind each of these records.
Today I hope you will learn more about how to find a website and its details, how to pull a report on your website's records, how to manage and edit existing website records, and then how to add new website records. Lastly, not everybody has access to MyRME, and we'll talk about that. So there's a way for you to be able to add access for someone managing a website. So first I want to say hats off to everybody who's involved as our web leads and our primary technical contacts. Thank you. We do have information about the policy and these website roles.
I want to address a common question we heard over the past few months. Many of you already have a perfect way to manage your own list of websites, and so we've often heard, "Can we get an API to sync our records with the digital inventory system?" So that is on our roadmap and we hope that we will be able to accommodate you and make this even easier in the future. We weren't able to get it done for this quick timeline, but we hope to... Reach out to us and let us know if you want to be part of that testing and part of that requirements building.
And so let's go ahead and search. An example of search might be that you know heard another unit has a website that has similar content to yours and you want to reach out and collaborate with another unit. So let's figure out how we can find a website. We have a page that supports the university websites digital inventory, and there's the URL, go.osu.edu/university-websites-digital-inventory. There you can review information on all of these instructions and you can also launch the platform. This tool is built within Microsoft Power BI, and this is part of our Microsoft suite of tools. So once you log in and you've accessed this report, it will be in your history. So you can always then visit https://powerbi.com and you'll be able to find this report in your history.
I want to mention, you can go ahead and ignore these outer frames I'm highlighting in red. Focus on that center area for more of your information. We also have help resources at the top. You can go back to the digital inventory websites and learn about our policy or if you are a web lead, you can log into myRME from this page. But we'll go ahead and demonstrate a search of this inventory system after this PowerPoint. There's four different ways you can search. One, the URL, the site name, contacts who are web leads or technical managers on a website. You can search a name dot number there. You can also search by your unit name so that if you have 100, 200 websites, you'd be able to pull up a list of all of those operated by your unit.
So to search a URL, you're going to click inside that field, you're going to select all of the checkboxes that apply to your search, and then from there you'll have a table that's built and it shows the URL, the site name, the web lead, and the technical manager and the unit. So selecting one line in our table then allows you to see lots more details on the record below. You'll be able to see the content management system, any developer notes. And so keep in mind that as you are adding to developer notes that that can be seen by anybody in the organization. You'll clear your selection with that eraser icon on each field. Do that after you're done with a search, because otherwise when you come back to the report it will save that in history. And so that might provide a little bit of a hiccup.
So yes, clearing your search, you'll see the tables, retired sites are not included in our list. Our list is representative of active and to be deployed websites. You can also then export the table as Excel or a CSV file by clicking the more options dots. You can search a name of a person, selecting records, selecting a unit, and by the way, there are 57 Ohio State units. These are built on the risk categories list of units. So everybody channels up to their risk category. And if you find something that you see is incorrect about a website, like let's say the web lead is not the web lead, reach out to the web lead to make those changes. Web leads are the ones who are going to make the corrections and manage the record. And we'll get to that part in a minute.
So the digital inventory system That we just talked about is the one that's open to everybody at Ohio State. So now we're going to talk about MyRME, where the web leads, the technical contacts and the accessibility quarter manage the records that everyone will see. Myrme is a component of ServiceNow and this is used as a tracking system for system criticality, accessibility, applications, servers, all kinds of good technology. So we are expanding the use of MyRME to websites. And so you'll see there's a websites tile here, so that's where you'd be able to click to find the websites that you're managing. There is a go link here for go.osu.edu/myrme, and it stands for Risk Management Entities. So that's just our acronym that we'll be using in referencing for the system, to add and edit records for websites. Keep in mind that not everyone has access to MyRME, so different people are assigned different records. When you log in, you may not have the records that someone else has. And so keep in mind we've got a link for knowledge-based articles up at the top as well.
If say for instance, you are a web lead and you see 13 of your websites, but there's two not showing up, you can reach out and ask to make sure that these websites are not assigned to someone else, because you'll be looking up the website record in that inventory and if you see it is assigned to someone else, you can ask us to change it. Send an email to both people on the record and your accessibility coordinator. We want to keep everybody in the loop as we're changing ownership of web leads. It's very important that you don't overwrite changes that someone else thinks they're a web lead for. So the other thing that we want to avoid is do not create a new entry in MyRME for a website you think is missing, because it might already be showing up for somebody else. So make sure you follow these steps before you create a new website.
As we mentioned, MyRME is a shared space, and so websites is just one of the components. And then you'll see that there's an add application button at the top. That's where you would add a new record for your websites, and only web leads are going to be adding applications for their websites. And then you can also search your listings of websites for your keywords. So for instance, A Walk In Our Shoe is the history of Ohio Stadium. Any of the keywords for walk or shoe should be included. So you'll be able to pull up your website.
To update a record. You would find your tile, and in this view you can see cards for each website records. Search that keyword, type your selection, and then you can click update application, and that's going to allow you to update the record. So when you're updating the record, remember this is a shared space. There's three categories of information stored in here. Application information, digital accessibility information and website information. This is also built within ServiceNow, so it looks like a shopping cart model with add to cart. We'll get to that later, but that's a very important way to save your work. For websites, you always want to make sure that website management and digital accessibility are checked, and that the business application is the short name of your website.
Keep in mind that the records might've been added by your accessibility coordinator before, and so the only places that I want to draw your attention to here is the name of your application. The name should be the name of your website. Avoid acronyms, avoid calling it a website. You don't need to say, The Women's Place website. You can just simply say, The Women's Place, or the College of Nursing, or the Office of the President, or the Marion Campus Library. Those are representative samples. Usually people are using their title tag as the name of their website, and that's a perfect example and a perfect use.
Your alias may be another name that you might call it. It could also be an acronym that you want to try. And then CI Code is a unique identifier for this record in case your name changes or your URL changes, the CI record is the unique identifier. That one you will not have to add, it's automatically created by the system. The customer contact is the web lead. So if you are updating information, you want to put your web lead information in here for your website, and your primary technical contact remains the same. Update those two. We do prefer two different people if you can for redundancy, but it is okay to have the same person be the web lead and the technical contact. There is a website status, you will use hopefully in use, retired, or to be deployed. So an active website is in use, retired is retired, and to be deployed as you're building it. There's a description section, which is nice for the marketing of your website. Keep it short, but you can describe what this site is for and what it does.
Accessibility information, as we mentioned, is managed by the accessibility coordinator. Consult with them if you see anything here but do not change information. They are working very hard to keep our website records accessible and this is their way of tracking it. You can log into the ADA website in order to find your accessibility coordinator.
So let's talk about website information. This section is new and this is managed by the web lead. So you'll choose what kind of website it is, whether it's a mobile web app, a web application or website. 99% of the times website records will be websites, so that's perfectly acceptable to use. In your URL field, try not to add https:// that is a given, so you can just start the URL with whatever your name is, .osu.edu. The contacts for web lead and technical manager are copied from above, and we did this primarily because web lead is a very important name for our university website policy. So some business applications have a customer, but websites are going to have a web lead.
You can also add customer-facing email addresses in here. So if your website has a customer-facing email address such as Newark, Ask a Buckeye, osuaa@osu.edu. Those are great places to put this so you have an identified help and support address that's attached to this record. The same thing is true with a customer-facing phone number. If you have a phone number for your website, add it here.
Optionally. You can also add an internet or internal service provider. This is not an old ISP, but rather does someone at the university support and host your website. We have two options in here, one with OTDI and one with the Office of Marketing Communications. And again, it's optional. Many units manage their own websites. If you want to add your content management system, you can. If you want to add your web vendor, sometimes people have multiple web vendors, so this field is a little bit different. You will click the lock icon to unlock this field. You will click the magnifying glass to search the approved web vendor list, and then you'll make your selections. If you have more than one, click that magnifying glass twice. And then once you've done selecting your vendors, you can click that lock icon back and your fields will be updated.
If you have a help desk support line for your website, like a ticketing system, you can add information for your ticketing system or that contact your web team information there. If you are managing your cookie consent, your privacy consent management... Blanking on the name. Whatever you're using to manage privacy in your cookies, definitely add that here and check your box for if you have it. Lastly, as we mentioned, we've got a journal function that developers might find handy to plug in notes. So for instance, if you want to talk about a redesign coming up in the next fiscal year or any other notes that might pertinent to the rest of the organization, that's an area you can do that.
How to save your work. Remember that there's a 15-minute page timeout with ServiceNow, so work fast and without distractions, don't leave your work and come back, it might not get saved. But if you do need to save it, you select order now when you're done, and that adds those edits to the database, or add to cart, if you want to save additional edits. I say, go ahead and always order now when you're done and then you click checkout and that saves your record. You'll receive a ServiceNow completion email that you don't need to take action on, and you'll be able to find your changes in the MyRME homepage.
As I said before, we try to avoid duplicate records. So when you are adding a new record, make sure the web lead is the person adding a new website to MyRME. And you'll do that with that button that says, Add Application. And again, make sure that you click digital Accessibility and website management for your application, the two most important fields for collecting website information. You can save partial work, but there are fields that are required in here.
You will want to work with your ADA coordinator to let them know to update the ADA fields and then select, Order now, and check out to save. We are in this soft launch phase of this tool, so log into that Power BI list of websites, try the searches, clear your searches, and check your name for records that you may be listed to manage. Is everything accurate? Check your unit's name for any blank records. If we don't have a web lead, we'll be knocking on your doors to see if we can get web leads assigned. And then confer with your teams and your accessibility coordinators to make sure your data is great. You'll get more instructions in March as we get closer to our policy approval. If we can answer any other questions, you can always reach out to websupport@osu.edu. Thank you.