2006 Campus Technology Innovators: The Web
TECHNOLOGY AREA: THE WEB
Innovator: University of Michigan
UM’s MAYBAUM: Providing truly
user-friendly website building tools.
Challenge Met
In 1998, the most common request from University
of Michigan Medical School faculty
was for a system to help them build unique
websites and simple databases, flexible
enough to let them express their creative
scholarly work. “At just about any university
that you can name, if a person needs to make
a website or database for his own unique, creative
purposes, he is given conventional web
space, or access to a MySQL/PHP server, and
that’s about it,” says Jonathan Maybaum, professor
of pharmacology and former director
of academic IT at the University of Michigan
Medical School. Maybaum set out to provide
something much better, and thus the
UM.SiteMaker project was born.
With UM.SiteMaker,
users can build their own unique database-driven
websites and web applications—through a simple webpage, requiring no
knowledge of SQL or traditional database
administration. “People love the system’s
flexibility,” says Maybaum. “It is used for all
sorts of purposes, including not only the
obvious ones like teaching and research, but
also recruitment, support of academic programs,
student organizations, and public
relations.” There are now more than 5,000
websites published by faculty, students,
and staff from all over the university, using
UM.SiteMaker.
Perhaps the most telling aspect of
UM.SiteMaker’s popularity in the UM community
is that the last several rounds of development
have been funded by contributions
from university units (schools, colleges,
departments). “Financial support is a very
sincere form of recognition around here!”
says Maybaum.
How They Did It
Maybaum and his team began by characterizing
their target user’s level of technical
knowledge. What type of person would realistically
be able to utilize the UM.SiteMaker
system? Their conclusion: Users should be
tech-savvy enough to be comfortable with
spreadsheets; further knowledge of web and
database design should not be necessary.
UM then turned to Global Village Consulting to develop and
host UM.SiteMaker. Programming was done
in Apple’s WebObjects environment.
“The cost-effectiveness of developing
in WebObjects, and of deploying on the
OS X Server platform, were critical in making
this project possible within a very small budget,”
says Maybaum.
Next Steps
UM open-sourced the application last year
as GVC.SiteMaker, and a high priority now is to
get the technology in use at other universities.
With the latest version (4.1), it is possible to
export user-defined solutions to an XML
archive that can be imported into any
SiteMaker site, at UM or elsewhere. “This will
allow other institutions that adopt the technology
to leverage what our users have
already built,” says Maybaum.“My vision is for
this to eventually create a community of ‘user-developers’
who are not programmers.”
Advice
“Supporting creative scholarship is the right
thing to do,” says Maybaum, “but if you use
technology designed for this purpose, it
makes business sense, too!” Take, for example,
this UM.SiteMaker success story:
A professor sent a grant application to the
National Science Foundation, for
a project on the history of substance abuse
research. Part of the proposed project
involved building a web database as the
mechanism for organizing and disseminating
interviews, artifacts, and other materials. Yet
the projected cost of the database ($30,000,
according to three vendor estimates) was
keeping the grant from going through.
Using UM.SiteMaker, it took about a day to
make what the professor needed. She revised
her grant application, and it looks like the project
will be funded, this time around. The NSF
recognized the use of UM.SiteMaker as a significant
improvement over the previous grant
proposal. Technology to the budget rescue!