News From the CHSSWeb Team

We have a several news items for this week, including a major change to the login process and a new current_students template.

Log In With Your Mason Account

We are in the process of changing our login process and our overall security configuration. When the process is complete, you will no longer manage your password through CHSSWeb. Instead, you will log in using your standard Mason email and password. You will not be able to use a non-Mason email. We will also eliminate the secure server certificate so you will no longer have to accept the certificate warning.

If all goes well we will deploy these changes Sunday night, December 8. We will put notices on the login page and send an email to all users when the new login process goes live.

Once these changes are complete, we hope to allow any Mason email holder who has a bio in the system to edit their own bio without creating a CHSSWeb account. We will let you know when that feature is available.

Listing Your Students

You can now use the Profiles application and the new current_students templates to list your current students. This is a feature that many graduate programs have requested.

Giving Links

All CHSSWeb sites have the option of displaying a fundraising link. That link defaults to a page maintained by CHSS which explains why one would want to give to the university and how one goes about giving. At present, most sites do not display the giving link. Eight sites display it and link to the CHSS page while three maintain their own giving pages.

We will be activating the giving link on all sites that represent academic departments or programs. If your site represents an academic department or program and you do not wish to display the giving link, please contact Kelly McCaskill. If your site represents a center, we will contact you before activating the giving link.

At the request of the Office of Advancement and Alumni Relations, we have changed the label on the giving link from "Donate" to "Give". We have also updated the CHSS giving page.

The university plans to release a new online giving system early in the new year. Once that happens, we will eliminate the CHSS-maintained giving page. Instead, clicking the giving link will direct the user to a pre-populated form with the department or program's foundation account.

Analytics

Do you know how your site is doing? Spring semester the CHSSWeb team will focus heavily on helping you view and understand how your site is performing.

We have recently made some changes to how we track site data which will make your analytics easier to access. In November we set up separate analytics accounts for each site. All sites are now tracked in their own account and also in a "roll-up" account that contains data for all sites. Prior to this we had only used the roll-up account. The separate accounts contain only your site's data so they will be much easier to analyze than the roll-up account.

Keep in mind that the new accounts do not contain any data prior to November. However, you can access older data in the roll-up account.

For access to your analytics, contact the CHSSWeb team.