This is the workspace of the team that maintains the IS&T Public Facing Measures page.
Brief Overview
An excel template is attached here. It provides predefined tables and graphs for team members to update with new values on a quarterly basis. Excel provides an easy path to exporting the graphs as JPGs through the file / save as web publishing wizard. The resullting files are copied to the measures locker in AFS, where they are seen by the Drupal system that produces the official web page. Indeed, the Drupal content refers to the graph images by URL reference to the afs location.
Definitions and Means of Production
Definitions
These pages describe all the necessary assumptions about each measure, along with the default "story", current target value, issuss and assumptons that provide nuanced understanding of the thing.
Contributing Data
The group will swarm collaboratively to update their sections of a single central spreadsheet, mockup.xls, attached to this page. Contributors should download the spreadsheet, change it, and then put it back. There is no file-locking in the wiki environment, but there is preservation of past versions. (We'll have to see how this works out in practice.)
Each measure will have a table in the excel sheet and a matching graph in the uniform style. Contributors will simply update their data in the table and the graphs will auto-update.
We need a way to communicate the new readings for updating the text in the left column of the Drupal page. We may be able to use linked cells to create an emailable chunk of text to send to production. Or we can just go in ourselves and author revisions to the Drupal page.
Generating the graphs
Once we have a definiitive size and style for each graph, with an understood % reduction (or not) to get the best results in the Drupal page, the excel graphs will never be reformatted again.
The way to get excel graphs available to the web is to File / Save As Web and auto-publish the worksheet. It will create a folder of JPGs in a folder called mockup_files on the machine used to produce it. That spot is now and should remain the measures afs locker -- /afs/athena/project/measures/ . So the graphs end up in /afs/athena/project/measures/pfm2010/mockup_files/
Editorial Perspective -- consistency, style, etc.
Colors
The main colors in the charts need to be the MIT grey and MIT red, as close as we can get to them. For more data ranges than that, we go to the Excel default rainbow of blues, purples and greens. The most we need seems to be five.