Today the meeting was canceled, but I feel a need to write where I'm at... I created a table that explains the projects I've worked on since they were discussed at the last meeting, shown below projects.xls.

I've spent most of today going through the isse site and tabbing out some of the archives and news/events pages to make it a bit more user friendly instead of just having a huge page slapped down with all the random text. I ordered the news pages with the <dl> tag, making it easier to visually comb through each event. I'm still waiting on some random approval to go through for the ISSE site so all of the changes I've done can go through.

As for letting in new technologies, everything is a pain around here. I have to wait up to a year to get a CMS through the door. We have to start another user group to get flash as an approved video technology. I've done my best to get google maps on our sites, only to be told by legal we can't do that. And our greatest outside resource from CNN can't help us out because we are unwilling to link to CNN as a source for information. I've dealt with my share of politics, but I've never dealt with a group so unwilling or resistant to letting in the outside world of technologies. I understand there's some legal mumbo jumbo here and there and security concerns, but I'm sure something could be worked out if we tried. I've used google maps when working for the university which I'd assume the same restrictions apply. As for Drupal, it's been used by many large corporations that have probably way better security staff than here, and yet I was shut down because of the admin's concerns.

Drupal Review

Currently I've been trying to review Drupal for the CMS Evaluation group. I ran across a module that is for checkout purposes so multiple people aren't trying to edit the same node at the same time. This seems like a cool thing although I haven't tried it yet. Drupal def. meets pretty much all of the core requirements as set out by the group. Joomla has been taken out, which is a good thing since it was never up to par for a large website.
I don't know where this first initial eval. will leave us, but I hope we can drop out some more and not continue with so many canidates.