Released the all new CIT Software downloads page. Spent a lot of time responding to questions/complaints/corrections.
This system is aimed at replacing the current page at https://www.uvm.edu/software . It is fully data-driven by (mySQL) database tables .
The motivation for deploying at this time a system to replace our static pages is the new licensing requirements for Minitab statistical software: the Minitab people want us to track who and how many download Minitab. The current software page does not offer a straightforward means to accomplish this requirement. Rather than develop an independent utility to provide this data only for Minitab, it seemed appropriate to take this opportunity to implement such tracking across the board.
The first page requires UVM NetID authentication via the Apache AuthDCE module, which has the added bonus of making the NeID available to subsequent scripts. The user is presented a list of platform choices, currently "MacOS X" and "Windows," selection of which displays an alphabetical by vendor name list of our current offerings. Depending on the software licensing requirements, each choice has either a "Download Now" or "Display license agreement" button. The latter leads to a third screen which displays the license agreement and a "Download Now" button which requires the user to indicate their acceptance before continuing. In either case, pressing the Download Now button both initiates the download and records the user’s NetID, name, title, status (faculty, staff, student), organizational unit, and the name of what they are downloading in a table for later reporting and analysis. The user’s name, title, status, and ou are obtained via LDAP lookup.
For CIT staff within the zoo "citweb" group, utilities are provided at
https://www.uvm.edu/software/edit
To add new downloads and edit current items.
Currently, reporting is limited to non-web based tools and are left as an exercise for the reader.
