posted Aug 6, 2009 2:46 AM by Antonella Pastore (CGIAR)
[
updated Aug 6, 2009 2:58 AM
]
CGMap is up-to-dateCGMap is now updated with 19 of the MTPs submitted in June (only Climate Change Challenge Program is left to land into the system database, but is already available as a document).
With 158 projects and 710 outputs, CGMap provides a comprehensive view of the work plans of the CGIAR. This year, the colleagues in Centers and Programs have done a great job in providing complete data on priorities, countries and output targets, i.e. the core data that allows the advanced search functions in CGMap to work and deliver accurate results.What's coming upWe're already at work with our CIAT colleagues on a number of new features of the system. This year, the keyword is 'Improve Access': we're working on more complete project fact sheets, on submitting the project information to search engines much more deeply than last year, and advanced mapping.
We are publishing some sneak peeks about the future enhancements to CGMap, regarding maps and KML, the geographic information exchange standard that will allow CGmap projects to be visualised on online maps.
See the post at http://ictkm.wordpress.com/2009/08/03/down-to-earth-cgmap-is-about-to-land/!
Stay tuned on our blog for more news.
Feedback welcome
Until the next update
best regards
The EasyMTP/CGMap Team
i.e. Antonella Pastore, Tania Jordan, Michael Marus |
posted Jun 26, 2009 4:53 AM by Antonella Pastore (CGIAR)
[
updated Jun 26, 2009 6:38 AM
]
2010-2012 MTP submission successfully achievedAll 20 MTPs have now been submitted and can be downloaded from CGMap. The MTP submission 2009 went off smoothly: by Friday June 19, the deadline for submission in CGMap, 15 MTPs were available via Download MTPs. The pending 5 had either deadline extensions, or were submitting over the weekend.
All Centers and Challenge Programs have made their MTP available via CGMap this year. Of these, 18 used EasyMTP for authoring and upload, 2 are on their way.
Coverage of MTP projects and their related metadata (countries of planned research, potential beneficiary countries, system priorities by output) is very close to 100% this year, based on the control we made during upload and document assembly.
Behind the scenesThe new report functionality, made available in EasyMTP last May, has remarkably streamlined the formatting and assembly process.
Our colleagues in CIAT have, as usual, been responsive in exporting the complex financial tables from FIS, a substantial contribution to the finalisation of the MTP documents. The Helpdesk has received a much smaller number of requests and issue reports than last year, which means that in spite of the limited upgrade implemented in EasyMTP and what still remains to be improved, users were able to update the MTP information without major impediments.
The extra step we took last winter to move more EasyMTP systems to the hosted environment has paid back. 11 systems are now hosted, while 8 are installed in Centers (Bioversity, IRRI, WorldFish, ICRISAT, ILRI, ICRAF, WARDA, CIAT). IFPRI, CIP, ICARDA moved to the hosted environment in 2009, in addition to the 8 existing systems set up in 2008 (CIMMYT, IITA, IWMI, CIFOR, 4 CPs - CCAFS to be set up over the next month). This setup has allowed the Helpdesk team to resolve reported issues and bugs very quickly, implement upgrades smoothly and with 100% quality control. For the locally installed systems, the Helpdesk team set up a monitoring mechanism that allowed them to be faster in analysing and resolving issues on this front as well.
What's nextWe've already started updating the CGMap database with the 2010-2012 MTP information. Over the next week, we'll continue to: - generate the individual project PDFs for Browse MTPs and for submission to Google, the search engine behind Search CGIAR;
- import all the EasyMTP databases in the CGMap database, so that Search Projects and Search Outputs can retrieve information from the 2010-2012 MTP;
- update the Project Fact Sheets with the new information coming from both EasyMTP and FIS;
- update the maps in Projects by Country with the new country and project data.
In addition, we're planning to redesign some parts of the system in order to improve its accessibility and usability. Stay tuned for more.
A shiny example of collective actionAll the people involved in the submission, including colleagues in Centers, Challenge Programs, the Helpdesk at IRRI, our colleagues at CIAT, should be proud of these achievements. The fact that every Center and Program has been able to complete this important task via CGMap is simply a shiny example of collective action, a much needed demonstration that we can work together in these times of change. So, thank you, all!
Feedback welcome
Until the next update
have a great summer
The EasyMTP/CGMap Team i.e. Antonella Pastore, Tania Jordan, Michael Marus, Dominique Liberto |
posted May 8, 2009 3:59 AM by Antonella Pastore (CGIAR)
[
updated May 8, 2009 4:42 AM
]
We know some of you have started editing the MTP to prepare the next update due in June.
If you need to refresh your memory on what you can do this year in EasyMTP, here are a few helpful pointers:
- EasyMTP 2010-2012 Practical Guidance Document and its Annex (PDF, 1.5MB)
Practical instructions on how to update the content in your EasyMTP systems, based on available functionalities, the Science Council guidelines and the analysis requirements in CGMap; the Annex contains the user guide on how to edit the required information in EasyMTP and FIS.
!Tip!
Do not roll over the MTP if you need to start from existing content: just edit the titles, assign or reassign the projects, that's it!
For all your help request, contact cgmap-support@cgiar.org
The EasyMTP/CGMap Support Team |
posted May 8, 2009 3:17 AM by Antonella Pastore (CGIAR)
A new reporting and exporting functionality is available now in your EasyMTP.
The upgrade is being installed and tested in the local and hosted systems. For locally installed systems, please inquire about installation status with your Center's IT focal point (as of Friday 8 May, all local systems have been updated while ILRI, ICRAF and Africa Rice are being provided assistance with installation).
What's new in the EasyMTP Reports
Here's an overview of the new features:
EasyMTP Reports OverviewEasyMTP Reports Overview
Action required: what you should do now
1. Enable macros in your Microsoft Word
Download allows you to save reports to your computer with a .doc
file extension. This uses a document template with macros which convert
reports and any pictures used in the reports into a Microsoft Word
Document.
In order to take advantage of the document template and macros,
you must ensure that Microsoft Word is configured to allow you to
choose whether or not to enable and run macros.
How to enable macros for Report Download
- Open Microsoft Word.
- From the Tools menu, choose Macro>Security....
- Under the Security Level tab, select Medium.
After you download, save, and then open a report, you should now get the proper Security Warning Box
Be sure to click on Enable Macros when you get the Security Warning Box.
If you cannot change the Macro Security setting on Microsoft Word, contact the IT Helpdesk at your office 2. Test the performance of the reports
The new report functionality strips all unwanted formatting and applies a standardised template to the MTP content.
The performance of the document download depends on three known factors:
- length of the MTP report,
- volume of unwanted formatting to be stripped off,
- network/bandwidth conditions.
Please test the different types of reports available and report back to us (and your technical focal point if you are on a local system):
a. if download takes less than 1 minute, just let us know, no further action is required;
b. if download takes more than 1 minute, the clean-up functionality can be temporarily switched off to improve performance and be re-enabled before upload for the final check. Please contact us (for hosted systems) or your technical focal point (for local systems) to have the cleanup temporarily disabled.
Please report to cgmap-support any serious performance issue by Thursday 14 May.
If you prefer to have the clean-up functionality switched off, please be aware that the reports may look good in HTML but unwanted or messy formatting remains in the document download.
!Tips to avoid performance issues while keeping the clean-up functionality enabled!
- View and print the standard reports to check and validate the content while you are still editing, and resort to the download option only to circulate it via email to non-registered users;
- avoid downloading the full MTP report, just generate individual reports for the Overview, the Annexes and the Projects.
|
posted May 4, 2009 5:56 AM by Tania Jordan (CGIAR)
[
updated May 8, 2009 4:03 AM by Antonella Pastore (CGIAR)
]
The
EasyMTP team has released a beta of the Service Patch #4 for EasyMTP that
includes many important improvements:
- Improved XML export
for MTP upload, both for database extraction and zipping XML files for ftp
transport, as well as XML output file encoding.
- Full MTP Extraction to
XML.
- Additional database
table for ISO Country Code lookup in Countries of Planned Research.
- Enhanced HTML Reports
with UTF-8 Character set support, cleaner and updated formatting and
document structure, and download to Word.
- Updated help
documentation.
The IT Focal points are currently in the process of installing this patch and it should be ready before Thursday May 7, 2009 We will keep you posted... Thank you, EasyMTP/CGMAP Team |
posted Mar 26, 2009 9:30 AM by Antonella Pastore (CGIAR)
[
updated Mar 27, 2009 7:48 AM
]
The EasyMTP Updates go onlineStarting from March 2009, the Updates for the EasyMTP Focal Points will be published on the brand new CGMap-EasyMTP Helpdesk site. Email communications will be reserved to specific matters.
New CGMap Helpdesk Web site
 The CGMap-EasyMTP Helpdesk site is now public and aims to provide useful information to both the EasyMTP end users and the technical focal points based in the Centers. It is hosted on CGXchange 2.0, a new online collaboration toolset that we have just introduced as the reincarnation of CGXchange. Read more about what's new on CGXchange 2.0.
What you can find on the CGMap-EasyMTP Helpdesk:
- The Downloads area is reserved to the Service Packs and software updates.
- The Documentation area is for guidelines, practical documents, user guides.
Some picks for you:
The Helpdesk email is the usual one: cgmap-support@cgiar.org
New reports start to look good!As anticipated, we are working on the upgrade of the report functionality of EasyMTP.
The issues found last year (for example, special characters not being exported correctly) are being eliminated. Once the upgrade is installed, it will be possible to open the reports in MS Word, where they can be saved in .doc format with a cover, styles, table of contents and horizontal layout of the logframes to save space.
Moreover, the lists of Countries of Planned Research and Potential Beneficiary Countries will be included as annexes to the report, so you will be able to check that the data has been entered and, at the same time, output a more compact final document.
We expect to release the Service Pack with the report upgrade by the end of April. Ad-hoc communications will follow in due course.
EasyMTP Online Training Sessions
We are just about to complete the EasyMTP training for the Centers and Challenge Programs that will be using EasyMTP for the first year.
Hosted systemsCIP, ICARDA and IFPRI EasyMTP's have been migrated to the hosted environment.
Although we announced we were no longer in the position to migrate the local systems to the hosted environment, we have managed to find a different way of running the application on our servers even with reduced capacity. After a round of testing, we have agreed with the other Centers which run EasyMTP locally to leave the system on their local networks for this year.
We will soon document this more efficient configuration and share it with the Centers' technical focal points, in case they want to adopt it for the locally installed systems.
News on CGMap
 Last time, we mentioned that we were working with colleagues at the Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Plan on a Web-based map of research activities in the region.
The CGIAR Research Map is now online and is getting a lot of attention. Since it was announced a month ago, the map has been viewed around 500 times! We blogged about it in Africa research is on the map: this post is in the top ten most viewed articles on the ICT-KM blog this month.
We are currently working on Phase II of the project that will see broader use of georeferenced information to make the maps richer and more usable.
If you are into geographical information systems, keep an eye on the African Geospatial Week taking place in Nairobi from March 31 to April 4.
Until the next update, take care!
The CGMap Support Team
|
posted Jan 13, 2009 9:00 AM by Tania Jordan (CGIAR)
The ICT-KM Program is pleased to announce that CGMap, a System-wide application developed in collaboration with IRRI and CIAT, and in consultation with the Alliance of CG Centers, the CGIAR Secretariat and the Science Council is now up and running and can be accessed at http://cgmap.cgiar.org/ CGMap provides a “map” that allows easy navigation through information on research and research-related activities that the CGIAR Centers and Challenge Programs publish in their Medium Term Plans (MTPs) every year. Spanning over a three-year period, MTPs describe the research agenda of each Center and Program in relation to CGIAR System priorities. CGMap will help you find answers to questions like: What Centers are conducting research on chickpea in Central Asia? How many projects are contributing to genetic enhancement of selected species? Visit the site to discover the useful functionalities that are available. You can identify projects and view fact sheets with scientific and financial information; search for outputs and output targets in project logframes; and map projects by countries where research is planned, and by potential beneficiary countries. Finding your way around is as easy as … well, following a map. If you have any questions regarding CGMAP please contact: cgmap-support@cgiar.org |
|
