# Presentation: 850339

## Emma Kolstad Antunes
June 22, 2006

- June 22, 2006

- Webmasters Town HallNASA Portal Update

## Agenda

- Why are we here today?
- What the NASA Portal is and isn’t
- How did we get here?
- Portal Drivers
- Timeline
- Benefits of the Portal
- What do we do now?
- Review of the CIO memo
- Implementation Guidance
- Q & A

## What is the NASA Portal?

- The NASA Portal has 3 elements:
- Outsourced Hosting Environment (Portal Infrastructure)
- Content Management System (CMS)
- Main NASA Web site (News Magazine and public face)
- Leads:
- Technical: Nitin Naik, OCIO
- Content (News Magazine):   Brian Dunbar, HQ PAO

- Hosting Environment

- CMS

- www.nasa.gov

## How did we get here?

- The Portal is a response to external pressures:
- Increased expectations from the public for the reliability, usability, and quality of NASA sites
- Greater focus on privacy, security, accessibility, and e-government at the Federal level
- Declining budget
- It provides management benefits:
- Present all general NASA Web content through one Web address
- Create a consistent, identifiable NASA "look and feel"
- Architect and balance OneNASA Web presence w/ needs of mission directorates, centers, programs, projects
- Provide robust, flexible and secure infrastructure that scales to handle large events and emergencies
- Portal infrastructure designed to handle high availability, heavy traffic and traffic spikes
- Manage overall public Web costs
- Focus investment on value-added content and creativity, not on infrastructure

## Timeline

- RFP Issued Aug 24, 2002; 1 month turnaround
- Site went live January 31, 2003 at midnight
- Columbia Disaster Feb 1. Trial by fire!
- CIO Portal Memo (June 2004)
- Administrator O’Keefe directed NASA CIO, Pat Dunnington & NASA Assistant Administrator for Public Affairs, Glenn Mahone, to bring all public Web content and Web sites into the portal infrastructure and operate them through the portal’s editorial process, pending development of a migration plan
- NASA Public Web Site Integration Implementation Plan (September 2004)
- This document outlined the content to be migrated into the portal infrastructure and provided a preliminary concept of how the migration would be done
- Issued as draft; no final version issued to date.
- Used as basis for migrating Center (PAO) home pages into Portal

## Timeline

- Center Home Pages migrated Nov. 30 2003
- Lead for _[www.](http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/)__[gsfc](http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/)__[.](http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/)__[nasa](http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/)__[.gov](http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/)_ is Lynn Jenner (PAO).
- We have a “Center” section of the portal that gives us more control over our content.
- Facilities
- IV&V home page was migrated Dec 2005
- WFF home page is in the middle of migration. Lead is Tom Taylor.
- GISS home page migration is planned after completion of WFF.
- GSFC Mission pages
- Code 400 involved in posting Mission content.
- Content posted to portal is news/overview type. Points to more in-depth information that lives at Goddard.
- Leads are Steve Padgett and Katy Mortimer
- Example:
- STEREO mission: _[http://www.nasa.gov/stereo](http://www.nasa.gov/stereo)_

## Why the Portal is Successful

- Works very well for what it was designed for: _[www.](http://www.nasa.gov/)__[nasa](http://www.nasa.gov/)__[.gov](http://www.nasa.gov/)_
- Business goals drive requirements
- Strong Governance Model
- Editorial board made up of PAO reps from Centers
- Clear lines of communication & accountability
- Roles & responsibilities well defined
- Agreement on vision & goals
- Good leadership
- Publishing Model
- News Magazine publishing model ensures consistent message, timely communication
- Audience: Kids, Students, Teachers, General Public, News Media
- Infrastructure
- Handles high-traffic events extremely well
- Addresses security, high availability, redundancy, policy compliance

## Snapshot of 2004 External Portal Traffic

**Columbia**

***40 fold increase***

- Total annual hits: 17.5 billion
- Page views:  1.75 billion
- Visitor Sessions:  150 million  (Estimated Unique Visitors: 50 million worldwide)
- Total information transferred: 330 terabytes
- Large spikes of traffic
- Columbia traffic in first 5 days was the expected traffic for the six months
- Mars interest in first 10 days exceeded entire previous year
- Awards include
- Two Webby awards
- Top .gov site for response time
- #2 .gov site for customer satisfaction
- Largest government event in history
- Best Managed Government Site

**Mars**

***Effective Response to Sudden Demand***

## NASA Portal Memo

- Success of news magazine portal seen as solution for agency
- Memo issued March 16, 2006
- Signed by Pat Dunnington, NASA CIO, and Joe Davis, Chief of Strategic Communications
- What it says:
- NASA officials who are planning to publish new Web sites, or fund public content generation, are directed to host these sites and create and maintain their content within the NASA Portal infrastructure
- Note:
- Addresses NEW Web sites (Existing Web sites are not affected)
- “Portal Infrastructure” - remember the 3 layers? Means flexibility on implementation

## What do we do now?

- New sites with public affairs type content, such as news, outreach, and education:
- Use the NASA portal
- Contact Nitin Naik (_[nitin.naik@nasa.gov](mailto:nitin.naik@nasa.gov)_) and cc: Emma Antunes (_[emma.antunes@nasa.gov](mailto:emma.antunes@nasa.gov)_) to make a plan for developing your site in the Portal.
- New sites with other kinds of content:
- No change to current state
- Consider whether you need an independent site. Could it be part of an existing site?
- Guidance under development
- Potential alternative: a Science and Technology Portal

## Potential Science and Technology Portal

- Complement to news magazine portal
- The needs of science and technology would drive the business model
- What made the news magazine successful is not the same as what will make this successful, therefore the governance model, publishing model, and information management would be changed to reflect Science community requirements
- “Living encyclopedia” model, not USA Today
- Peer review as editorial control
- More flexibility to meet webmaster & content owner publishing needs
- Would provide common features & tools
- Example: application to do remote proposals
- We will be working this with headquarters over the coming months.

## Questions?

- Contact info:
- Emma Kolstad Antunes
- GSFC Web Manager
- 301 286-1377
- emma.antunes@nasa.gov