DMPonline enhanced client customisations – process revisited

DMPonline subscription basic vs enhanced

DMPonline is free for users to use but with the subscription you gain the access to the administrative interface through which you can gain access to plans (you can view individual plans and download metadata on them all), you can

• create your own templates and customise funder templates,
• create themed guidance to apply across all templates in the tool,
• edit your organisation profile by adding logos, links, email addresses,
• enable the DMP feedback functionality,
• add schools and departments,
• download details for all users in your organisation, and
• get insight into usage statistics on number of users and plan.

The benefit of subscribing to our enhanced package is that on top of all of the previously mentioned admin functionalities, you get to customise the pages so they get to look and feel your institutional pages. In practice this means that you can customise your institutional URL (so instead of sending your users to dmponline.dcc.ac.uk they get to visit by you specified web page), you get to change the orange colouring of the DMPonline pages to your institutional colours as well as changing the text on the static pages.

Customising process for enhanced clients

In November 2020, we shared a blog post about the customisation process. In the current process we share with you form where we ask you to upload the university logo and favicon, provide us with your text and specify your institutional colouring. We also ask you to start with putting together the URL as this is normally the part of the customisation that takes the longest. Although, we have streamlined our communication materials with you we have recently identified few places where we can still improve.

Customising process revisited & improved!

This is why in February 2021 we had DMPonline branding meeting where we re-visited the process and discussed what seems to work well and what we can still improve from the lessons learned from the past year to ensure we onboard new institutions even with a smaller developer team. Areas where we wanted to focus on was avoiding lengthy backward and forward communications around the further changes to the customised pages, ongoing request for minor changes and identifying how this process can be further improved to avoid any delays and provide further transparency of this process.

As a result, we identified several areas which we are introducing to the more formalised process:

1. In the form we share with the enhanced clients we added the specific format of the university logo and favicon
2. We introduced extra UAT step
3. We are introducing a policy of cycles of releases – so live sites will be released every three months

1. In the form we share with the enhanced clients we added the specific format of the university logo and favicon

We feel that the form works well for you and for us. In the form we already specify how we need you to specify the colours with us (in the hex format), as well as allow you to upload your university logo and favicon. We now introduced a small change in the form where we ask you to upload your university logo in .png format with transparent background, as the colours behind the logo will be the primary colours from your branding. For the favicon image we ask you to share this with us in the .ico format.

2. We introduce extra UAT step

We were discussing within our team how we can improve the further changes that are often result of backward and forward communications. We have realised that we never introduced an extra step into the process that could help you to better review your customised pages – which is to ask you to do structured  user acceptance testing (UAT). Within the DMPonline team, this is something we do on a regular basis as a part of our job, but for some of you, this might be a new process. This should be a very beneficial step that you will find useful and we hope will reduce the number of changes requested further down the line in the process. We will be putting together a video as well as written guidance for new administrative users on how to test your newly customised pages and what to look at when testing the pages. Thus, when reviewing your branded pages, you can fully ensure that this is something you will be happy with once it goes live or collect all feedback in one go. We are also introducing a new policy  where we will only allow one further iteration of changes during this process. Otherwise, if there will be further changes that you did not think of prior sending us the form – these will go at the bottom of the list we work through and will be implemented in the next release cycle.

3.We are introducing a policy of cycles of releases

Every time we release a new branded pages, we need to put all DMPonline pages down. This is why we have decided that we will launch release cycle where we will be bundling all new pages every three months – so this will give us opportunity to always ensure that  new clients’ pages are released at the same time. By doing this, we will be able to give you clearer timelines around what we can commit to, and you will also know whether you can commit to this deadline on your end – as you will also need to gather all the branding colours, texts and work with IT colleagues.

Last but not least...

If you are interested in enhanced subscription or wish to swap from your basic subscription get in touch with us on dmponline@dcc.ac.uk.  Feel free to contact us at the details below:  

• DMPonline helpdesk at dmponline@dcc.ac.uk (opens in a new window)  
• Social media: Twitter @mdDCC1 (opens in a new window), @DMPonline (opens in a new window), and LinkedIn (opens in a new window)  

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