Portal Development Notes

Dear Tribal Members,

The Account Registration System to request your user accounts for the Portal is now online. You may go to the following address to request an account:

https://portal.coquilletribe.org/signup/index.php

Please note that it may take up to 7 days to process your request, especially as we get started. Once we process your request, we will send you an email with your username and password. If you have any questions about the online form, or if you have difficulties using it, please don’t hesitate to call or email Zeb DeOs: zebdeos@coquilletribe.org, 541-756-0904 x10238.

Thank you,
Zeb

Quick update: Things are not quite ready to go with the Portal. I'm working hard on the account registration system but have a ways to go yet. The Form Generator is working good, and the account request form is nearly complete. Right now I'm working on writing validation functions for each field. After that I need to build the mechanism to securely transmit your registration information to the appropriate staff. It may be one or two more weeks before it's ready to go, but should still be done before Salmon Bake, and I'm working extra hours in order to complete it as soon as possible. As soon as the registration system is live I will place another note here, and we will send a message to the email list.

Note: I wasn't able to actually get this entry posted online until June 20th, 2010. Getting much closer now than when this was written.

Background:

The Website Team (an informal staff team chaired by Chris Tanner) was tasked to develop the Tribal Portal to be an exclusive area of our website providing Tribal Members with information and tools for enhanced communication and access to Tribal Government. We were originally going to outsource the project, but the costs were prohibitive, so upon deliberation we decided to do the work in-house. The Executive Director delegated primary responsibility for the technical aspects of developing the portal to the Systems Development and Integration Services (SDIS) Program (formerly the GIS Program).

At the 2010 Mid-Winter Gathering I announced our plan of going live with the Portal by February 9th. Unfortunately I underestimated how much time was needed to complete the project, and consequently we had to delay "go-live" to allow more time to complete the project securely.

Where We Are Currently At:

The Management Information Systems (MIS) Program acquired and dedicated a server to house the Portal system. I've installed the operating system and other software needed to form the foundation for the Tribal Portal. Since we settled on WordPress as the platform for the portal, I also configured WordPress, downloaded and installed several plug-ins, wrote a couple plug-ins, and developed a custom template which all together customizes WordPress to be suitable for our portal. This portion of the project (which I'll call the portal proper) is between 80 and 90 percent complete. A few tasks remain, including ensuring that attached documents cannot be directly accessed without authentication (even if the full pathname is known to the eavesdropper.)

In addition to this technical work, I and the Website Team worked with the Executive Director, the Legal Services Department, and the Tribal Council to draft a terms of service governing access and acceptable use of the portal.

Account Registration System:

While the portal proper is near completion (for core functionality), there is currently no way for potential users to sign up for an account. As I began working on a form for collecting registration details, I moved away from building an ad-hoc system in favor of building a small forms-generation framework to help ensure incoming data is valid. This validation is to avoid possible attacks where a cracker/hacker may attempt to enter malformed data into form fields to try to trick the server into executing arbitrary code; however, we are not directly tying the registration system to the enrollment database (in case there is a fatal as yet undiscovered bug), so we will also be performing further manual validation to verify eligibility for portal accounts.

The task of making this form generator was not as trivial as I originally thought, but I now have a good code-base. I am currently writing numerous automated tests, and refactoring the code to do my best to ensure it will work securely. Another aspect of the Account Registration System which I have yet to develop is the means of transmitting data from the public-facing registration system into our internal network, but I do have some tentative plans on how to go about implementing that.

Current Go-Live Date:

We have committed to getting the portal core functionality online, along with the ability for people to sign up for accounts, by June 15th, before the 2010 Salmon Bake. Core functionality includes the ability for restricted information to be posted to the portal, only accessible to people who have active accounts, and the ability for users to provide public feedback and engage in interaction on any such postings. After this core functionality is available we will look into providing additional interactive tools as priorities and resources allow.

Please stay tuned for further updates!

Dear Tribal members, we regret to report that the portal account registration system will not be online on February 9th, 2010 as planned. Though we have made good progress on the registration system, we still have more work to do in order to finish the system securely. In particular we want to ensure that our computer programming code is written in such a way as to minimize security risks so your registration information can be securely transmitted to Tribal Administration. When the registration system is finished, an announcement will be sent via the email directory, the Tribe’s website and the February newsletter. We apologize for any inconvenience this delay may cause.

If you have any questions concerning the portal development efforts, including the account registration system, please contact Zeb DeOs, SDIS Coordinator via email at zebdeos@coquilletribe.org or via phone at 541-756-0904 x.10238. Thank you!