IC Web Team Blog

The Intercom website has been an active "digital bulletin board" for communication with the Ithaca College community for over 18 years. The oldest posts in our archive go back to January of 2003, years before everyone had a smartphone, before there were Facebook Groups or Twitter threads. Intercom is even older than some of the students in our incoming class. And yet in all that time, while the site has remained a central part of how the IC community shares with each other, the basic functions and technology that power Intercom have largely remained unchanged, suspended in a limbo of how websites were built at the beginning of the millennium.

We've done our best to make small updates and refinements to the base code elements that power Intercom over the years. But the software and infrastructure used to maintain the system were the same tools used to run the rest of our old college website, living on a server that has now reached the end of its operational life. In fact, several elements of the code behind Intercom have already begun to fail in recent months, and we are running out of time to maintain this key resource for the campus community.

In order to keep Intercom going, preserve its content, and provide tools to keep this service going for campus for the rest of the year, our developers are finalizing the migration of Intercom to our Drupal web platform, with a goal of launching this new version of Intercom after Commencement in the last week of May.

If you have been following our blog posts or watched our recent presentation about the progress we've been making on the website, the one consistent part of our message has been the need to complete the migration of any remaining content in our old content management system (Web Profile Manager) so that we can retire that aging server. This is the same system that hosts Intercom, and it is no longer maintainable to modern web standards.

In the next few weeks, we will be continuing to migrate any new Intercom posts as they are posted in the current system. We are not building a brand new Intercom - our goal is to replicate the same functionality and features that currently exist, but within the modern responsive layout and branding of the rest of our website.

While this migration is being worked on, Intercom will continue to run where it is:

• If you can post on Intercom now, you should still be able to post as you always have.
• The "Top Stories" section has been temporarily disabled, but it can still be found in the Intercom Roundup email.
• The Intercom Roundup email will continue to be sent out on its regular schedule during and after the migration to Drupal.

There will be more official announcements when the date is set for us to make the final switchover to the new Drupal site, including new documentation on how to add posts that take advantage of the new features and designs available on this site.