WPM Shutdown Coming

By Stephen Shoemaker, March 9, 2021
The long-awaited shutdown of Web Profile Manager is scheduled for April 1.

Those who’ve been at IC more than a few years and been involved with the web — maintaining their department or office website, or updating their faculty or staff profile — should be familiar with Web Profile Manager. Typically referred to as WPM, it served as the college’s content management system (CMS) for over a decade.

Now the time has come to power the system off. The planned date of shutdown is April 1. What does this mean for site visitors and site managers?

The crucial takeaway is this: Any content still being served from WPM will no longer be published. In other words, if a site is still in WPM, users will no longer see it as of April 1.

Content managers need not fear losing access to their WPM content right away, though. They will still be able to log into the system and access their profiles for a few more months. The tentative date for total shutdown is June 1.

Worried You Still Have Stuff in WPM?

Do you think you still have content in WPM that hasn’t been moved to Drupal or a dedicated digital tool? This could be an entire site, web form, or documents.

If so, please email the web team at web@ithaca.edu.

WPM has served the college well even as we’ve pivoted toward the Drupal content management system. Since 2018, when the first sections of the new Ithaca.edu were published from Dupal, there has been an active and ongoing effort to: migrate websites from WPM into Drupal; recreate forms in new solutions (including FormStack); and shuffle document files into SharePoint.

Those efforts have been a joint venture between the web team (comprised of individuals within the Division of Marketing and Enrollment Strategy and developers in Information Technology) and IT’s business productivity team, and are in the final stages leading to completion.

This milestone has been years in the making. WPM was created and maintained in-house here at IC, and served as a crucial component of the college’s web presence all these years.

However, as the college shifted its technological needs and priorities over the years, it was longer sustainable to provide development resources or maintain proper security; and shutting down the server from which WPM operates will provide the college with a small cost-savings, as well.