Hi, I’m Charlotte Hu. I work for the Secretary of the Air Force, Public Affairs, Command Information. I handle digital publishing policy.
Today, I’d like to talk about the suite of technologies we use to tell the Air Force story. Specifically, I’d like to talk about AFPIMS, DVIDS, Akamai, Jira, Site Gauge, GovDelivery, RSS feeds and how they interact with apps like AF Connect and social media platforms as well as how all these technologies interact together. Let’s start with AFPIMS, the American Forces Public Information Management System is a content management system based on Dot Net Nuke, which is an open source software. This is what you probably use to upload content to your installation public website. Chances are, if you have an AFPIMS login, you probably also have a DVIDS login. The Defense Visual Information Distribution System is the default video solution for AFPIMS. So if you put a video on your AFPIMS website, you upload it to first to DVIDS and then pull it onto a DVIDS player on the AFPIMS public website. DVIDS can also auto-push any videos you put on the DVIDS website to any YouTube channel you might have pre-connected. You can also pull YouTube videos from your YouTube channel into AFPIMS if you have that connection setup. DVIDS is also the default distribution system for podcasts. So if your unit has or wants a podcast, those podcasts will be loaded into DVIDS. From there, they can be auto-distributed to iTunes and pulled into a podcast player on AFPIMS.
I’d also like to talk about Akamai. Akamai is the system that serves the public information that is distributed through both AFPIMS and DVIDS. Akamai is a third-party contract. And it’s a company that has servers in 250,000 places in the world. Information that is uploaded to an Air Force public website is then pushed to mirror servers around the world, and the public will see your content from those servers. What this means to the website manager is if you’re going in to make a correction, that correction may not be immediately visible on your public website. This is because it must be cached on the mirror server, and it can take as much as 20 minutes for those changes to update. If it takes more than 20 minutes, please put in a trouble ticket.
Which brings me to the next technology we’re going to talk about, and that’s Jira. Jira is the trouble ticket system used by the Defense Media Activity for the entire suite of technologies. So if you have a problem with any of the technologies, you put in a Jira trouble ticket. If you don’t already have a Jira account, you can contact the defense media help desk to get set up. If you don’t know how to contact them, you can check the www.publicaffairs.af.mil website for contact information to both the defense media activity as well as to the AFPAA public web team. The Air Force Public Affairs Agency public web team can be a critical asset to you if you’re working with the suite of technologies you might use to tell the Air Force story.
The next item you’ll probably want to know something about is metrics. Site Gauge that is used on AFPIMS so you can track the information about who is seeing and how many people are seeing your content. DVIDS has its own metrics system, and as you are likely already aware, most social media platforms also have their own metrics systems. What this means is that you’ll be gathering data about who’s using your website, and how frequently and how many and from which country from a variety of sources.
Site Gauge Metricshttp://sitegauge.gryphontechnologies.com/
The other technology you might be using is GovDelivery, now called Granicus. GovDelivery is an email distribution that is connected to many of the APFIMS websites with a page watch technology. This gives customers the option to sign up for an email and receive a notice every time new content is added to one of the RSS feeds.
That leads us to RSS feeds. RSS feed is a classic website technology that is used to move content seamlessly and automatically from one platform to another. RSS feeds are what is used to bring your social media information feeds into your AFPIMS public website. It can also be used to move information from one AFPIMS website to another. For example, if you happen to be at a major command website and you want the news and information from you various subordinate wings to display on your website, you could do that by setting up an RSS feed. In this way, all new content from those sites will automatically appear on your site. RSS feeds are used to populate the information on AF Connect and other mobile apps. Additionally, online newspapers sometimes feed in information from official Air Force websites via RSS feeds. News reporters often use RSS feeds to help them keep aware of certain topics that they are monitoring.
This basic overview of the various technologies used in digital publishing is designed to help you as the public affairs professional decide which tools you might want to employ in your communications strategy. If any of these tools is something that you want to deploy, contact AFPAA or myself. You can get our information on the www.publicaffairs.af.mil website.
It’s been a pleasure talking with you. I look forward to hearing from you.
35-Year Public Affairs & IT Professional 