With litigation pending between Thomson and Mason, we’re letting our campus site license for EndNote expire at the end of November. When it lapses, any copy of EndNote that was downloaded and installed under the terms of that license will have to be uninstalled and removed.
The library is taking the lead in helping campus users migrate out of EndNote and into either Zotero (why wouldn’t you?) or some other reference management tool. While we’ve had intermittent contact with campus EndNote users over the four or five years that we’ve been primary support for the program, it seems reasonable to expect that we’ll hear from each and every one of them at some point in the next few weeks.
Planning our response we put together two ad-hoc groups: one charged with a “communications plan” and the other a “technical plan.” During the meeting we had on Wednesday, it was suggested we quickly put together a website and reference the address in the one-pager we’re distributing to campus groups. I volunteered to set up a site and assign it a DNS entry. Less than an hour after the meeting ended I had the site up and running, replete with a link to iChat (AIM) and an “ask a question” email form.
How’d that happen so fast?
As I left that meeting I realized I needed to cheat a bit to have a site up quickly and do it in a way that didn’t look slapped together. Considered iWeb (rapid development but tied too closely to MobileMe) then remembered Sandvox.  Downloaded a copy and after a quick five minute test, forked over my $49 and registered it.  No, Sandvox doesn’t replace your normal method for website creation but for something quick like this, it works really, really well.