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How deep do we go in applying a Web content management system in the
university Web presence? How do we best make the case to management? Will there
be a charge to internal audiences to use it? How will training be provided?
What are the pros and cons of open source and proprietary commercial
systems?
Spotlight on Princeton
Four years ago, the Web strategy task force decided that content management
was needed in order to simplify the management of content and design and reduce
the number of technical people required to make updates. Hundreds of people
have received Dreamweaver, training, and then developed sites of widely-varying
levels of quality. The goal was to roll out a solution, as widely as possible,
to ease high-quality Web publishing throughout the University.
Princeton originally selected a system called eGrail, but it was acquired by
another company and no longer met Princeton's needs.
At the beginning of this year, Reed's group identified 50 new open source
and proprietary candidates based on a list of 180 functional items. Open source
was considered as long as a systems integration vendor was available to stand
behind the product. Syndication of content across schools and departments was
an important feature, so that news stories could be distributed to different
pages on sites.
The group issued formal RFPs to 15 vendors and 12 responded. (Atomz, Ektron,
and RedDot did not respond.) The top five systems were evaluated in depth:
Zope/Plone, Typo3, Extrafin, Red Bridge Interactive, and Roxen. (Three were
open source and two proprietary.) Each company was given design templates, made
presentations, and allowed hands-on experience. Thirty strategic, production,
and technical colleagues from across campus evaluated the demos.
The unanimous decision was for Roxen, a
Swedish company expanding into the U.S. market. An unlimited campus-wide
license was acquired, as well as an annual support and version maintenance
agreement. The VP of Information Technology and the VP of Public Affairs — who
is also the Vice President and Secretary of the University — approved the
deal.
Technical and functional implementation of the University's new core Web
site on Roxen CMS (not yet opened to the public) went smoothly over the summer,
with two people working on back-end administration, including LDAP integration.
There are four servers: one for testing and development, one for content
administration, and two load-balanced for delivery.
Content approval for the new core Web site has taken longer than originally
expected, due to a strong sense of ownership by some campus groups. Reed's
group raised awareness through presentations to cabinet members and their
staff. (Observation: Cornell has defined official "curators" for sections
of their new site.) Expected launch is February.
Training has been a partnership between Communications and OIT. The
cross-platform, WYSIWYG editor works on both the Macintosh and Windows. Roxen
delivered the source code to Princeton.
It is clear that top-level support is needed to approve enough staff to roll
out the system to more of the campus. It is anticipated that there will be no
charge to departments for the content management system. Additional charges
will be applied for graphic and functional design and special development
efforts.
The Office of Communications is seeking as much functional and design
consistency as possible. They will be providing standard templates along with
the content management rollout. However, design services will be available to
develop custom templates for departments that need them.
The system uses advanced, tableless CSS, XSLT, and XML and is built on an
internal MySQL database. Multiple style sheets are available, including print,
legacy browser, aural, and Braille readout.
Spotlight on Dartmouth
In December 2002, Jay's group had maximized the number of clients it could
serve with the system it had inherited. They
made the case for being able to increase their client roster incrementally,
without adding staff, by implementing a light-weight content management
system.
The top
features requested by clients focused primarily on browser-based page
editing for static content. Although dynamically-syndicated database-backed
content was desired, the budgetary reality led the
discovery team to select a light-weight system called OmniUpdate. Dartmouth started with a hosted
solution (the OU staging server communicates with the campus Apache server via
secure SFTP), and will migrate to an on-campus appliance when Network Services
staff deem necessary.
Lightweight FTP solutions are very flexible; they allow for dynamic elements
(via server-side scripting and include files), and are easy for people to
understand and use. Purely dynamic systems can be more complex, need higher
hardware requirements, and necessitate more user training.
The first sites were launched in two months, with user training taking an
average of one hour each. Since early summer 2003, over
70 sites have begun using the standard templates, of which over 60 are in
the OmniUpdate CMS.
A transitional goal is to get users comfortable with role- and page-based
content approval and the concept of locked-down page templates with editable
areas. Some sites are published immediately by staff; others have multiple
approval steps, such as the IT site, which has 25 editors and two-to-four
levels of approval: authors, group leaders, and a copyeditor.
Shifting content to an enterprise system, if needed in the future, would be
easier because the current code is well-structured and would be easy to
convert. The templates are all built from server-side includes and a
stripped-down table layout. Graphic design elements are provided by Public
Affairs. The next standard iteration will include fully tableless
templates.
Spotlight on Chicago
Chicago has also contracted with OmniUpdate as an interim solution due to
its low-cost and simplicity, as some departments were going their own way with
Web design vendors making small, custom CMS solutions for individual sites.
Sara warns against site re-design as part of implementing a CMS. See Resources for Sara's recommended links on content
management.
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