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By Nina Shariff, reprinted from Web Content Report, May 2005
Dartmouth College is close to two years out from a Web
Content Management System (CMS) — a painstaking project whose success can be
attributed to identifying internal needs and finding the right vendor to match
them.
That’s the most important thing when selecting a CMS, says Jay Collier,
associate director of Web Publishing
Services at Dartmouth. “Finding a solution to match our clients’
top-priority needs, as well as our resource levels, was most important,
regardless of whether it was open source or proprietary,” he says. Indeed, open
source is not necessarily an alternative to commercial solutions; it’s simply
another option to consider as you identify your needs and find a solution to
match them.
Consider Dartmouth’s approach to selecting a vendor: Several years ago, a
team of staff responsible for Web publishing services at the College managed
the sites of more than 40 departments and offices — and each time a change had
to be made, one of those team members had to be contacted. What resulted was a
“Webmaster bottleneck,” says Collier.
At that time, he and his team were charged with what Collier calls a “discovery project,”
based on a process used by MIT, that evaluates internal (or, in Dartmouth’s
case, “client”) needs and matches those with potential solutions or CMS's.
The discovery team gathered a large list of features and requirements from
current and potential constituents via focus groups — and ranked those by
importance. The top internal needs: simple page authoring and editing, simple
site administration, standards and accessibility, separated content and
presentation, workflow management, scalability, and speed of
implementation.
Collier and his staff then perused dozens of vendor materials, both
commercial and open source, and evaluated them against the criteria. “Our
general requirements made it pretty easy to narrow down that first group,” says
Collier — from about a dozen down to four.
The discovery report’s team members then requested demos from sales and
marketing representatives from the final four. “We wanted deeper information
about subtler requirements and capabilities,” Collier says, including firm
longevity, long-term development, and openness to contacting current clients.
Collier also made a point to invite focus group participants and clients to
join his staff for both the demos and hands-on trials.
That entire process made the final decision an easy one. Collier says it
took only one month to migrate his first clients’ content into the new system,
where all new sites are developed. The new system locks in information
architecture and design, while giving content experts access to add and tweak
content at their discretion.
“Clients have taken to the system quickly without a great deal of training,”
says Collier. In fact, his team had planned extensive group training, but the
tool is so simple to use that most users learned how to use it during their
site’s migration or development.
Within
18 months of implementing the CMS, “we have doubled our client roster,”
says Collier. And that’s without any promotion. “It all came from word-of-mouth
or pent-up demand.”
The decentralized approach has
paid off in spades for Collier and his staff. In addition to eliminating
the bottleneck, which has spurred a great deal of activity from users, “we have
been able to focus more on overall quality assurance and less on word-for-word
updates,” he says.
Reprinted with permission of Ragan
Communications from Web Content
Report.
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