Content Management: Streamlining Distributed Authorship

1. Content Management: Streamlining Distributed Authorship Patty Patria Bentley College Technology, Deployment and Integration

2. Overview • Discuss our pre-content management culture. • Discuss software selection and implementation process. • Discuss benefits. • Discuss hurdles. • Q&A

3. Bentley Facts • Bentley is a business school that blends the breadth and technological strength of a university with the values and student experiences of a small college. • We educate students to be leaders in business and related professions in a global economy, by combining the communicative, creative and reflective strengths of the arts and sciences with the analytical, technological and problem-solving strengths of business. • We enroll approximately 3,800 full-time undergraduate, 490 adult part-time, 1,300 graduate and 7 PhD students. • Bentley College is located on 163 acres in Waltham Massachusetts, 10 miles west of Boston.

4. Bentley and Technology • Bentley positions itself as a national leader in business education. • We have state of the art technology facilities including a Trading Room, Language Lab, Center for Marketing Technology, and Design and Usability Center. • Students have a high expectations that they can use the latest technology during their college experience.

5. What is a CMS? • Document-centric web-based system that allows for easy-to-use, distributed authorship through WYSWYG editors. No HTML coding necessary. • Allows Marketing/Web Services to push down standard templates to all users and ensures standards are consistent with Marketing initiatives. • Stores all data in a database to allow for versioning, rollbacks, searching, link management, change management and much more!

6. Bentley’s Need for a CMS • Home grown content management system that used templates for our external marketing site (www.bentley.edu). • No versioning or rollback capabilities. • Minimal 508 compliance. • Could not automatically publish to multiple servers. • Could not easily search for content or broken links on our web server. • Could not maintain the level of speed, quality, privacy and compliance that we wanted.

8. Pagemaster Need for a CMS • For our internal department sites, 100 Pagemasters that used FrontPage and FTP. • Most are Department Administrators with a lower level of technical skill. • Experienced routine problems with training, ease of use and forgotten FTP passwords. • When Marketing launched new template designs, Pagemasters had to apply the design to each page of their web sites. Some sites have 400+ pages. • Largely static web site. Most sites only changed content once per year.

9. Search for a new System • IT analyzed Bentley’s current internal and external web environments and built flows of our current processes and new automated solutions. • IT, Marketing and Web Services started an RFP process in August 2004. • We targeted ECM tools that allowed WCM, DM and Collaboration. • Looked at Oracle, IBM, Documentum, Interwoven, Red Dot, Serena Collage, Hypwerwave and Common Spot. • Selected Serena Collage due its ease of use for end-users and system administrators.

10. Pre-Implementation • Classified users into new categories. • Designed new workflows for Functional and Content changes and addressed political concerns before deployment. • Created a permission matrix for various users. Began deployment in January 2005. • Obtained management buy in.

11. Classified our CMS Users • Pagemasters • All pagemasters will have full access to add, delete and modify pages similar to your FrontPage access. The menus, top, left, bottom and right nav bars are still controlled by Marketing. • WWW Contributors • For sites that are considered external marketing pages, WWW contributors will now be able to update their own content. It must be copy edited and approved by Marketing, but has a quicker turnaround time. • Course Descriptions • Eventually, faculty or academic department administrators will be able to enter course descriptions online through Collage.

14. CMS Permission Matrix

15. Management Signoff • After we selected a new system and designed new workflows, we met with the VPs for IT and Marketing to get sign off on the new flows. • People’s jobs in both areas were affected; everyone needed to be on board.

16. Implementation • Installed software on January 3, 2005. • Set a “go live” of February 1 for WWW. • But…….

17. Process to Migrate WWW Content • Copy and paste all unstructured content into fully structured pages (approx 2,000 web pages). • Upload all images and documents to Collage (1,100 links and 900 images). • Rebuild any links/images within Collage.

18. Implementation • Because we had large volumes of manual content to convert, we changed direction. • Decided to use Cascading Style Sheets with our CMS to govern our entire template. • Actually went live with WWW in April 2005.

19. College Wide Benefits • Dynamic web site. Some users update content daily vs. periodically in the past. • Marketing can now build web sites on their own; augmenting Web Services capabilities. • Marketing can publish changes on their own. • Marketing can edit content on departmental web sites; they could not easily access these sites in the past.

20. User Benefits • User-friendly GUI interface. No more FrontPage or WS FTP. • All data is stored in an database that is backed up nightly. • Users can roll back versions, post pages on a timed basis, and search the system for content. • Users receive all template changes automatically. In the past, users had to update every page with changes. Large sites have 400+ pages. • System auto publishes all changes.

21. Other Realized Benefits • Distributed authorship on WWW; lay users can enter their own changes and get timely turn around (one business day). • Two master templates for our entire web site which use CSS; new design changes automatically pushed to users. • Fully structured content that can be ported to multiple venues. • Web site is posted to redundant web servers to allow for minimal downtime if server issues arise. • Don’t need to freeze our web site for a month every time we roll out a new template changes.

22. Removing the Bottlenecks Now…. • Users update their own content. • Marketing publishes its own pages. • Marketing creates its own sites. • People feel more empowered. • Web Services works on more technically challenging projects.

23. Problems Along the Way • Timetable was a bit too aggressive. Leave time to integrate CSS if you don’t have them already. • Not enough resources. • .5 of a Senior Web Developer • .5 of a Junior Web Developer working with users. • Marketing staff always assigned to capacity on existing projects. • Performance- need a good understanding of how code effects master templates.

24. Problems Along the Way • Technical users slightly resistant. Need to set expectations up front. • Waited too long to announce new system to our Pagemaster community.

25. Other Initiatives tied to WCM • Ability to view statistical data on your site through a web analytics tool deployed by Marketing. • Ability for Pagemasters to build their own forms in a graphical Form Builder utility which links to content in Collage. • Ability to publish to multiple web servers simultaneously for redundancy.

26. Questions?