Choosing a Content Management System

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Apologies to Kubrick)

What Are You Trying To Do? Vague market space +

What Are You Trying To Do? Vague market space + Vague customer expectations +

What Are You Trying To Do? Vague market space + Vague customer expectations + Limited staff & management experience =

What Are You Trying To Do? Vague market space + Vague customer expectations + Limited staff & management experience = Vague career results

What We Did Institutional web issues are not solvable in isolation Web Forum: ~120 web practitioners from across campus with interests in various parts of our collective web effort Six committees: Portal, Search, Standards & Practices, Infrastructure, Marketing, and CMS Meetings range from weekly (during projects) to monthly

CMS Committee Charter: Should we get one? If so, specify requirements Interviewed users from across campus Roughly two dozen interviews Open-ended: What is your publishing process today? What works well? What works poorly? If you had a CMS, what parts of your current process would have to stay?

CMS Committee Digested results Held town hall on CMS Revised results Wrote RFP Sanity-checked with consultant Are we speaking the same language the vendors are? Released RFP

CMS Committee Digested results Held town hall on CMS Revised results Wrote RFP Sanity-checked with consultant Are we speaking the same language the vendors are? Released RFP -- today!

Marketing Committee Content inventory -- “official” web sites across campus: Purpose of site? Users? Metrics? Benchmarking Front door, gateway pages Other templates

Things a CMS Will Not Do Inventory/tag your content Build your navigation Localize your content Improve the quality of your content Won’t manage the timeliness of your content Change your human processes Automatically convert non-HTML content

Recommendations for Web CMS Deployments Start with a pilot Do not start with world hunger Minimize templates Development, maintenance, migration Investigate existing publishing processes Understand the content

Recommendations for Web CMS Deployments Expect resistance from practitioners Transparency of process Think broadly about governance Streamline the committee work as much as possible HCI/design/requirements team

Resources The Content Management Bible, Second Edition: Bob Boiko The CMS Matrix, The CMS Report,

What do you mean when you say CMS? Absorb content Store it Tag it Process it Approve it Publish it

What do you mean when you say CMS? Absorb content Store it Tag it Process it Approve it Publish it How hard can it be?

What do you mean when you say CMS? Document Management? Document Image Management? Files or structured documents? Knowledge Management? Portal? Digital Asset Management? Digital Rights Management? Digital Records Management?

What do you mean when you say CMS? Learning Object Management? Collaboration? Source Management? Product Data Management/Catalog Content Management? Institutional Repository? For now, Web Content Management….

Enterprise Content Management Vendor-defined term Random, large, expensive collections of features

Web CMS: Why? Common look and feel Better students, more research dollars We say theory, marketers say fact Content providers -> Content creators Reduce costs Improve timeliness and accuracy of site Improve record-keeping Put regulatory compliance in the hands of content owners rather than technologists

Web CMS: Why? Improve security Fewer, better controlled systems Improve business continuity No longer dependent on a variety of platform- specific, or even machine-specific, tools and configurations Regulatory compliance Rollback to specific date

Web CMS: Core functions Separate design from content QA tools Design enforcement Workflow

Web CMS: More Built-in apps: Blogs Discussion/forums Chat Guest book Photo galleries Site map creation Survey tools On and on….

Web CMS: Still More Specialized import tools Multi-site deployment Personalization Caching and replication Syndication Multiple formats (wireless, RSS, mail, etc.) Version branching & reconciliation Internationalization & localization tools

Institution-wide CMS? Add…. Directory integration Groups in particular Authn/z Sharable content libraries? With ACLs? Federatable? One source, many destinations ~Order of magnitude increase in cost/effort

Other Decisions Static or dynamic Push or pull Fat or web client Content provider browser support Reporting Complexity of workflow

Other Decisions Search integration Personalization/customization Content promotion Flexibility/extensibility of metadata Server platforms Print integration