University Business - April 2010 - (Page 28)

internet technology understanding of what a CMS will do and what it won’t do. A CMS will help you streamline the publishing process, reuse some pieces of content throughout your website, and enforce your branding and style guidelines. Unfortunately, it won’t magically update web content on its own; CMS users are the only ones who can do that. That’s why, at this stage, you should also learn more about how your future content contributors will work. Tony Dunn, CMS coordinator at California State University, Chico, went through a very long CMS evaluation in 2007. In the presentations he has given about the topic, he always tries to emphasize that the software application should support the specific ways people currently work. This will assure that it’s popular—and gets used. In other words, don’t think you can just discard and simply replace processes currently in use. You will need to convince your users that the CMS will also simplify their lives. 4. Perform a comprehensive analysis of needs. Since your content contributors will have the biggest impact on the success or failure of your CMS, you must involve them in the selection process. Create a committee including future CMS users (academic department secretaries, registrar and admissions officers, etc.) and super users (web editor, web director, communication coordinator, etc.), technical staff from IT, and university administrators. Depending on the size of your institution, this group should create—or, in the case of a large university, oversee the creation of—the comprehensive list of business and technical needs the selected CMS will fulfill. For bigger universities, the committee should also include a project champion whose mission will be to represent the interests of the institution as a whole as well as its main website users (prospective and current students, alumni, donors, friends, etc.). “We had a committee representing many areas of 28 | April 2010 Open-sOurce vs. cOmmercial cms: not apples to apples AS LAST moNTh’S University BUsiness fEATuRE “WEb CoNTENT NEEdS—SoLvEd” noted, the thousands of content management systems on the market fall into two categories: open source and commercial. When evaluating specific products, be sure not to compare open-source systems directly with commercial products. “A comparison between two commercial systems and an open source one is a waste of time,” says Rob Cima of mStoner. most end users never pick an opensource solution, because they typically don’t show well in a feature-by-feature comparison. “Either the feature doesn’t exist, or it doesn’t have a pretty user interface. Also, there aren’t trained salespeople to give slick demonstrations of the open-source products,” adds Cima. A better way to proceed is to start the evaluation process with open source systems. If your future CmS users can’t get on board, evaluate commercial options, as well. the institution, and we collected about 20 pages of requirements, but nobody was assigned to champion the communications benefits of a shared CMS for the institution,” recalls Santiago Fernandez-Gimenez, the information architect and web project manager for academic support resources at the University of Minnesota. Looking back, FernandezGimenez thinks this lack of a project champion prevented the committee from effectively evaluating the various software solutions. 5. Use a complete and foolproof evaluation process. With your list of needs in hand, you can start to create the functional and technical requirement matrix you will use to evaluate the different content management systems. You should prioritize these requirements into must-haves and niceto-haves. Take the time to do a request for proposal (RFP) and make sure the main Resources Noel-Levitz report, Scrolling Toward Enrollment, www.noellevitz.com/expectations Collegiate Web Solutions, www.collegiatewebsolutions.com mStoner, www.mstoner.com CMS vendors in higher education receive it. This assures a more thorough, concise, consistent process across vendors. Whether you take the RFP on the road or not, should retain the CMS that gets a passing grade on most of the requirements. Don’t settle for a single solution yet. Pick a small group of vendors and ask them to recreate a couple of pages from your website with their software in a sandbox environment, which allows you to try out products. Your technical team will then be able to form an educated opinion. You should also follow the user evaluation process deployed by Princeton a few years ago for selecting its current CMS: Invite selected vendors to perform a demo on campus along with a user page editing class geared toward a sample of future CMS users. Schedule an extra hour after the class to let content contributors “play” with the CMS. This sample group should commit to attend all of the vendor sessions so they can evaluate and compare the different products. “It was the most surprising result of our process, but the one that I believe has made our CMS so successful,” says John Wagner, system programmer at the university. At Princeton, the decision was made unanimously and letting the users actually compare the systems in action made a big difference, ultimately leading to a successful CMS implementation. universitybusiness.com http://www.noellevitz.com/expectations http://www.collegiatewebsolutions.com http://www.mstoner.com http://www.universitybusiness.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of University Business - April 2010

University Business - April 2010
Contents
Editor's Note
College Index
Company Index
Advisory Board
Behind the News
Sense of Place
Viewpoint
Financial Aid
Internet Technology
Certified for Safety
Managing the Enterprise on Limited Resources
A New Chapter for Campus Bookstores
Independent Outlook
What's New
End Note

University Business - April 2010