The Pros and Cons of a Site Wide CMS Implementation

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The Pros and Cons of a Site Wide CMS
Implementation
Patty Patria Bentley College Technology,
Deployment and Integration
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Overview

• Overview our pre-content management culture.
• Explain our implementation process.
• Discuss the problems.
• Highlight the benefits.
• QA

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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.

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Bentleys 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.

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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.

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Search for a new System

• IT analyzed Bentleys 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.

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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.

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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.

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CMS Permission Matrix
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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.
• Peoples jobs in both areas were affected
  everyone needed to be on board.

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Implementation

• Installed software on January 3, 2005.
• Set a go live of February 1 for WWW.
• But.

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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.

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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, and
  rolled all internal sites into the system over
  the next year.

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Problems Along the Way

• Timetable was a bit too aggressive. Leave time to
  integrate CSS if you dont 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.

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Problems Along the Way

• Underestimated the amount of manual data entry
  required. Had to scramble to get all data
  converted.
• Technical users slightly resistant. Need to set
  expectations up front.
• Waited too long to announce new system to our
  Pagemaster community.

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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.

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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.

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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.
• Dont need to freeze our web site for a month
  every time we roll out a new template changes.

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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.

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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.

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Questions?