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Content Management
Keep Up or Fall Behind
7/1/2007
New CMS features and functions are driving true innovation in content management, and enabling information access, sharing, collaboration, and tracking on a scale heretofore unimaginable. Does your system measure up?
THE DREADED WORDS “EASY ASSEMBLY” can fell even the bravest of us. But in the case of content management systems (like course management, also known as CMS), vendors are living up to the promise of bigger, better, stronger—without a proportional increase in user-unfriendliness. The latest systems offer bravura functionality as well as ease of use: Now web analytics, blogs, wikis, podcasts, streaming video, geomapping, and portal creation all are within reach of even the nontechnical user.
No surprise, then, that higher ed institutions have taken this flexibility and run with it. As their information and collaboration needs increase, colleges and universities are finding that they need to manage content in much the same way that a commercial business does.
“Enterprises are creating more documents, collaboration artifacts, and records than ever before,” reports a recent study by the Cambridge, MA, technology consulting firm Forrester Research. “This explosion of unstructured information— such as documents, e-mails, and web content—often results in chaos if the content is not created, tagged, versioned, controlled, and managed in a consistent manner.” The ability to impose consistency on unstructured content, and be able to edit and manage that content without expert technical help, is precisely what has drawn universities to the newer, flexible CMS solutions.
CMS Self-Assessment
As their information and collaboration needs increase, many institutions are finding that they need to manage content in much the same way that a commercial business does. Have you modified or changed your content management model lately?
University of Virginia: Template and Go
For Sue Haas, co-director of enterprise systems at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, ease of use was the single most important factor that drove the school’s selection of a content management system. After looking at several vendors, Haas settled on CMS400.Net from Ektron. (Darden admits roughly 300 students into its entering graduate program; its parent organization, the University of Virginia, has more than 20,000 students enrolled in its undergraduate and graduate programs.)
“We were very impressed with the web editor,” Haas says. “We wanted to get consistency in branding and also have the ability to get editors from various departments to use it. The .Net technology was a big deal because we are entrenched in Microsoft. The developers on campus are very familiar with it.”
Recommended Reading
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Now's the time to use online tutorials to streamline professional development and help desk management.
- Retention Rx
