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Content Management
Keep Up or Fall Behind
7/1/2007
In fact, the content management system was critical to the revamped website that Darden launched in September 2006 as part of a branding campaign. According to Ken White, Darden’s vice president for communication and marketing, the site “has tools other b-school websites simply do not possess. First, the site has been planned to be audience-centric. Everything is designed and written for the external visitor, who, in many cases, is a prospective student. Most b-school sites target people who work for, or attend, the school—a group already familiar with the organization.” The upgraded site offers blogs, streaming videos, podcasts, and other interactive features. Thanks to the new content management system, each unit, office, or team at Darden now has the flexibility to update its own content as necessary, without relying on—or waiting for—the work to be done by any other entity.
“We have developed templates in the CMS for this purpose,” says Haas. “We have oversight along with the marketing and communication departments, and we audit content at random throughout the year to make sure that the branding, images, and logo are consistent. There is a pool of approved images. We’ve ‘templatized’ everything so that we can easily pull in content from different sources, and the web editing system is WYSIWYG [what you see is what you get]. All of our editors are trained to hyperlink, insert images, and so on, and we have given them documentation. If they have questions, editors always have the option of asking my team.”
Haas notes that the CMS is not linked to the college’s course management system, although integration is fairly extensive otherwise. “We’re very diverse in our systems,” she says. “All of our systems are integrated; for instance, the CMS is integrated with student applications. There are so many different components, but we need to have those differences. Microsoft SharePoint is wonderful for collaborative work, for example, but not great for content management. So, we integrate them all, but we basically write interfaces or .Net scripts where we might need them. The new version of SharePoint does offer content management, but we’re happy with Ektron and don’t want to change.”
CMS Self-Assessment
Web analytics, blogs, wikis, podcasts, streaming video, geomapping, and portal creation are now integrated within new CMS products. Can your system handle these new functions?
Wofford College: Doing It All
Wofford College (SC), a private liberal arts institution of 1,250 students, is another Ektron client. Administrators there find CMS400.Net a highly flexible, multipurpose tool.
“It can do almost anything,” says Laura Corbin, Wofford’s director of news services. Like Darden’s website, Wofford’s site features blogs, podcasts, videos, and interactive functions such as maps. The CMS went live in August 2006, and building all the content behind it “was a huge project,” says Corbin. “It took us three months last summer, working 10 hours a day. Currently, there are close to 15,000 pieces of content in the system, and it’s a lot more cost-efficient than pieces of paper.” Her team expects to finish up this summer.
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