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Content Management
Keep Up or Fall Behind
7/1/2007
Pushing the Envelope Perhaps the most imaginative use of a CMS is Northwestern University’s (IL) integration of two systems, to consolidate content and establish a common content repository. Northwestern, a private institution with an enrollment of about 17,000 students, integrated the Xythos WebFile Server content management platform with the enterprise web applications in the Blackboard Academic Suite. The result is a unique combination of technologies that is customized for faculty and student needs with regard to collaboration and document management.
NORTHWESTERN’s integration of the Xythos content management platform with Blackboard enterprise web applications is facilitating collaboration and document management for faculty and students.
According to Keith Kohls, technical specialist for Xythos, the company’s open-standards-based document and content management solution serves as a common content repository into which unstructured content and data can be placed. “It’s content that ends up on a flash drive, or whatever. Northwestern has found a way to integrate all the information.” As Kohls explains it, “Xythos is where everything is, while Blackboard is the entry point for the user to dig into the information.” The Xythos platform aggregates content (for a math department, for instance), so that when users access it, they all see the same file. This process is known as single-instance storage, or a system’s capacity to keep just one copy of content that multiple users or computers share, eliminating data duplication and improving efficiency. “Access is easy, but the secondary step of managing and tracking it is more important,” says Kohls. With its ingenious system, Northwestern has done both. The system is the brainchild of Brian Nielsen, project manager of faculty initiatives in the Academic Technologies department at the university. The department, a unit outside the main IT group, is charged with evaluating new and innovative technologies, buying and testing them, and moving them into the mainstream campus community. For nearly a decade, the university had been looking for an effective CMS, according to Nielsen. Early on, he saw the potential of Xythos “because of the degree of openness that it provided.” In 2003, the Academic Technologies group bought a license for the software, strictly for faculty use. “Our deployment was different than for a universitywide tool,” he says.
The very first project was in support of the engineering program. “Every freshman participated in design and development,” Nielsen recalls. “Everyone had a Xythos account; there was a directory structure for each team, as well as shared space. As they developed projects, course coordinators began using the system.
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