9 Best Practices for Implementing a CMS

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9 Best Practices for Implementing a CMS

9/26/2007

By Dian Schaffhauser

Giving people the ability to update their slice of the campus website doesn't sound like a revolutionary idea--at least not in an era ruled by mass participation in social networks, the sharing of mashups, and the craze to add widgets to personal websites. Yet, the easy road for achieving that--the use of a content management system (CMS)--is lightly traveled, according to software publisher OmniUpdate. It estimates that only 15 percent of colleges and universities have deployed a CMS to update the content on their sites. Why such hesitation to deploy a solution that can help a school keep its site refreshed in a timely way?

According to Lance Merker, CEO and president, besides the obvious issue of budget concerns around technology investments, a major roadblock is change management--making sure that people are trained and will actually work with the new system. Here he shares nine best practices to help ease the transition from performing ad hoc Web efforts to adhering to the structure of a CMS.

1. Selecting and implementing a CMS isn't a project just for the IT group. Get other users involved early in the decision making process.

"Where we've seen projects fail," said Merker, "is when the IT department has the responsibility thrown to them: 'Hey, they're the smart ones. They understand technology. Let them figure it out.'"

That means besides the IT staff, a school should also engage marketing communications people, as well as those responsible for crisis communication and other end users. Why marcomm? They (presumably) understand the concepts of branding, messaging, content, and reusability. "The Web is not just about putting out a brochure," said Merker. "It's about communicating effectively to different audiences, whether that's prospective students, current students, parents, the community at large, or [alumni]."

The same is true for those who have a role in crisis communication. "There needs to be multiple channels of communication," Merker said. "These ... can involve the Web in such a way that it becomes a lifeline to those trying to seek information in near real-time." He cited the shooting incident at Virginia Tech as an example. "Those folks who made the biggest impact on the public and the news media and those trying to seek information about their loved ones were those who were involved in real-time rapid Web content management."

Finally, ordinary end users for the software can help decision makers gauge how difficult the system will be to learn, said Merker. "If the users don't want to use [the new software], it's going to fail."

2. When pulling together a short list of potential solutions, ask yourself: Who else uses this product--and for what?

CMSs have been around since the dot-com era, and many were built to sustain commercial endeavors on the scale of an Amazon or eBay. Several go far beyond the features needed in a higher ed environment, providing a fairly complex product or service that offers the wrong types of workflows and processes for campuses. They were "originally designed," said Merker, "to solve different problems."