Stellent Universal Content Management
Are higher education institutions different from Fortune 500 companies when
it comes to managing the critical information and knowledge they hold? Increasingly,
the answer is no. Both higher education institutions and businesses around the
world are faced with the challenge of managing an overwhelming amount of information.
And it is critical for these organizations to gain control of their content
in order to serve students, faculty, and staff effectively.
Like many businesses, higher education institutions look to the Web to help
meet these needs. Initially, colleges and universities used the Web to recruit
prospective students and publish university news. Now, these institutions are
using the Web to streamline many of their business processes. Academic departments
are developing Intranets to facilitate collaboration, and portals consolidate
a variety of information from decentralized departments.
Enterprise content management software systems can help support these content-intensive,
Web-based initiatives. Stellent Universal Content Management, from Stellent
Inc., is available for both large and small institutions for creating, distributing,
tracking, and managing content.
The Stellent software system supports five content management elements: Web
content management, document management, records management, collaboration and
digital asset management, all with a single graphical user interface and platform.
It provides higher education institutions the ability to deploy content-centric
business applications (e.g., department intranets); meet government mandates,
including Section 508 of the Disability Act; and implement enterprise wide initiatives
that ensure common, consistent content and content management capabilities are
leveraged across multiple sites and applications.
Many institutions have implemented portals as a way for students and faculty
to view class information, check e-mail, and look at grades. And, as academic
portals continue to grow in popularity, institutions are quickly realizing that
the content feeding the portal needs to be centrally managed. Stellent offers
integrated solutions, combining portals with Universal Content Management to
provide enhanced access, creation, and management of content, while improving
the efficiency of distributing that content across the academic institution.
In addition, many colleges and universities have numerous public Web sites,
extranets, and Intranets to manage a variety of content, including:
- Enrollment information/student records
- Class recordings/presentations (digital assets)
- Policies and procedures
- Forms, proposals, and contracts
- Building blueprints, drawings, and specifications
- Human resource information, including job postings
- Information technology (IT) documents
- Specialized academic department initiatives
- eLearning support
With Stellent’s Web content management capabilities, higher education
institutions can maintain Web standards and consistent branding on multiple
sites, but leave content creation and editing up to the individual schools or
departments, reducing the Webmaster bottleneck and empowering the various site
owners.
One academic institution currently using the Stellent system is the University
of Alberta in Edmonton. The university first began using the system to organize
and manage its policies and procedures, and later for a planning and infrastructure
extranet. Akiyah Clements, Express Applications project leader for the University
of Alberta, says, “Instead of having hard-copy policies and procedures
scattered across campus, the university now has an Internet site that stores
protocol from all departments, ranging from administration and finance to human
resources and research.” This initiative has reduced confusion for university
staff when they are trying to locate the latest policies and procedures, and
has decreased the expenses related to these search processes. The extranet,
created for planning and infrastructure, provides secure, Web-based access to
all building drawings and specifications—including older blueprints, which
were scanned into the system—to contractors currently working on university
projects. In turn, this solution has dramatically reduced the number of planning
meetings and trips to the university required by off-site partners.
The Ohio State University in Columbus is also using Stellent Universal Content
Management. The system enables the university’s Office of Information
Technology (OIT) to access, contribute, and revise information system (IS) documents
and to store and manage application code. Previously, OIT IS documents, which
include database designs, documents, job operating instructions, disaster recovery
procedures, and OIT policies and procedures, were stored as hard copies in rows
of file cabinets. Now, the entire collection of documents is stored in the Stellent
system and available via a Web-based Intranet. In addition, OIT application
code is now stored in an online library managed within Stellent. The search,
check- in/check-out, and version control capabilities help users identify and
fix problems within the university’s computer systems. OIT can pinpoint
exactly when code was changed or migrated into the Stellent production environment––ultimately
reducing the amount of computer downtime.
In an economy of budget cuts and downsized staffs, institutions must “do
more with less.” Using a common software platform and interface for all
content management applications (i.e., document management and Web content management),
allows institutions to easily re-use and share content and content management
components among applications.
Stellent’s functionality allows the flexibility to expand the system
for other initiatives without significant integration time and costs. And, the
Stellent system leverages a common skill set across all content management applications,
minimizing training and administration costs and facilitating user adoption.
For more information about Stellent, visit www.stellent.com
or call (800) 989-8774.
