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Teachers College at Columbia U Overhauls Content Management

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 03/22/11

Teachers College, Columbia University in New York will be implementing a $150,000 content management system. The graduate school of education will be using Site Manager, an application from TerminalFour, to streamline the publishing process for its 300 academic, administrative, faculty, and research Web sites. The deployment will also enable the creation of personalized academic catalogs in both paper and digital forms.

Site Manager includes authoring tools; styles and templates for consistent content; a media library for storage and management of images, video, documents, and sound files; granular control over user rights and roles; workflow; version control; multi-language functionality; and the abilities for the user to publish to different devices and sites and to add electronic forms to Web sites. According to the company, the software also integrates with other systems in use at institutions, including those from SunGard Higher Education, Blackboard, and Datatel.

In October 2010 a Web task force first began meeting at the college to focus on projects related to creating a new home page and more efficiently integrate pages and links to optimize the college's presence in search engines. The latter, according to a brief online description is intended to "bolster marketing efforts and advance [the college's] fundraising and alumni relations objectives."

"Our Web development strategy is playing an increasingly integral part of the college's future strategic direction. Its role in the recruitment, retention, and engagement of faculty and students is growing and defining how successfully we compete as a 21st century institute of higher education," said Paul Acquaro, director for the Office of the Web. "We found a lot of vendors had taken their eyes off the ball when it came to keeping their products modern and flexible. TerminalFour was ahead of the curve with software [that] is both simple to use and incredibly powerful."

He added that the college was impressed by the vendor's credentials in higher education. "This gave us comfort that they understand the challenges we face and importantly could help us overcome them. Ultimately, we bought the relationship with TerminalFour."