In a recent meeting of web professionals from around our university a discussion of Content Management Systems (CMS) for web content came up. The spark was certainly the terrific presentation from one of our group on a system his department had created — a custom programmed application utilizing .NET. But you could tell there was some pent up frustration from the group. The idea of a universal CMS is a real holy grail for us web folks. We’d all love to have the burden of updating static pages lifted from our shoulders, and are not eager to take on the burden of maintaining our own custom systems. The big commercial systems often seem too expensive, but the open source ones don’t seem to quite hit the mark either.
A recent Educause study, Content Management for the Enterprise, may help shed some light on the situation. The authors state “CMSs are not at the plug-and-play stage yet; there are no completed applications available to plug into your institution’s workflow that will manage disaggregated content.” So where do we start? I often find that if a problem feels too big to know where to get started, one approach is to identify little pieces and work on them — bottom-up instead of top-down.
For instance if we all have our own systems, perhaps we can decide on some common standards and formats for exchanging data. RSS and other XML formatted feeds can offer easy ways to exchange data — and if we agree on some common standards, such as how to identify building locations or faculty members, pulling information from other departments into our own pages won’t be too big a challenge. I’m happy to report that I wasn’t the only one to leave the meeting with this thought in mind — we have since formed an informal working group to explore this idea. Stay tuned for future posts on our progress.
One of the biggest challenges of a CMS is that it required standardization across all users, and getting a group of different departments to agree on too many things is probably all but impossible. Standards could be imposed by executive order, but that never really works very well — people can be very creative at by-passing edicts they don’t like. Better to start small, and get agreement on little things that most people don’t care about — the technical format of XML feeds for example.
The article has some other good ideas, although its focus is on a CMS to support course content integrating with Moodle, and not directly focused on CMS for web content.
Content Management for the Enterprise: CMS Definition and Selection
by Brian Stewart, Rodger Graham, and Tim Terry
Volume 2008, Issue 22Abstract: This ECAR research bulletin traces the content management practices and strategies adopted by distance education provider Athabasca University (AU) in Alberta, Canada. It discusses generalizable principles and processes for specifying and selecting an enterprise-wise content management system. The bulletin focuses on the steps preceding actual implementation of a CMS, and it reflects the progress and experience gained from AU’s activities to date.
http://connect.educause.edu/Library/ECAR/ContentManagementfortheEn/47540
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Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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