Last July, I conducted several email interviews to prepare my column on how to survive a Content Management System (CMS) implementation for the October 2006 issue of University Business: “10 Tips for Surviving a CMS Switchâ€
Nancy Jeanne Mustachio, Application Development Director at Seton Hall University shared 4 tips of her own at this time.
Forge a strong relationship between IT and PR.
Define joint goals and objectives. This is by far the key to success. The dedication of Public Relations to create a positive image of your University, coupled with IT’s skill set and infrastructure required to support a reliable, scalable, feature-rich webspace, must be the first ingredient in this resource intense project. It is through these mutual goals, you will be able to set a requirement list for a CMS, build the Information Architecture, and develop the delivery features.
Conduct an ‘apple to apple’ vendor review.
Create a feature and IT requirement grid, which each vendor must adhere to when presenting. Will the CMS meet your goals and objectives? For example, if your organization has multiple content providers, does the CMS allow for a flexible workflow and approval process?
Estimate your traffic and determine your infrastructure’s point-of-failures.
A content management system is ‘not’ just a webserver, or an application that contains content. A content management system allows for authoring, content approval, dynamic database reads, and content taxonomy. Build reliability into your CMS architecture, and prepare for fail-proof solutions. For example, dedicate one server just to authoring and another as the ‘read-only’ (in case the authoring server fails), preface the authoring with two read-only servers managed by a load-balancer (in case a read-only server fails), and/or update a static version of your entire site onto a remote server (in case any portion of the CMS fails).
In your initial phase, target your content delivery to your institution’s priority audience.
For most institutions, it tends to be prospective students, incoming students, and current students. When building from the ground up, if you try to focus on all constituents at once, the depth of the content or the richness of the dynamic element begins to suffer.