B2: Web CMS and University Web Teams Part II - the Never Ending Story?

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Comment by Ann Neilson on July 25, 2008 at 2:10pm

This was a really useful session (at IWMW) and made us realise that we're probably doing the right things with our change management, even though we didn't know that was what we were doing! We're going through a similar exercise on a smaller scale and have acquired a mountain of post-it notes, photos and loads of communications. Keep us posted with chapter 4...

Comment by Claire Gibbons on July 17, 2008 at 2:37pm

Thanks for all the comments. I'm really looking forward to this now!

Comment by Steve Martin on July 8, 2008 at 4:31pm

Here at Northampton, we are also in the process of putting out to tender for a CMS... we have used Oracle Portal for our schools and department pages for a while (for historical reasons) but I have never been happy with it at all, especially from the user end as it is generally a horrible experience for them!

I may be quite naive about how easy it is going to be to implement and the problems that it is going to solve, but our experience with Oracle Portal has given us a great feel for what we need and don't need from a CMS. Plus we already have the devolved content contribution so that won't be a major culture change as it might be at other institutions that make all web updates via a central team.

I look forward to the session and learning from the experience of others...

Comment by Matthew Bull on July 6, 2008 at 9:31am

At Kent we're starting to use Sharepoint for intranet and document management purposes. We're also looking closely at an open source cms with a view to adopting that as our main web publishing tool.

It seems like a lot of web teams are at a stage where they're questioning the cms they bought a few years ago. I wonder if this is because many systems claim to do everything but end up being too cumbersome to manage. My feelings are that it might be better to start small and evolve a system according to need by gradually building integration with other systems.

Comment by Marilyn Mullay on July 3, 2008 at 11:21am

We've been using Mediasurface for the last 4 years and there are some faint rumblings about looking at new/different systems. There's also a possibility of moving our intranet to Sharepoint in which case any CMS we DO use will have a different function from what we're doing at the moment. All a bit vague at the moment but it'll be good to hear what other folk are up to. This is my first conference ...

Comment by dmackland on July 2, 2008 at 10:10am

This is very topical for me at the moment as we are currently out to tender for a CMS and a site redesign both at the same time. We are working to a project plan of getting our current site moved over to the new CMS/Design and live by Janauary 2009 - yikes.... Something tells me that I'm going to be very busy over the next 6 months (cancel all holidays) as our web team is only currently 3 strong (1 vacancy). Fortunately all content is currently controlled by a web editor in our communications department and we only have 4 schools - plus a handful of services that submit content to the current site.