Web content management: controlling the website when everybody wants a piece of the action

University Business, Dec, 2004 by John Savarese

The webmaster, once seen as a hero and magician, is now in danger of being viewed as a bottleneck. No lone person, or even a central office, can be responsive enough to keep today's complex higher education websites stocked with up-to-the minute information. On the other hand, if dozens of individuals and offices create their own web materials without coordination, a website can splinter into unnavigable chaos. This dilemma is motivating many savvy webmasters to start moving their institutions in the direction of web content management software (WCNS).

There are literally hundreds of products that offer some version of web content management. You can find inexpensive packages that provide a modest environment for coordinating contributions to a website by a handful of authors. At the high end of the scale, ambitious enterprise content management systems aspire to integrate databases and content types that go far beyond static web pages. Those systems can run up project costs well into six figures and require extensive technical resources. There are also quite powerful systems available under open source agreements. (See box for a list of representative vendors.)

As with so many IT projects, when you set out to adopt web content management, you are probably also initiating cultural change, so include the stakeholders right from the beginning and secure commitment from the top administration. Start with an assessment of your needs and agree on the problems that the new system must address. You will find it much easier to sort through the software options if you set limits beforehand on how far you realty want to go.

Here are some suggestions to help you set expectations and match them with the product features you will encounter.

DIVIDING UP THE RESPONSIBILITY

The most fundamental capability of a web content management system is to create a secure, easy-to-use, collaborative workspace. You need to be able to parcel out the responsibility for editing certain parts of the website, white preventing unauthorized access to the material Some systems provide their own internal systems for assigning usernames, passwords, and privileges to the collaborating editors. That's fine if the number of people involved is relatively smart and stable. But if you have dozens or hundreds of users, and there is constant turnover, maintenance becomes a major task--maybe even a new bottleneck. In a large environment, you probably already have a campuswide authentication mechanism, like LDAP, Kerberos, or Microsoft's Active Directory. If so, you might restrict your search to systems that integrate with your flavor of authentication.

As you took more closely at the steps involved in posting new web material, you'll find that users play distinct roles. The more sophisticated WCMS offerings reflect this. In an Admissions office. for example, an associate director might be responsible for writing information about an upcoming campus visit, which then has to be approved by the director of Admissions before being posted by the department's technical coordinator. In another setting, the same associate director might have full control over creating, approving, and posting material on another page for a program that she runs herself.

Managing that level of complexity is made much easier if the WCMS supports the concept of roles. A person might be assigned the single rote of author for one web page, white carrying out rotes as editor or approver for another page. That way, a person who needs a high level of access in one area is not given the master key to the whole system. This level of sophistication in assigning privileges could be vital in one institution, and maddening overkill in another.

EASE OF USE

One of the reasons that people got so dependent on the webmaster in the early days was a four-letter word: html. The appearance of WYSIWYG (What You See Is Slightly But Aggravatingly Different from What You Get) web editors like Macromedia Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage make it easier for nonexpert users, but still come with their own learning curves.

If content creation is to be shared by a large number people across campus, there has to be an easier way. If most contributors will just be plugging plain text into prebuilt templates (adding new events to an events calendar, for example), then a fill-in-the-blanks screen will make it easy to do the job without much training. It's even easier if contributors can simply use a form in a standard web browser, without having to learn any special software. This simple approach works well for letting faculty and staff maintain their own personal web pages--as long as they are satisfied with following a standardized and fairly simple format.

If the contributors will be allowed to be more creative, then your WCMS product has to incorporate an easy-to-use layout editor of its own, integrate with third-party toots like Dreamweaver or FrontPage, or allow importing of formatted material from desktop applications like Microsoft Word or Excel.