| Students, faculty, staff, and visitors to the university increasingly expect to do business online. Providing useful and authoritative online content in a timely and consistent manner is becoming crucial to our business processes. The University of Utah provides an enterprise-wide Content Management System (CMS) to university departments and organizations to facilitate the managing and sharing of information. |
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What is Content Management? |
| A content management system is a software based enterprise tool used to collect, manage, and publish information online. Effective content management should include consistent and reliable methods to identify requirements, manage authoritative sources of information, and assemble content on-demand to meet customer’s needs. Content management can also help content authors and site managers to organize, control, and direct information. |
| Content is more than just words on the screen. Images, documents and metadata are all considered manageable kinds of content, and are all integral parts of an effective content management strategy. Content management requires that information be imagined beyond the traditional website. Good content management makes content more widely available and helps maintain the quality and integrity of information as it is used. |
Content management separates information from how it is displayed. The value of content is increased by making it reusable in other places beyond its original purpose. A content instance such as a news article could be authored once but displayed in multiple places, and used by a variety of other departments. An article about student recruitment written by a college for its own website could also be used on the Prospective Students website as well as other related Student Affairs pages. That same article might be combined with similar articles from other colleges to create an online recruitment brochure. Changes or updates to that article get made once by the owner of that article, but still show up in all the places where that article is being used.
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How does Content Management benefit the university? |
- Content can be shared effectively across institutional reporting lines, but the content will be managed by knowledgeable content owners.
- Improves usability and satisfaction with the user experience, as content is delivered in the context of the user’s role and not necessarily based on organization structure.
- Content can be delivered according to audience, and different needs from the public versus the insider can be addressed.
- The quality of content can be improved and the content life cycle can be managed. Duplicate and contradictory content are minimized, and authoritative sources of content can be owned and published from a more reliable content repository.
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What are the elements of a Content Management System? |
Content Repository
- A shared collection or database of content items
- Authoritative – content is created and managed by its official or designated source
- Re-usable – created once but available for use in multiple places
- Aggregate-able – can be combined in multiple ways with other content items
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Content Creation
- Create and edit content anytime via a web-based user interface
- Programming and graphic design skills are not required
- Template-based architectures promote best practices for writing for the web,
accessibility, and find-ability
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Content Publishing
- The process of pushing out approved content to the web
- Can be scheduled or done on-demand
- Content can be published to multiple ends points – web sites, portals, databases
- Content is published according to workflow rules
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Workflow
- Managing the tasks required to create, edit, approve and publish content
- Can be simple or complex
- Helps monitor the quality and consistency of information
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Search
- The primary tool for accessing content in the shared repository
- Uses metadata and system architecture to locate existing content items
- Can find any type of content in the repository – images, documents, html, etc.
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Metadata
- Data that describes the use and meaning of particular pieces of content
- Improves the find-ability and usability of content
- Makes sharing content between websites and applications easier
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Templates
- Defines page layout for the display of content
- Templates are independent of the content being displayed
- Multiple templates can be developed for any content
- Maintains a consistent look and feel throughout a site
- Helps organizations comply with University Branding requirements
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About the Vignette Content Management System |
| The Vignette Content Management system provided by the university includes all of the elements and functionality needed for a comprehensive content management strategy. |
Read more about the Vignette Content Management System at http://vignette.com/
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What sites are using the Vignette Content Management System? |
- The University of Utah Home page www.utah.edu
- Marriott Library (currently in beta testing)
- Brain Institute (currently under development)
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What if I am interested in using CMS for my site? |
| We are currently in the process of productizing content management for a general rollout. Before moving your existing site into content management, you will need to complete the following assessment phase: |
- Content audit – completing an inventory of your content, breaking it into structured components that are re-usable.
- Defining Content Management roles – who will manage your content? Who approves content? Who are your content authors? Who will build and maintain your templates?
- Defining workflow – what are the business rules you want the content authors to follow? Do you want someone to approve content to enforce consistency and best practices? Who publishes the content?
- Developing your look and feel into a content management template(s).
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| Most organizations should plan on a 4 month process for moving into content management. The actual time required will vary depending on the size of the organization and the amount of content, as well as the number of people assigned to assist the process. It is recommended that you take the time to re-evaluate your content rather than simply copying and pasting existing content into the content management system. |
| Content management is an enterprise-wide system, and should be approached holistically. Rather than move individual sites one by one, each College is encouraged to adopt content management as a whole. |
For more information, contact Jill Brinton jbrinton@media.utah.edu or 585-3042. |
