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Day Software to provide CMS product
Day Software Inc., a global firm whose products have been successfully implemented at other U.S. research universities, has been awarded the contract for a Content Management System (CMS) as part of the university’s Web Content Initiative (WCI).
“Day was selected by the university because they have a long list of strengths,” says Richard H. Lesniak, CIT director of academic services and WCI project director. Not only could the firm match all of the technical requirements expressed in the university’s Request for Proposal (RFP), but it was also strongest in usability, an area of paramount concern to WCI planners.
Day’s CMS—specifically version five of its CQ product—is “very full-featured, with a variety of different modalities to accomplish tasks based on how complex the problem,” says Lesniak.
The goal of the WCI is to develop standards for official UB campus Web sites. Partners in the initiative are the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, the Office of the Chief Information Officer and University Communications.
Key to the WCI’s success is selection of a CMS that is “realizable, stable, consistent and performs well, even in cases where the entire university might be using it,” according to Lesniak.
The selection of Day follows a lengthy process that included extensive review and study of potential firms and software, as well as opportunities for individuals campus-wide to participate in and provide feedback on demonstrations of CMS products that were considered finalists in the process.
“I have been impressed with the openness and thoroughness of the entire CMS selection process,” says Michael E. Cain, dean of the medical school. “Anyone on campus could have participated in the vendor demonstrations if they chose to do so, and all who participated had the option of evaluating the products.
“The ability of interested faculty and staff to weigh in during the process, plus the attention of the CMS team to product functionality, has given me confidence that the right vendor was selected for the university,” Cain adds.
WCI consists of eight pilot sites at UB: two within the Chief Information Office’s presentation of IT-related themes and services; the medical school’s main page and three other sites within; and sites maintained by University Communications for UB 2020 and the Office of the President. For the past year, 14 functional teams across campus have been working on the WCI, including a team devoted to selection of a CMS vendor. July 2010 is the scheduled completion date for the WCI pilot, including new or revamped content for each selected site.
In developing system requirements, a CMS selection team headed by Raymond P. Dannenhoffer, associate dean for support services in the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, emphasized versatility and ease of use. The CMS chosen, he says, “should allow users to easily maintain the content of their Web sites without having to know a lot of high-end computer stuff.”
More specifically, a successful CMS system, team members determined, must support highly structured content, the ability to help campus authors create and maintain links among pages and sites, and be able to provide tools to manage the integrity of site links. At the same time, all aspects of the software needed to be easy to learn and use, efficient, resistant to error and not requiring extensive experience. Furthermore, any product chosen had to be accessible to all users, in accordance with the federal Americans with Disabilities Act and state guidelines.
Dannenhoffer explains that a WCI usability team led by Jennie Luk tested out software products from various sources and did so from a variety of perspectives. “They took both seasoned folks and folks who were very novice in terms of computer experience and expertise and ran them through a series of tasks, testing whether the interaction was intuitive and whether they could complete the tasks. They also ran different groups through different software vendors. This would ensure that no learning curve was involved—the idea was to have everyone have the same challenge and experience.”
In July, the three finalist companies visited campus to demonstrate their products and answer questions from employees who maintain Web sites and work on Web site content. There followed further evaluation of the strengths and weakness of the final contending firms, as well as analysis of Acquia/Drupal, an open source product the team continued to examine. The CMS selection team also conducted conference calls with NYU and the University of Oklahoma, which had engaged in a university-wide effort akin to WCI and were queried on their experiences with Day software. Team members also talked to Penn State, which is using Day’s CQ5 for its library Web sites.
While Day’s CQ5 is a proprietary rather than open source product, it promises the best of both worlds, says Lesniak. “Although it is being provided to us by a commercial entity, it is based on a large suite of open source standards. We’re getting dedicated support from the vendor. At the same time, we’re able to use all those nonproprietary open source standards that are rapidly in development out in the collaborative world.”
Indeed, adaptability is a key feature, says Lesniak, since campus IT resources are, or will be, predominantly deployed on the Student Services Transformation (SST), a large-scale initiative not part of WCI that promises to touch on all aspects of student life at UB. “So it’s important that we get [a CMS product] that we know is going to work and meet our needs, and be ready to use without having to make a lot of changes because we don’t have those people available right now.”
For his part, Dannenhoffer says he is pleased that the intricate selection process ultimately led to a consensus choice on campus, rather than from his committee or any other. “The best thing that came out of the process was that the committee that I headed didn’t pick the product—the campus picked the product. It was clear after the demonstrations and from all the input that we got that the campus was more comfortable with the Day product, as compared with the other products we saw and the open source products we looked at.”
Now that the milestone of selecting a CMS vendor has been achieved, the next steps are to get the software installed and configured for the campus, followed by test migrations. “We’re going to take some sites that currently exist and we’re going to actually contract with the vendor to assist us with doing a migration from what have today to what we want it to be in the future. So we understand what the most efficient ‘pathing’ is to move into their product,” says Lesniak. “Finally, we will continue to do the migration for the eight different Web domains that are part of this pilot. At the same time—roughly a few months from now—we’re planning on initiating some training for the campus to understand what’s necessary in order to participate in the Web Content Initiative.”
Lesniak points out that the WCI goes beyond the pilot. “It is really about improving the quality of the content that we are providing to our external and internal users overall, so we are more effective in achieving the university’s goals. Right now, the CMS is a tool. There are other tools that are being developed as part of the Web Content Initiative: content analysis, a discovery process for needs analysis, and information architecture that will help people come to UB’s Web site. All of these are tools that we will try to use throughout campus. So WCI goes beyond the particular project that we’re working on right now.
“While the CMS right now will be limited to the people who are part of the pilot project, as soon as the pilot concludes in July 2010, all these tools—including the CMS—would be available for general campus adoption, if the process is followed properly.”
To view videos of the software vendors’ demonstrations that were part of the CMS selection process, click here.
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