Current challenges

Current challenges with Bates’ content management processes and systems

Definition

First of all, it is important to distinguish between “content management” and “content management systems.” In this case, we are talking about the first: the entire lifecycle of digital content management, including evaluating, architecting, authoring, editing, publishing, archiving, and retiring content. Although this process is supported by technology, it is mostly a people process: identifying who does what and to what standards.

Also, we must keep in mind the principles of an effective Web user experience.

Scope

There are three types of content on the core Web site, and each demonstrates a different set of problems.

• Top-level strategic content
• News, features, and images produced by CMR
• Department and office information

Strategic content will not be redeveloped until an integrated communications program is in place. CMR content is already produced with a high level of polish. Therefore, senior staff have determined that the departmental and office pages deserve the most immediate attention.

Challenges

Note: these comments reference iCMS version 4. Version 5 alleviates many of these challenges; a plan for roll-out is forthcoming from ILS.

[When will the version 5 upgrade plan be available? jc, 6/1/07]

[Also, please keep in mind that most of the iCMS 4 issues mentioned below are a result of how we have used the system, not of limitations in the software. Exceptions are: page history and pasting directly from Word documents, both of which are addressed in version 5. jah]

For the past 6 years, over a hundred department and office authors have been publishing official content directly to the core Web site using an architecture, interface, and system that has evolved very little. As a result, we have major problems in this area.

• Is it available? – The core Web site system has been unavailable more and more often over the past year
  • [JAH: Hasn't this been corrected with the load balancing/failure rollover software that Steve set up?]
  • [The publishing system had to be restarted three times in the past four weeks. jc]
  • [Ingeniux has been informed; they had us make a configuration change as of 18 May 2007. Let's keep track of Publisher resets from now on. jah]
  • [Images uploaded to the CMS may not be available to the public for as long as two hours, even though they appear in the publisher preview. Therefore, contributors can publish pages with broken images. jc]
• Is it findable? -  Information architecture is inconsistent, departmental navigation sprawls, and search results can’t be customized for key terms
  • [Architecture and navigation to be addressed by Jay, right? Poor search results mean we have to look at search engines besides Google. jah]
  • [Rearchitectures — swapping prototypes, adding redirects — are difficult with iCMS4. Search engine results can be improved by an overhaul to linearize the HTML, which is not possible with iCMS4. jc]
    • [What does it mean to make HTML linear? jh]
• Is it usable? – No department is charged with providing training or supervision on Web content standards and best practices for usability
• Is it relevant? – All core Web site content is presented within the same interface, without restriction, making fast evaluation by context difficult
  • [To be addressed by WMT? jah]
  • [To be addressed as part of a multi-tiered templating system and group restrictions, which are not available as part of the current iCMS4 implementation. jc]
    • [How does a multi-tiered templating system and group restrictions make content more relevant? sm]
• Is it accurate? – Content is not associated with owners, automatic update reminders cannot be created, and there is no workflow/approval process to allow or require fact-checking or quality control by editorial staff
  • [work flow and owners are easily fixed within iCMS4; it turned out to be a lack of knowledge, on our part, of the system's capabilities and behavior. Update reminders require programming. jah]
  • [As soon as these issues can be resolved, we can begin improving the quality of the core Web site content. jc]
• Is it friendly? – Writing with a personal voice and designing for colloquial communications are not currently in the CMR portfolio
• Is it sociable? – The position supporting community management was only temporary, yet both Advancement and Admissions have expressed desire for creating connections with, and amongst, their constituents
• Is it engaging? – The primary interface design has not changed in over 5 years, so current design standards aren’t represented
• Is it persuasive? – Desired strategic outcomes for persuasive messaging are still to be developed

Why is this happening?

Strategic communications

No department has been charged with proactively supporting or training departmental or office content developers; CMR staff is charged only with reactive responsibility for non-CMR content. Content support is not included in the ILS portfolio.

• [The Academic Technology group takes an active part in faculty content. Student content, by policy, isn't supported by the College. Support for staff content has been hit or miss, although CMR student employees have been involved in some of it, e.g. Dining. jh]

Information design

It is currently not possible to distinguish between experiences targeted for various constituencies, such as: prospective students versus current students, public versus restricted environments, or current versus archived content. Also, subsite architectures aren’t being revisited on a regular basis. (Please note that this is not a skill we should expect departmental authors to develop.)

Content development

There is no inventory of current official pages, their histories or content owners; our content management system, as currently configured, does not allow such tracking. As a result, authors publish content that is often later orphaned, and rearchitecture becomes much more difficult.

[Inventory and owners can be done with the current system, as configured. Page history isn't available. I'm discussing possibilities with Steve. jah]

Infrastructure systems

Web authors around the College report that the publishing system is difficult to re-learn if they don’t use it very often, that there is minimal content development training available, and that work isn’t being monitored for quality.

[Re-learning should be addressed by deploying the authoring client for both platforms. I'm surprised about the training comment. Reneé works hard to make herself available. Are there people who don't know that? Should she send a message to the webweavers list? jah]

[We know that there are people who are accustomed to a more intuitive interface and, rather than just making updates, put off training opportunities. In other words, an intuitive system doesn't need regular retraining. jc]

[I think this can be addressed by deploying the authoring client and by reworking some of our designs, especially the "faculty list" section. Pasting directly from Word will be addressed in version 5. jah]

[The following summary added 12/6/07. jc]

• All iCMS account owners have the ability to edit all iCMS content, so changes can be made anywhere, to any page, by anyone
• The current deployment of iCMS has no formal content ownership implemented, so there’s no way
  for authors to check with an owner
• The current deployment of iCMS has no version tracking implemented, so authors can’t see who, when, or why a page was changed
• The current deployment of iCMS has no notification of stale content implemented, so authors aren’t reminded when content is old

Interface design

Division of responsibilities for interface design between CMR and ILS makes iterative interface improvements difficult to implement. An overhaul of the interface, first demonstrated last fall — let alone migration of old content into a new system — is not within the resource level of any department.

[Is ILS responsible for interface design? Members of the Web Management Team want an opportunity to provide input based on their experiences. But, otherwise? jah]

[Interface design is currently, according to prior agreement, a shared responsibility between ILS (for HTML) and CMR (for CSS). That arrangement is being revisited by the Web oversight group. jc]

[Web Technology Services has been receiving HTML and CSS from CMR, then writing XSLT to output them. We had the impression that was the agreement. jh]

Staffing and budget levels

Resources are lower than at other institutions. People with Web responsibilities have their time divided and report to many offices around campus. Systems redeployments stretch engineering staff thin.

[Right on! jah]

System capabilities

Overview (Jim Hart)

The Ingeniux CMS is a very capable system. As you’ll see below, I’ve added notes responding to most of the perceived limitations. To sum them up:

1. We haven’t fully explored the capabilities of newer versions.
2. We didn’t understand, in the beginning, what we were getting.
3. We haven’t queried other Ingeniux users for templates we need.
4. We haven’t documented or proselytized new features that we’ve built, so very few people know they exist.

That said, Ingeniux CMS isn’t an open source system. It has a much smaller user base, and, more importantly, programmer base, than, say, Drupal. It was, however, much more flexible than Drupal until the Drupal CCK module (custom content) came out. Until then, you had to be a PHP programmer to add any data, feature or function not provided by Drupal or 3rd party modules, and it wasn’t as easy to do as it is with Ingeniux CMS.

The large programmer and user base of systems like Drupal and Moodle allows those systems, potentially, to grow faster than a proprietary system. Ingeniux CMS needs for someone to set up a well organized and maintained online library of templates and modules, ala Drupal, so Ingeniux customers can share their work. We have a number of potentially useful templates in our system, notably those in Athletics and CMR; rosters, news articles, news releases, athletics events, general events, copyright statement, slide show, multi-media launcher, rotating teasers, and WebGuide, among others. Using a component-based content model and standardized CSS, we’ll have many more.

Version 5 (Jim Hart)

Version 5 of Ingeniux CMS has a new look and some new capabilities. We aren’t moving the existing version 4 site to version 5, en masse, for a number of reasons (some of which I may forget to include, so feel free to add them):

1. We want to start fresh using the component-based content model and standardized CSS. We’ve learned a lot about how to use the system effectively in the last few years. Having new and old pages and components on the same system would be more confusing than it is, already.
2. We want to deploy the author client, rather than the administrative client, to most web weavers. It’s easier to use, because it’s simpler and cleaner.
3. New pages, and components, a different client, and changes in version 5, imply substantial retraining for current web weavers. We thought it would be easier to train new web weavers on new subsites,  first, to “work out the kinks”. Then, bring current web weavers along when their part of our Web content is migrated to our new methods, and version 5.

Jay Collier: I would suggest that these capabilities might become liabilities depending on the amount of time required to implement them.

Jim Hart: These capabilities, especially number 1, apply, regardless of the CMS. In Drupal, for example, we would use the Content Construction Kit (CCK) and phpTemplate to achieve the same modularity and reusability. Other CMS’s will stand or fall on their ability to provide for content re-use and code modularity.

System limitations

User management

• Can’t currently identify permanent, fixed content owners
• Can’t look at page revisions or compare versions
  • Revisions aren’t automatic, but there’s an Archiving feature that we don’t have enabled. It stores revisions in a Microsoft SQL database. (For some reason, everyone can archive pages, but only the Windows Author Client can search the database. (see Help Contents and search for “archive”) (jah)
    • Time estimate: ? (requires research into the Archiving feature)
• Can’t currently assign editing rights for each section (subsite).
  • Editing rights can be assigned by section. We just have to set up the right groups and permissions. (jah)
    • Time estimate: 10-99 hours. (iCMS administration, not programming)

Findability

• Generating meaningful URLs is a time-consuming manual process, and nested folders that match the site architecture aren’t possible.
  • We could easily do the latter using the same logic as for Google Analytics. (jah)
    • Time estimate: ? (need requirements specified)
    • Jay Collier: In what format are requirement needed? Is it possible to use both a publish-as name as well as a path URL?
    • Jim Hart: Start with a Problem Statement, I guess.
  • We may not have to use their PublishAs attribute. We might be able to add our own element to each schema and use that, instead. (jah)
    • Time estimate: 10-99 hours?  (May not be possible. We’d have to check with Ingeniux about updating the PublishAs from our own element in order to avoid naming conflicts.)

Architecture and content migration

• No automated method for exporting content
  • Content migration among “Ingeniux sites” is provided, including from version 4 to version 5. (jah)
  • The hard part about migrating to other systems (e.g. Drupal) is figuring out the location and format of the data in the target system. Once that’s done, writing the code is fairly easy. (jah)
  • Jay Collier: This is true for exporting. How about importing? I’ll make that a separate point.
• No automated method for importing content
  • Jim Hart: I wasn’t clear, above. The export would be formatted as input for a particular targeted system, so importing into that system would be straightforward. In the case of Drupal, for example, the output would likely be SQL statements that would load the content directly into the MySQL database.
• Doesn’t automatically generate redirects when pages are deleted or moved.
  • If a page is moved, it’s X-number stays the same, so no redirect is needed. If “moved” means moving the content to a new page, then this is correct.
  • Jay Collier: Whenever I rearchitect a section, I create a prototype for testing and approval. When complete, the old x-numbers are deleted without redirects. It is my understanding that this critical user-oriented feature is not possible with iCMS4.
• Deleting a page from the publishing software doesn’t automatically delete it from the production server.
  • If we can get the Empty Recycle Folder function working, this will be corrected, I think. (jah)
  • Jay Collier: What will that take?
  • Jim Hart: Getting back in touch with Ingeniux. They were working on it before I went on vacation.

Authoring

• Other systems use a cross-platform, cross-browser Web interface. Not available with iCMS4.
  • One can certainly argue with Ingeniux’ decision to use browser-specific features. However, that decision adds a lot of functionality, especially drag-n-drop, which I wouldn’t want to be without. It’s a trade-off. (jah)
  • Unless I’m mistaken, AJAX interfaces support drag and drop, too.  (jc)
• The blog support is not intuitive.
  • Doing blogging is no big deal. I already wrote it. But, no one wanted to log into the Publisher to make blog entries (and I don’t blame them; neither do I) People who have the Publisher open all the time might be more willing. (jah)
  • This would indicate to me that the iCMS4 interfa
    ce is not particularly intuitive. (jc)
• What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor provides non-semantic markup, shows editors more options than necessary, and creates poor code.
  • Fixed in version 5. (jah)
  • Jay Collier: what is the timeline for migration to version 5?
  • Jim Hart: We don’t have one.
• Direct edits or cut and paste of tabular data from other programs is difficult and display can be unpredictable.
  • An easier way to copy/paste table data from MS Excel and/or MS Word is vital for Institutional Planning & Analysis pages. Direct copy/paste from Excel frequently crashes iCMS.  Manual edits of tables often leads to misaligned data.  Suggested workarounds using Acrobat .pdfs or creating raw tables in Dreamweaver are not a practical solution for frequently edited pages. (Jim Fergerson)
  • May be better in Version 5, where we can use tinyMCE or other browser-based WYSIWYG editor. (jah)
• There is no automated method to notify authors/owners when their content needs to be updated.
  • see above regarding workflow. (jah)
  • Jay Collier: Don’t see that reference. Please summarize here.
  • Jim Hart: Once pages are assigned to workflow, the assigned user isn’t cleared on check-in. So, pages have “owners”. Once that’s the case, we can readily script notices based on date-last-modified, or on spelling errors, or on bad links, or whatever. Programming time required could be less than 10 hours or more than 10 hours, depending on how complex the selection criteria are.
  • Jay: Does the “owner” of a page remain stable, even if someone else makes an edit? Can we roll back to earlier versions if an “owner” deems that necessary? (jc)
• There is no record of previous versions of pages.
  • see above regarding Archiving. However, the Archiving feature is limited. Steve and I are discussing other possibilities for versioning. (jah)
• There is no simple automated method for creating forms.
  • What should this do?
  • Jay Collier: Other systems included drag and drop elements in the WYSIWYG toolbar that create forms and form code that is supported by the system, i.e., tied into a form-processing module that sends form data via e-mail.
• There is no code validation to make sure cross-platform standards are supported.
  • Available in version 5, I think. If not, it’s easy to add links to the code validation sites. (jah)
  • Jay Collier: Other CMSs use the Tidy application upon submission of an editable area.
  • Jim Hart: I believe that’s an option in version 5, depending on what WYSIWYG editor we install.
    • Time estimate: ? (need to define requirements)
    • Jay Collier: What format should the requirements follow?
    • Jim Hart: If Tidy is all that’s needed, you just defined them.
    • Jay: Yes, that’s what I wrote. Although, if iCMS4 is generating poor code, Tidy may make poor assumptions. At least it’s a good place to start.
• There are no templates for events, newsletters, FAQs, blogs.
  • We can build them or get them from other Ingeniux users.
    • Blogging with the Publisher probably doesn’t make sense. It would be like blogging in Drupal using the Content Construction Kit (CCK). It’s the wrong tool for the job. We could write a browser-based blogger using forms and funneling the results through Ingeniux CMS to a database. But, why would we do that when there are so many good blogging tools out there?
    • Jay Collier: Blogs and news feeds are, basically, the same thing. To not be able to create chronological content in one environment would seem to be an unnecessary limitation.
    • Jim Hart: News feeds can be built from any chronological content, not just blogs. And, the Publisher can do chronological content. Bates Now and its news feed provide an example of both statements. Blogs are a means to enter a certain kind of chronological content having a limited number of elements (“fields”), and certain features that people expect, e.g. “trackbacks”, and the ability to use the blog without special client software.
    • Jay: Since iCMS4 can do both, could you estimate the amount of time to deploy them?
• There is no provision for public calendar events.
  • We have an event component. It may need to be revised.
  • We would have to write the code to present the calendar(s).
    • Time estimate: 10-99 hrs.? (might go over 100 hours)

Ingeniux CMS4, at present, is a “roll your own” system. However, some templates are provided, and we, obviously, have done many more, including basic FAQ and blog support. In addition, we could poll other Ingeniux users to find out what they have. (jah)

• Users need to remember to create meaningful page names, rather than to accept the default system-generated x####.xml
• No way to subscribe to e-mail reminder when selected pages are updated.
  • This feature is in workflow, in versions 4 and 5. (jah)
  • How much time would it take to deploy this feature? (jc)

Content sharing

• News releases and other content is not easily shared in multiple locations.
  • Ingeniux CMS is built for content sharing. We haven’t made good use of components (as opposed to pages), yet. That will be changing. (jah)
  • Jay Collier: Again, I understand that the toolkit is available. The question: how much Bates time is required to implement? Is the interface intuitive?
• No simple way to create access-restricted pages or subsites except through abacus
  • Changed in version 5, which provides password support. (jah)
  • Jay Collier: How intuitive is the management interface? Does it support groups? For sections of the hierarchy?
  • Jim Hart: I don’t know, yet. Haven’t seen any documentation on the password feature.
  • Jay: How would  you acquire that documentation?
• No easy Banner to Web interfaces. Perhaps this is a matter of support, rather than software capability.
  • We have automated interfaces to the Banner faculty, staff and student basic information, and to the online catalog. These connect to extracts, rather than the “live” database for security reasons. (jah)
  • Jay Collier: Can this be created by users through an intuitive Web interface, or does it require ILS expertise?
  • Jim Hart: It requires typing certain text into an element in the Publisher. I wouldn’t expect the average web weaver to do it, but certainly you or some of your students could handle it.
  • Jim Fergerson:  Brio/Hyperion does offer an “Export To HTML Wizard” to help create web pages from existing charts, reports, and pivot reports.  Simple tables are displayed in clean code that could be pasted into iCMS.  HTML pages can also be automatically updated to a designated directory on a server whenever the report is run.  There is also an “Export Document to Web Page” option, which is the recommended method for exporting complex reports, tables, and graphs.  I don’t think anyone at Bates is actually using these yet, but they may have real potential if there is support for moving pages to the appropriate place in the web.  Links to selected exported reports appear in a frame, with the currently selected report displayed in the main window. (Would this have to be done through abacus instead of iCMS?)  Needs coordination between web designers, administrative computing, and report developers.

File management

• All images are seen by all editors, the image upload tool takes up to a minute to load, there is no way to restrict.
  • Steve has suggested a “media server”. It would improve performance, and allow for upload permissions by director
    y/folder.
    • Time estimate: 10-99 hrs.? (depends on requirements)
    • Jay Collier: how will requirements be developed, and in what format?

Syndication

• There is currently no automated method for syndicating content throughout the site.
  • There is. It was written for version 2, though, so we haven’t promoted it. It needs a rewrite to take advantage of the version 4 XML output feature. (jah)
    • Time estimate: 10-99 hrs.

Interface

• There is no user-selectable theme tool.
  • Not when creating/editing content, no. Also true, though, for Drupal/CCK. Are there systems that provide theming when creating/editing content?
    • Jay Collier: Not sure where the “creating/editing” comment came from. I am talking about the ability for a user to apply a theme to a subsite. At any time. Example: a department gets a new graphic design, develops the new theme, and then applies the theme to the subsite. Is that available?