Content Management System Minutes May 8, 2008

Web Content Management System (CMS) meeting minutes

Held Thursday, May 8 at 10:30am-noon in Math & Computer (MC) 1058

Present: Gary, Eva (Chair), Terry, Pat, Guillermo, Paul, Megan

Regrets: Chris, Mary Lynn

1. Administrative items

  1. Minute Taker: Megan
  2. Agenda: approved
  3. Minutes: previous meeting not approved (not completed)

2. Stakeholders section:

  • Megan provided layout, sorted by levels of impact
  • agreed to display as list rather than table
  • group will review list and provide feedback
  • suggestion to incorporate idea that this affects a wide spectrum of groups within the university including academic departments, administrative units, ancillary businesses, research groups and centres, affilliated colleges, project groups & committees etc.

3. Current web maintenance practices

  • Clarification on role of wikis and blogs added
  • Megan to provide 2 line summary on use of in-house content Management System (CMS) type solutions

4. At other academic institutions

  • Discussion of valuable resources from University of British Columbia (UBC)
  • Diagrams from UBC document useful as a starting point
  • Which universities to target with survey?
    1. Canadian universities similar in size
    2. Canadian universities of other sizes
    3. American/UK/other universities similar in size
  • Do we need ethics clearance? - Eva to ask
  • How to proceed with survey – suggestion to research web practices at that institution as much as possible, email personally, follow up with phone call
  • Need to identify a short list of key questions

5. Benefits of CMS implementation

  • Group to consider benefits and risks & provide feedback
  • Benefits relative to what we're already doing or in general > how a CMS would improve what we're doing now
  • Consider relative to principles of content management?

6. Principles for future web content management

  • Eva & Mary Lynn revised #4, Distributed web content management
    • suggestion to remove occurences of “business”
    • Eva to revise again & check with Mary Lynn
  • #6 condensed, reference to colour palettes & fonts to be removed
    • discussion on inclusion of accessibility & usability & how it fits in with content management; Eva to integrate with other principles
  • #3 – suggestion to add changes in organizational structure as example

Alignment of principles with web practices

  Dreamweaver Templates Dreamweaver Templates with SSI
4. Distributed Management all 2's all 2's
5. Agility in responding to changing technology 4,4,4,4,4,4 3,3,3,4,4,4,3
6. Integrated web presence 4,3,3,3,3,3,4 3,4,3,3,3,2,3
  • Discussion on difficulty of getting people to follow University of Waterloo standards; much of difficulty in creating an integrated presence depends on individual units following the standard
  • Time up, to be continued next time

-- MeganMcDermott - 08 May 2008