Content management November 2 2007

Web Advisory Committee: Content management subgroup

Meeting Minutes

Friday November 2, 2007

Present: Sean Van Koughnett, Sarah Forgrave, Guillermo Fuentes, Pat Lafranier, Isaac Morland, Heather Wey, Megan McDermott, Gary Ridley, Chris Gray Regrets: Penny Pudifin

The purpose of the first meeting of the Content Management Subgroup was to identify the major issues that impact content management in the Waterloo webspace.

Four key interrelated issues were identified:

  • Leadership
  • Resources
  • Competency
  • Technology

1. Leadership and resources

When the web first “arrived” at UW well over a decade ago, it was viewed as an add-on to traditional methods of communicating to our stakeholders. Since then, the web has risen in prominence to be (arguably) the most important communication tool we have. However, in many cases the resources allocated to web management appear still to be allocated as if the web is an "add-on" communication tool rather than one of primary importance. The result of this resource deficiency is an overall webspace of uneven quality.

A few possible reasons behind the resource issue:

  • Those with influence over budgets do not recognize the importance of the web in the university’s overall communication efforts, and thus do not allocate the resources needed.
  • Those with influence over budgets recognize the importance of the web, but have decided that other priorities take precedence.
  • Those with influence over budgets recognize the importance of the web, but underestimate the resources needed to manage it well.

The subgroup concluded that the level of awareness needs to be raised with leadership on the importance of the web and on the resources required for proper web infrastructure and support.

2. Resources and competency

Given the resource issue, the management of the webspace in many (especially smaller) units ends up being delegated to someone whose primary job is not the web.

In some cases, web courses are taken by these individuals but because the knowledge gained from this training is used infrequently, these courses are of little use. In other cases, individuals simply don’t enroll in courses and they cite a lack of time as the main. Lastly, in some cases the courses cover a wide range of material when the needs of the individual are much more narrow and simple.

Regardless, many of those who have been given the task of managing their unit’s website feel uncomfortable with the technology and unsure of themselves due to their competency gap.

3. Competency and technology

Because Dreamweaver was the first on the scene at Waterloo, it has become the established content management tool for the majority of the units across campus.

However, Dreamweaver is not the most user-friendly tool to use, which exacerbates the competency gap. (Contribute is much easier.)

Given the difficulty of mastering an application like Dreamweaver for those who are infrequent, non-technical users, a suggestion was made that additional resources should be provided from IST (ie a “wandering web team), to support the efforts of the smaller units across campus.

The discussion evolved to consider other solutions to this issue: namely, the implementation of more user friendly, open source Content Management Systems, such as Drupal (plus modules), WordPress and Plone, as well as commercial CMS that would allow the novice/infrequent user to more easily update content without requiring much additional training or support.

Other Notes: we briefly discussed what some of the other larger units across campus are doing to deal with some of the issues identified above:

  • Library: using CMS to reduce duplicated content; with new associate librarian (Allan Bell), the web has become a higher priority.
  • Arts: ACO has offered customized training for Contribute users in their faculty; discussion about how there is administrative buy in from associate dean of computing
  • Math: once people have taken the Dreamweaver courses, they are given special training customized to content manager; uses Dreamweaver, but all users are updating snippets of code (SSI) rather than actual assembled pages. Templates are not accessible to modified by content managers.

Suggestions for next steps:

  1. Survey the web content managers on campus to find out who is using CMS (and what they are using)
  2. Investigate the pros/cons of CMS and the pros/cons of our current system

Next Meeting: Will be proposed once the WEB ADVISORY GROUP has given feedback on the notes above.