Use of a Content Management System (CMS) would greatly enhance the efficiency of web site operations, improve crossover of data from various departments and allow for greater accuracy of information. A CMS would also help web site content editors to better maintain their materials through the use of a browser-based, integrated software that would be easier to use than the current Contribute software employed at the College.

Business Case for Content Management System (CMS) Implementation (Spring 2014)

 SUNY Orange has recently made an institutional commitment to invest in technology that will help the College increase student retention and completion, improve communication and streamline College operations. This technology, in the form of a portal, will allow the College to more effectively support students and enhance operations through an overhaul of MySUNYOrange.

In the face of lowering enrollment figures, it is important that the College investigate how technology can be used to effectively and efficiently recruit new students and retain current ones. Once the portal (which will consolidate many of the College’s online resources available to current students, faculty and staff) is fully implemented, the College’s website will be streamlined to more fully support the recruitment of new students. As the portal is focused on retention, persistence and completion, so should the website become focused primarily on recruitment.

From its original initiation, information on the College website has been developed by the content owners and published statically in a series of silos: admissions information to the admissions pages, registration information to the Registrar’s pages, athletics information to the athletics pages, etc. In recent years, the College has integrated technology to allow sharing of news and event announcements through other sources, such as the Grapevine bi-weekly newsletters, the Nennius system, and social media. However, on the website itself, there is virtually no cross-promotion of events, news or recruitment-worthy information, and any attempts to do so must be done on an item-by-item basis because of significant limitations of the current software being used to update/manage the web site.

Content owners (or webpage managers) are currently using software called Adobe Contribute, which allows them to edit pages of the site that they have been given permission to access. However, this software, while fulfilling the College’s needs in the past, has outlived its usefulness and is no longer fully supported or updated by Adobe.

There are other significant limitations as well. The software has several bugs which lead to crashes and lost updates. The updates can take several minutes to process. The software requires paid licenses and is required to be installed on each machine from which a webpage manager wishes to edit pages. It is difficult to create templates for users. In large part due to Contribute’s limitations, our current website cannot be converted to a “mobile friendly” site and still be able to be managed by Contribute.

Contribute does not include any picture or document management and tracking capabilities, and it severely hampers the College’s ability to change the navigational structure of the site in a timely fashion.  This also hinders the ability to maintain a contemporary or dynamic site design.

Needs Statements

The College needs to improve its online recruitment of students and online profile.

Currently, when a department or office has something to share, the assigned webpage manager manually adds it to the website and/or manually adds it to the Grapevine. There is currently no cross-promotion of recruitment-worthy information unless it is done item-by-item and page-by-page (cutting and pasting, etc.) A CMS would allow information be shared across the website, with no manual re-entry because items posted to the software could be targeted to various locations quickly and easily without additional content inputting.

A CMS would also allow for more timely changes to navigation, smoother updates of graphics, and more efficient overall design and maintenance of the College website. Items could be added dynamically to navigation without extensive re-working or I.T. staff involvement. Images could be also updated dynamically and usage could be tracked site-wide.

Timeliness of documents and document tracking would also be available through a CMS, so that version control would prevent old documents from remaining on the site, while assuring that relevant links and/or other locations of documents could easily be tracked.  The statistical analysis component of a CMS would provide the College with data with which to make decisions on many facets of the site.

CMS page template designs offer a more pleasing and contemporary look to the website, allow the look of the entire site to be changed quickly and easily, and provide a simpler navigation experience for all users.

Finally the CMS would allow SUNY Orange to present a mobile-friendly version of the site to many different mobile devices without compatibility or re-sizing problems. This, in itself, could have a dramatic effect on student recruitment because prospective students would be embraced by the mobile friendly site rather than turned away by the current site’s lack of mobile functionality.

Overall, the CMS would greatly assist student recruitment while at the same time raising the College’s online profile by allowing broader sharing of recruitment content, producing a more appealing and dynamic design, and providing more timely sharing of news and information from a variety of sources.

The College soon needs to select a new software solution to edit its website.

Adobe is no longer fully supporting Contribute. The current version is slow and contains several bugs that cause delays, software crashes, or loss of webpage drafts. With close to 100 Contribute users and an average of 5-6 new drafts (plus 5-6 new documents) per day, this is a source of frustration to most of the College’s heavy Contribute users and leads to a reduction in productivity (meaning less wasted time) for many users. The software itself also requires specific training and is not immediately user friendly in its interface and options.

Contribute is a separate piece of software that needs to be installed on each computer on which it is to be used. It is also Operating System dependent, meaning that each time a new operating system is released, a new upgrade of Contribute may have to be purchased: Contribute ceased to function on Windows 7 PCs, requiring I.T. to purchase the latest upgrade. A different version of the software is also required for Apple Macs.

Upgrades themselves consume significant resources, with I.T. and Communications personnel spending approximately 35-40 hours working on the initial configuration and roll-out. Additionally, I.T.  staff is still helping users upgrade their software, having already spent approximately an additional 10 hours in user support.

A CMS would offer users a browser-based interface to manage and edit websites. Such an interface would be more user-friendly and require less training for staff by I.T. Users would be offered templates that meet the College’s branding (reducing non-conforming branding errors) and would demonstrate to users what their edits would look like on the live site.

Overall, a CMS would provide easier and more user-friendly access to webpage editing, through a web browser, improve website branding, and eliminate confusion on best design practices and layout.

The College needs version control and document tracking on the website.

Any document that is uploaded to the website remains on the website until it is manually deleted. At present, a handful of individuals can delete a document. Individual content owners cannot delete their own existing documents. If a document is to be replaced or removed as part of a webpage update, Contribute does NOT overwrite the previous document, or remove it. The document will only be removed if the webpage manager informs the relevant administrators. Occasionally, older outdated documents become problematic when they show up in webpage searches, or old links direct folks to them.

Contribute does not adequately support document tracking or management.  A CMS would allow the College to enable version control on web based documents. There would be one location for each document, and the content owner would update to that same location. Only the latest version of the document would be available on the website, the old version would immediately be removed. Any links to the document would also be automatically adjusted--in real time--to point to the new or updated document. Removal of a document would warn the webpage manager and the administrators of what pages would be affected if the document were to be removed so they could be updated accordingly.

Overall, a CMS would allow better control over what documentation is presented publicly, and more fully support the timely removal of old information and the prevention of user frustration or legal ramifications due to old information still being available.

The College could develop a template for Portal pages

Implementation of a CMS would also allow the College to establish templates for portal pages that would be different from website pages. Upon rollout of the portal, content from the web site will be moved into the portal where it will only be accessible to current students, faculty and staff.

It would be advantageous if the College had the ability to enhance users’ portal experience by providing information on page templates that assure the users that they are still within the portal rather than having been redirected back to the public site. And, using the same CMS to manage web pages and portal pages would create a more efficient process and save content managers time because they’d only need to master one software package.

Conclusion

Implementation of a Content Management System would greatly aid the College in many ways. Most importantly, it would allow the College to build and maintain a fully integrated web site that would support cross-promotion of materials, allow for admissions and student recruitment materials to be more broadly displayed, and greatly enhance the experience of all visitors to our site ... particularly those using mobile devices.

It would also streamline the web site maintenance process for many users at the College, while at the same time providing information management and web trafficking support that would allow the College to make data-driven decisions on web site navigation, design and content.