What features would a good CMS provide?

The web redesign project is considering a change in scope to include a possible change in our web technology.

Recent changes to the way in which external systems interact with Oracle Portal, the College CMS, have created an opportunity to review the College’s current platform. Coupled with an expanded content strategy for the redesign, we will now be reviewing the future of the College CMS.

The first step will be to carry out a rigorous assessment of Oracle Portal. This will identify if we can deliver what we need to for the redesign and for the future best operation of our website within Oracle Portal, or if we need to move to a new CMS.

Alongside this will be an exercise to identify potential CMS products (including Portal) and rate them against the technical and user interface features that we require.

We have already begun to gather these requirements, and, with the help of Domain7, have a solid understanding of what the essential technical features are. We are now consulting the College’s web editor community to find out what features a good CMS will provide from a user’s perspective.

Please use this blog to tell us what you think these are.

The next steps

A decision
Once the Oracle Portal and other CMS systems have been assessed and rated, College senior management, will then decide if the results of this assessment mean a change and if so, how to take this forward.

Moving the redesign project forward
A potential change of CMS will affect the timeline of the redesign project. The CMS review will run alongside the website redesign, with dependencies on various different workstreams. The design stream will commence as normal and work to decide upon new information architecture will start once the guiding concept for the project has been agreed.

Following an intense Discovery week, led by our agency, Domain7, we have been busy discussing their findings and how to take these forward.

Domain7 have reported back on what they have learned about the Imperial brand and our audiences.

Brand

Domain7 believe there are two main challenges to advancing the College’s brand position:

• Becoming known in the UK as categorically distinct from Oxbridge, rather than as a second choice school to them. Imperial is aiming for different types of students and academics than Oxbridge, and that should be more broadly recognized.
• Gaining “household name” status outside of the UK, with perhaps a particular emphasis on breaking through into the Americas. Gaining recognition among students and industry leaders is critical for anchoring a broadly-acknowledged position as a global leader.

Audience

An extract of some of the findings:

More organised information
“The college has not decided how it wants to use its website. A communication tool? An information repository?”

Less cluttered easier to find info
“Someone head of a department just fills out the website, they are not a web designer or a writer. They just put stuff there, thinking it is usable. It would help if there was a clean framework for how to promote and give stuff to students.”

Culture and communication problems
“Some students feel the college is really against people. That’s not true, but the college is not really good at communicating what it’s doing.”

Balance independence with assistance
“They need to give us a balance between signposting and being too in your- face.”

Academics feel like they are not as accessible to the outside world as they would like to be
“People from other universities don’t find our experts when they search”
“The website is the entrance point to the school, it needs to be top quality to reflect that we are.”

Read the full report on the College’s brand and audiences

These findings will begin to form the basis of the strategy for the College website which will be driven by an overarching ‘guiding concept’.

We’ve been busy working together with Domain7 to develop the guiding principles which make up the guiding concept. These will form the key pillars upon which the redesign of the College website will be structured.

We will make these available for review on this blog in the coming weeks.

On March 7th, Workspace, the repository that holds uploaded documentation, linked to via the Content Management System (CMS) will be upgraded from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010.

What this means for web and workspace editors

• No content uploads or changes to SharePoint Workspace on March 7th (8:00am until 2:00pm).
• URLs will stay the same so no need to change links to documents.
• The document wizard will not be affected.
• If you have any updates to existing or need to add new content for March 7th, you must upload it to workspace on the 6th (or after 3:00 pm on the 7th).

What this means for web and workspace readers.

• This change will not be noticed by the CMS and Workspace readers.
• The database which holds the content will be read only so you will be able to access your content but not edit it during the upgrade period.

The website redesign project has kicked off. If you are not yet familiar with the project, the aims are:
• to ensure that Imperial’s website meets the needs and requirements of a diverse range of audiences
• to make the website compatible with mobile devices
• to implement a refreshed design
• to review and improve the current navigational approach

Find out more about the project.

We are currently working with Domain7 to conduct an intense week of audience research and discovery. This phase of the project is focused on meeting with key stakeholders and web audiences to find out what the College is trying to achieve, what stakeholders wish to accomplish and what our key audiences need.

Domain7 have been talking to many people throughout the college and beyond. We’ve made a fairly exhaustive attempt to reach as many people as is logistically possible during the discovery week. We have not been able to include everyone in face-to-face discussion groups and one-to-ones.

We’d really like to hear your opinions so please do use this forum to post your comments about the College website.

The project team will post regular updates and calls for feedback here.

UPDATE – this issue has now been resolved

There is an issue with the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome and Safari which affect a few forms in the CMS editor and may affect other web based systems. Detailed below is a list of the forms that we have found that are affected by this bug.

This problem can be avoided by using Internet Explorer, or earlier versions of these browsers. This is an issue that is shared across the web community and is been brought to the attention of Mozilla (the owners of the Firefox browser) and they are investigating a solution.

Currently this issue affects the following in:

The CMS Editor

• Document wizard
  ‘Upload a file’ button which opens MS Sharepoint does not work

An interim workaround:
Visit: https://workspace.imperial.ac.uk/ and find the folder for your website (or https://workspace.imperial.ac.uk/people and the folder with your name on for PWPs), upload your file, then on your webpage insert a hyperlink and paste in the url of your document, something like: https://workspace.imperial.ac.uk/websitename/Public/documentname.doc

• Link wizard
  ‘Find’ a link form, the form does not pass the selected link details

 

• Add ins wizard
  The form does not close or add the content to the editor form
• Format Wizard
  The form does not close or adds the content to the editor form

News article form

• Adding an author via the ‘Search and Add author’ form
• Adding tags via the ‘See all tags’ form
• Adding a featured academic via its associated button in the links section

 

Personal Web Pages (PWPs)

• Changing the banner name (editing the professional name).
  The form doesn’t close. The change has been made and so if you clear the change the change can be seen.

 

We will be working to resolve this issue as soon as we can and will keep you posted.