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Eliza Grinnell and Lesley Lam from Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences discussion their experiences with Plone at a university, including the planning, implementation and launch of a public site, intranet and faculty websites.
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Reflections on a Year with Plone
About Us
Areas of Research• Applied Mathematics• Applied Physics• Bioengineering• Computer Science• Electrical Engineering• Environmental Sciences & Engineering• Mechanical Engineering
About Us
Community• 83 faculty• 358 grad students• 415 undergrads• 122 staffTotal Community = 978
Recap
Hired Jazkarta for 3 projects
• public site
• intranet (a.k.a community site)
• template for faculty websites
Agenda
Public Site
Intranet
Faculty Websites
Developer Notes
Agenda
Public Site
Intranet
Faculty Websites
Developer Notes
Public Site - before
• 900K hits/year
• HTML and PHP
• Editing in Dreamweaver
• File handling challenges
• Messy back end
• Interface changes
Public Site - after
• 1 million+ visits/year
• Positive feedback
• Voted as “best” Harvard website by Harvard Voice
• #2 in search results for “engineering and applied sciences”
• Ease of updating helps daily content updates
• Nice big area for features
Public Site - after
• Customized news & press release area
Public Site - after
• Internally developed new employee database in AD
• Plone pulls data from newly created database.
• Expanded faculty data lives in Plone.
• Visitors can search the directory alone or full site
Public Site - one year laterSuccess
• Having any CMS at all. Hooray!
• Ease of use
• Organized files + no overwriting
• Stability
• Searchability
• Consistency
• Integrates well with our AD personnel database.
Challenge
• Consistency can be a problematic
• Rely more on technical help for changes to design
• Adding functionality requires technical expertise that we’re still growing in house.
• Steep learning curve.
• Recent investment in Microsoft technology presents challenges.
Public Site - future plans
• Improve events calendar functionality & display. • Optimize for mobile devices.• Add video, some Flash, Add This button• Continue tweaking content formatting and site design
Next Challenge - new culture
• New culture of creating, consuming, and sharing.
• Decentralization of content(Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, iTunes, etc)
• Website no longer the sole source of external communications
Agenda
Public Site
Intranet
Faculty Websites
Developer Notes
Intranet - before
• Lots of questions
• Knock on doors for answers
• Undeveloped policies
• Few written down
• No institutional memory
• Paper-based forms
• Commitment to change?
Intranet - after
• 45K visits/year total
• Documented policies!
• Some community involvement
• Primarily a policy archive and document repository
• Work in progress
Intranet - one year later
Success
• Accommodates frequent changes to content structure
• Searchable pages & documents are essential for a site of this type
• Easy to use for the web novice.
• Only 1/2 hr training
• Can do tech support intervention from your desk
• Like the portlets. Easy to update. Good for news nuggets.
Challenge
• Rely more on technical help for changes to design.
• Recent investment in Microsoft technology presents challenges.
• Still facing technophobia, staff cutbacks, and process change resistance.
Agenda
Public Site
Intranet
Faculty Websites
Developer Notes
Faculty websites - before
Faculty websites - after (for some)
Faculty websites - one year laterSuccess
• Having a full featured template that can be supported by faculty assistants
• Easy to create
• Easy to customize group permissions
• Migrating content is quick
• Easy to learn and maintain
Challenge
• Title displays school name only.
• Faculty want some ability to customize. Currently one code base for all.
• Challenges cutting and pasting content directly from MS Word.
Agenda
Public Site
Intranet
Faculty Websites
Developer Notes
Development notes
• Stability
• Administration
• Development
• Design