NYU's Tisch School of the Arts debuts EM3 iOn Web Content Management
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Why EM3 iOn works for NYU's Tisch School of the Arts
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The situation: New York University's Tisch School of the Arts consists of more than 20 separate departments, each with their own administrative group, operating style, and unique identity. Distributed teams were maintaining Web sites for all of them manually—and independently. Tisch reviewed publishing processes to determine how to better meet the needs of their varied audiences and stakeholders.
Their goals:
- Force consistency – Many groups were managing localized sites. Each had its own look and publishing process.
- Increase frequency of updates – While some sites were regularly updated, many were not. Tisch knew the solution had to be extremely user-friendly to encourage those who weren't keeping information up-to-date.
- Change once, update many – They had difficulty manually updating information since they had no way to determine all the sites and pages that needed modification.
- Direct tasks to those best suited – Print writers should be able to produce Web copy; department chairs should have a means to quickly approve content, etc.
After studying their needs, Tisch cautiously began exploring Web content management (WCM). Working in higher education, this was a new experience and they felt had to be very sure of their choice.
The choice: EM3 iOn™
Initially Tisch reviewed several entry-level products that didn't offer the power they needed. Avoiding platform products from the well-known enterprise content management vendors for budgetary reasons, they then looked at offerings from seven mid-tier vendors. Budget dictated that the WCM system be flexible and open so they could manage it independently of the vendor, and that cost not be based on administrative "seats" since they didn't know how many users they would ultimately support.
"Many products didn't allow us to develop our own templates, instead tying us to the vendor, and those weren't for us. iOn had all the features we were looking for. When I saw how it worked, I thought, 'This is it.' It's such a natural way of operating. Everything was very clear." said Esther Preiser Ph.D., Associate Director of Computer Information Technology.
The process: Tisch's Web Administrator,Aaron Fowler, helped spearhead the transition to iOn. His initial focus was integrating template designs from a well-known New York design agency, which were in the approval stages when iOn was selected. Tisch wasn't concerned about integration issues, Fowler said, because "using iOn, we knew we wouldn't have a problem creating any kind of site we wanted. In fact, the agency’s designs were easy to translate into iOn."
The design agency specializes in researching and recommending the best ways to organize online information. Their information architecture recommendations worked beautifully with iOn's best-practices content publishing model. According to Fowler, "It was obvious that iOn’s building blocks [information object modeling framework], dovetailed perfectly with the agency's concepts of how our sites should be organized."
Template integration
iOn's templating system relies completely on industry standard HTML, XSLT, and XML. Although Aaron hadn't worked with XSLT and XML, he had a programming background. EM3’s training, iOn's sample templates, and a standard reference book were all he needed to perform advanced template integration.
The agency provided 20 example pages of tested HTML. With these as his foundation, Fowler spent approximately 6 weeks working part-time at creating 20 page display templates and their associated widgets (iOn's reusable template components). In the process of integrating his first template, he created most of the template components that would be needed in the other 19 templates. iOn's powerful ability to factor and reuse portions of templates made creating the additional templates simple.
Information architecture
During the template creation process Dr. Preiser and Fowler defined the metadata and content types they would use in iOn. These were designed with an eye to permissions in order to effectively manage future content contributors. Fowler built them in iOn as he was creating templates—"it was a very simple task."
The results: As soon as the first template was completed, the launch team of three began adding content. This took approximately four weeks, but by overlapping template integration and content population, both tasks were completed in only eight weeks total. The team created 10 Web sites with approximately 1200 content objects, entering new and converting existing static content. Ultimately Tisch's installation will manage 20 Web sites, one for each academic and administrative department.
A big win was bulk-importing 500 course descriptions directly into iOn's database. According to Dr. Preiser, iOn exceeded their expectations with its openness—allowing technical users to move data in and out of the repository with ease. "It's a big plus that we can access all of our data. Technical users are empowered to get information both in and out."
