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About the CMS

• New content management system to go live this fall
• No more FrontPage!
• Publish pages immediately or at a future date!
• The conversion process
• CMS Training
• For more help

New content management system

Beginning Oct. 1, 2010 a select “trial group” of faculty and staff who maintain the content on a handful of CCRI’s public-facing websites (sites in www.ccri.edu*) will have a new tool –a Web Content Management System; also known as a Web CMS, WCMS or most commonly, just plain “CMS”.

The company we are using to provide the CMS is OmniUpdate (OU) of Southern California.  OU provides CMS for over 500 colleges and universities in the U.S.A. The CMS provides authoring (and other) tools designed to allow users with little knowledge of programming or markup languages, like HTML, to create and manage content with relative ease, through a browser-based interface similar to Facebook.

No more FrontPage†

Unlike HTML editing programs, such as FrontPage, a CMS allows non-technical users to make changes to a website with little training –it is a Web-site maintenance tool for non-technical administrators.

Publish pages immediately or at a future date!

The CMS can be set up so that content managers‡ can either publish new and revised pages immediately, or send them to others in their dept. in an approval workflow system. Not only can pages be published immediately but, a future date and time can be set for publishing to occur. You can also set a time for the page to be removed from the site automatically. This system takes IT/Web Services out of the publishing process and puts it entirely under each department’s control, where it should be.

(‡ On the new system, "Information Providers" or "IPs" will be called “Content Managers” or “CMs”)

The conversion process

Over the past year, Web Services has been converting the pages from the current www.ccri.edu site into dynamic pages which will be editable through the CMS' web interface.  The CMS pages will also be converted to the new "look & feel" (exemplified by this page).  We now have enough pages and sites converted to the new system to enable us to go live with the new site starting October 1, 2010. However, many sites and pages will still need to be converted to the new look & feel after we go live with the CMS. Any pages/sites that aren’t converted to the new look & feel at the time we go live, will be moved to the same server on which the CMS pages reside but will keep their present design and can still be edited per usual, on test.ccri.edu using FrontPage, and published via e-mail request to webservices@ccri.edu . Put simply: if a site's content manager hasn't been invited to train on the new CMS, then they can continue to edit their site using FrontPage and e-mailing webservices@ccri.edu to publish. We will continue to convert the balance of the site to the new system with a goal of 100% conversion as soon as possible.  Any content manager interested in helping to convert their site to the new CMS should contact webservices@ccri.edu for additional training.

CMS Training

As we complete each department, organization or program’s site on the new system’s test server, the next step will be to train the CM responsible for those sites in how to use the CMS to update their sites.  We will hold a series of group and individual training sessions throughout the year in the IT conference room (#2276) on the Knight Campus.  Each session will be announced via e-mail to those CMs whose sites have been converted.

The training will consist of an introductory segment where we go over the basics, after which, the participants will do some hands-on training with the CMS. We recommend that content managers start practicing with the new system as soon as possible after the session.  After the training session, CMs should be able to work independently but, as always, we will be here to assist, should they need it. 

For more help

CM's can communicate with Web Services via e-mail, phone or (better yet) via Office Communicator, should questions arise.  (If you do not have Office Communicator installed, now would be a good time to do so. We recommend this to ALL CCRI employees -not just CMs. For downloading and installation instructions, see: /it/Documentation/communicator).

Also: check-out our "Tutorials" page

This page developed and maintained by Web Services. We welcome feedback on your experience using the site - please e-mail with your comments or concerns.