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