Today, two representatives of RedDot were on campus to demonstrate their web content management system to about 15 from various W&M departments (including Swem, Law School, and VIMS!) There is no doubt that RedDot is an enterprise solution - filled with functionality, and characterized by a very straightforward, easy-to-use interface. Two Virginia schools have recently purchased RedDot - VCU and Longwood.
In the coming weeks, we hope to host demonstrations for other products. Mark Windley has been speaking with folks from PaperThin about the CMS called CommonSpot. More on that later.
posted by Susan Evans
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9 comments:
What does this project mean for student orgs, I wonder? The current webspace is... well, limited is an understatement.
We'd welcome any suggestions on ways to enhance the webspace provided to student orgs? Send your ideas to support@wm.edu and we'll do our best to respond.
posted by Susan Evans
Would W&M really be served well by a proprietary content-management system?
Banner's "filled with functionality", and is used by a whole bunch of other VA schools, and is pretty much universally disliked by students everywhere for its awkward interface, and notorious unreliability during course registration.
There are a handful of open-source products specifically geared toward academic institutions that could also be considered.
Anyhow, as long as the current A&S CMS gets replaced, I'll be happy.
Andrew, our goal is to do a comprehensive review of content management solutions - third party and open source. Is there a particular open source option you recommend? We've tried a lot of them, but could expand the list.
posted by Susan Evans
I'd recommend something like Alfresco
http://www.alfresco.com/
Plone
http://plone.org/
Etc. The key ingredient is usability. Apparently even the software that runs myWM is something of a black box to the people who run it.
Oh, and I have one suggestion for student orgs:
Write Access
That's all. Maybe mod_rewrite too. But without write access, organizations are stuck with static websites that are absolutely useless. That's why many (some frats, The Flat Hat, Circle K) are jumping ship - because the paranoid security policy makes webspace unusable. And, no, a CMS written by IT in Perl and using WM templates isn't going to do the trick.
Open source is not off the table and we are continuing to weigh the pros and cons of many products and solutions. Alfresco and Plone are both already on our list of products to investigate.
posted by Susan Evans
I think Drupal is the best opensource option. I too dislike this proprietary system.
Some folks on the re.web project are also looking at Drupal.
posted by Susan Evans
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