All of the staff are highly educated, speak English well and work in IT. So, it is much like working in Australia, except for the obvious location shift, the standard of computing equipment, and the standard of IT knowledge.
It's a phenomenon that is obviously worldwide, this CMS- thing. The Administration wants to convert their sites www.tibet.net to CMS, because "it's easier".
Over the last 10 days, I have been taking the staff on a crash course of CMS discovery, starting with the most important question ever, "What makes you think it is easier?" followed by a "Why do you need it?"
Sometime over the last year, the CMS word has boomed on Indian shores and mountains, and most businesses are moving towards this technology. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that at all, I just wonder how many businesses really know what they are in for.
Going back to basics, it's critical to get an idea of what your site does NOW, and how you think a CMS could either;
- Improve the quality of your web content
- Improve the processes behind web publishing
- Reduce the need for specialised training in users
- Create collaborative publishing environments
- Reduce the amount of hardware, licensing, etc required
- Reduce duplication of effort
The thing is, that I haven't met anyone in a CMS environment where all of these items are met by introducing the system, especially in the first year, so the best you can hope for is at least hitting one or two of these targets.
The next thing I have been trying to introduce over here, is that your CMS should facilitate the features and functions you already have, REALLY WELL, before adding additional bells and whistles like polling tools, movie streaming, RSS feeds etc. It just adds another level of complexity for the team installing the CMS, and frankly for the users. If they haven't been using new features like RSS already, give them some time to become accustomed to the CMS first.
Our approach for "picking the best CMS for tibet.net" was to do a CMS review. I have come across a couple of good sites that have helped here. I should point out the www.tibet.net, is nothing at all like University of Melbourne, so the needs are entirely different, including the standard of technology, the skills required to learn the system, the infrastructure available to install it etc.
We went to www.opensourcecms.com to have a look at new Open Source CMS's on the market, and have over the last 5 X 3 hour sessions done an demo install of:
- Mambo
- Drupal
- Typo3
- Plune
- Joomla
- My Source Matrix
- It's FREE
- The ability to customise templates easily
- It's quick to learn and teach
- PHP/MySQL
- It contains news features
- It contains RSS features
- It can embed media files
- There is a WYSIWYG for end users
- permissions based user set up
- A fairly flat architecture
We weren't looking for anything too grunty, anything too complex.
The team then spent roughly 3 hours playing with the system, using the Administration interfaces, using the publisher interface, reading the instruction manuals, signing onto Developers forums and just getting a feel for how they would have to work with the system.
Anyone interested in interface usability would have had a field day!
In the end, the Team selected Joomla. www.joomla.com
They had looked at the other CMS's and realised for them, it suited their needs best.
They are currently teaching themselves how to customise templates in the system, and how to use the different features.
The next step for the team will be to go back over their current site and hack out any bits and pieces that aren't needed, review the content they have, design a new architecture and start gathering content to move across.
So I suppose the lesson behind this story is to know exactly what you are asking for......
MORE next week.
1 comments:
Didn't anyone warn you not to drink and take antibiotics?
:-)
Get well, duder.
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