OU's Day CMS

[Scott Watkins]

There's been a bit of discussion regarding the new Day CMS. I don't have any insight into its use or implementation as we're not migrating towards it just yet. However, who has had experience with the administration section of the new CMS? What are its pros and cons?

[Erin Yarbrough]

Hey guys, not sure if anyone’s interested, but thought I’d give a quick little update on the CMS. Here’s everyone live so far: President's Office, OU home page, College of Journalism, University College, Public Affairs, Commencement, Graduate Sooner

And, these are some of the sites we’re migrating now and will go live late summer/early fall: Art Museum, Recruitment, Admissions, Development, Alumni, College of Arts and Sciences.

[Son Le]

How long did those take to move over to the CMS?

[Erin Yarbrough]

This is sort of a tricky question. The actual creation of each site in the CMS only takes a few days to a couple weeks depending on the complexity of the design (this includes creating CSS for the design) - though, Libby or Christian could be more specific about this.

Additionally, though, we take site owners through an evaluation process of their information architecture, content and design. So, from initial creative brief through design, development, content migration and go-live it can take a few months. A lot of the timing just depends on if the site is going to redesign, if IA and content has been revisited recently, and how much time owners can spend on content migration.

Our first site was migrated in Nov. 07 (graduation office), but we've been picking up speed in the migration process as we go. Hopefully we'll have those sites already in development all live by the end of Sept.

[Laura Gibbs]

Thanks for the update, Erin! I clicked through to the additional sites you mentioned here, and I do not find any RSS feeds on any of those pages, and when I clicked on Events for Public Affairs, I did not get a list of events, but instead a list of venues where events can be held.

Do you know if there are any plans afoot for some kind of events calendar, and some use of RSS to publicize updates to webpages and to make announcements? I honestly don't visit websites anymore, and instead rely on RSS feeds to let me know when there is some new content at a site. As I mentioned in another forum, I'm always looking for OU-related RSS feeds to share with my students; it sure would be great if this new CMS promoted some use of RSS feeds for events and announcements across the campus!

I'm also very curious if there is anything in the CMS that promotes the creation of content-based widgets which could be used in Facebook (I'm very curious if anybody is using Facebook for institutional purposes), etc. - if there is RSS for organizations on campus, it's super easy to make widgets for Desire2Learn based on the RSS feed, which is one of the main reasons I'd love to see more RSS feeds for campus-related activities! :-)

[Erin Yarbrough]

Great questions - Laura (and a mind reader of sorts :o) So, what we've done is essentially rolled out a CMS that will allow for all basics of content ownership and have begun building more dynamic and rich content components on top of that. One of those examples is that we have a flash slideshow generator (what the OU home page slideshow is using) that allows those of us w/o flash knowledge *raising hand* to create a flash slideshow by just choosing pictures out of our media library. Rss is one of those things on our list of components to create. I believe this is actually already in development, but i'll have to defer to Libby for that one. Our list of components to create will probably never been 'complete' - we look to campus for components that will be the most beneficial.

Similarly, we're also working on a campus-wide calendar option. We'd hoped to have something available for campus before school started, but have needed to push that timeline back by hopefully just a couple months. We had created a custom calendar in the Day CMS and after taking some of our CMS users through training on it have found some functionality lacking. So, instead of rolling out a system that would just be o.k. we decided to take a step back and look at some third party options as well as the option of building out the additional functionality in the CMS. We'd actually also like some input from the forum as well. I think Christian is planning on posting some of our wants/needs in a calendar and getting input on that.

(p.s. RSS feed is also one of the features we're looking for in a calendar)

[Laura Gibbs]

That is such good news, Erin! I've had great success using RSS-related resources for my online courses via Desire2Learn and other web environments where I can repurpose the RSS. I would be so excited to see a university events calendar that has an RSS feed. In the past ten years, I've probably missed out on hundreds of events because I did not find out about them until after the fact. There's so much great stuff going on at OU all the time... so I will await the events calendar eagerly! Super!

One of my own experiments this fall is going a Google-based Calendar for my online course assignment deadlines so that students can get notifications on their cell phones. I tested that out this summer and the cell phone notification feature seemed to work really nicely, so I am very curious to see what my students will think about that. I'm guessing they will jump at the option since cell phones are very much a big part of their lives. I figure if we can offer them cell phone notifications for campus emergenices, as we now do, it's good to try offering them cell phone notifications for when they have a quiz in my class - a kind of minor emergency, ha ha.

:-)