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Day Joins Other CMS Purveyors in Educating Higher Education

Government institutions and higher education purveyors have major content issues. Increasingly, they’re turning to the pros to help assist them - not a bad deal for the enterprise and Web CMS industries at large.

With this in mind, content infrastructure vendor Day was selected by Oklahoma University to assist in developing the institution’s online personality across a user-scape of over 17,000 unique daily visitors.

The Day Communiqué line boasts some decent credentials, including data migration certification for Quatico and native JCR standard compliance for its CQ DAM (or digital asset management) component.

Like most any major university that’s had as long a track record as Oklahoma U’s (founded in 1890), the school has a major content management and data security load. It supports about 30,000 students and its website, www.ou.edu, is jokingly typified by students and staff as overly bureaucratic and next to impossible to navigate. (Let’s not even talk about search.)

Communiqué can empower site administrators to better organize data and adequately present relevant information, recreational news and opportunities to students and staff without overloading users, or the site, with content.

Plus, the system has no problem integrating what’s already there. “[Communiqué] allows us to maintain our own Web content within a controlled framework, ensuring a consistent look and feel among all of our Web pages for a robust, easily managed online presence,” said Melanee Hamilton, who serves as director of Web communications at the university.

The core of the rebuild was to make information simpler to find and sift through. The platform improves the navigation and search features for all the necessary data, including video, PDFs, images and text, better serving first-time visitors to the site.

And OU is now better able to serve alumni and staff as well, with a more robust extranet service served through the main site.

And here’s the critical thing: more intuitive controls in the hands of Web content developers mean less IT involvement for small creation and management issues.

“It’s imperative for large organizations such as the University of Oklahoma to have a system in place to manage their ever-increasing rich-media content,” noted SVP Chris Stark of Day in the Americas.

“Communiqué’s flexibility, robust features and standards-based platform enable ease-of-use for all content creators and Web site visitors, and facilitate a cohesive look and feel to support the University’s goal of consistent branding.”

Day is certainly not the first CMS to address problems in higher education. In fact, dipping into the uni kitty has become something of a prolific trend among those who know where the biggest content problems occur.

Xythos, for example, helped improve usability on Blackboard for Northwestern University, and TERMINALFOUR developed site management relationships with a string of universities in the US, the UK and Ireland.