OmniUpdate's Web CMS Conversion Tool for Serena Collage

By Marisa Peacock | Published May 5, 2009

In our constant coverage of CMS, we often forget that big or small, public or private, all organizations benefit from implementing an efficient CMS. Colleges and Universities are not unlike large, corporate enterprises. With many constituents to serve and many offices managing various parts of the website, an easy, efficient and effective web-based content management application can help alleviate many management, implementation and conversion issues.

Convert Collage to Campus

OmniUpdate, Inc., a provider of web content management software for higher education, has launched a website conversion tool uniquely developed for Serena Collage clients.

Having been recently discontinued, Serena Collage's Web-based application was used to build, manage and maintain websites. While it provided users efficient control of Web content, from basic changes to text and images, to more complicated site-wide changes such as navigation elements, the Collage web Content management system stored content in a proprietary database schema that was not easily transferred to other systems.

In addition, Collage published content as flat static pages so that each page was published with inline headers, footers, navigation and other common elements.

In response to its discontinuation, and as a possible attempt to woo Collage users, OmniUpdate has written a conversion application to help migrate complete websites to OU Campus, Omni's CMS product designed for colleges and universities.

OU Campus' functionality integrates with existing websites or newly designed websites. Using the conversion tool, OmniUpdate automatically reads, converts and tags XML content exported from Collage.

Continuing to Meet Compliance Requirements

Because many colleges and universities receive federal funding, their sites require them to meet ADA Section 508 Compliance. OmniUpdate makes sure that all sites meet these standards, by beefing up styling and element tags, stripping old ones away and converting directory structures and navigation elements.

All editable regions, toolbars and group sets on each page are converted from Serena's Nexus tags into OU Campus tags. OU Campus XML/XSL templates are created from Serena Master Page. In addition to these exciting conversion tools, OU Campus users can also expect to find other new updates this month, notably a new Live Delivery Platform (LDP).

Conversion Made Easy

Having a product, no matter how difficult, become obsolete is never easy. Being able to integrate and convert existing pages into a new format is a great incentive.

Being able to work efficiently once converted is even better. Learn more at http://omniupdate.com/products/oucampus/.