Meeting the Competing Needs of the EDU Market

Experience in the .EDU market has demonstrated two key, and at first glance, dichotomous truths:

1) Each university, for a variety of reasons, has distinct (but not entirely unique) needs and these needs are so diverse as to invalidate any single, monolithic approach to deploying websites in support of the university and its departments. These reasons may be categorized as either:

a) Organizational structure.
In this case, the structure of the organization, its financing and decision-making process and the relative autonomy from -- or dependence upon -- centrally-managed or mandated form, feature and function may either limit (in the case of fairly autonomous organizational structures) or enhance (in the case of central organizations' structures) the usefulness, effectiveness or fit of a single approach to the EDU web ecosystem.

b) Organizational mandate.
In this case, the mandate assigned to the web ecosystem, its focus, the level to which various constituent groups are acknowledged and services and the position the web ecosystem holds in communication and outreach efforts pursued by the university have distinct and specific impacts on the form, features and function of each element of the ecosystem.

2) While many differences exist in organizational structure and mandate, there are universal needs for features and function and these needs are generally organizational, administrative and/or operational in nature; not entirely or even mainly publically exposed or presentation-centric.

This presentation will explore the challenges of and approaches to implementing content management services in a complex organizational environment across an open, integrated architecture using Drupal. Topics to consider include: Centralized information and identity architectures, cross-platform content syndication, integrating Drupal with the EDU ecosystem, complex editorial workflows, integrating analytics, SEO and mobilization of the Drupal platform.