ImageX on Meeting the Competing Needs of the Higher Education Market

Experience in the higher-education 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. These needs are so diverse as to invalidate any single approach to deploying web sites in support of the university and its departments. These reasons can 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 on - 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 centrally organizations structures) the effectiveness of a single approach to the higher-education web ecosystem.

b) Organizational mandate: In this case, the mandate assigned to the web ecosystem, 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 specific impacts on the form, feature and function of each element of the ecosystem.

2) While many differences exist in organizational structure and mandate, there are universal needs for feature and function and these needs are generally organizational, administrative and/or operational in nature; not entirely or even mainly publicly 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 university ecosystem, complex editorial workflows and governance, integrating analytics and SEO, and mobilization of the Drupal platform.