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Project Coordinator at East Northamptonshire Council
17 March 2008 11:45am
Hello everyone
I'm hoping I can get some advice please.
I work for a district local authority and currently both our main website and intranet systems are managed and maintained externally by one of our partners.
However, we are now in position and are keen to look at bringing control of this totally in-house - therefore all development, maintenance, support and hosting of our website and intranet. Our first task is to investigate and find a suitable Content Management System.
As we are quite early on in the investigation process, it would be helpful to get feedback regarding suitable systems and software - those which you can particularly recommend or advise against.
Has anyone recently gone through a similar process and can share their experiences (good or bad!)?
Your comments would be very much appreciated!
Many thanks :-)
Helen
Technical Project Manager (MBA, MBCS, CITP, CEng) at Naxtech.com
17 March 2008 14:53pm
Try www.naxtech.com
There's a content management system for small businesses which may be interesting and a demo for local government portals which may also be useful.
Freelance Web Consultant at architxt.net
18 March 2008 09:47am
Hi Helen,
One of the most important factors is who will be managing content. Will there be one person responsible for all or will you be asking various people around the organisation to take ownership of sections of the site.
If you're opting for the latter you may want to get a CMS that allows you to set up workflows.
You mention that you need a CMS for both intranet and website. Are you able to plan your information architecture so that both sites can share content and assets? For example, will you want to publish the same article online as well as internally?
Talking of info. architecture, migration to a new CMS is a good opportunity to think about taxonomies and tag content with metadata. This is a very worthwhile exercise.
Finally, the CMS you choose needs to be able to support the functions you offer. Certain products come with limited functions and offer plugins at extra costs. There are open source systems that are free and feature all the functions you want... but may be limited in other ways.
Good luck.
Managing Director at Cranmore Digital Consulting Ltd
18 March 2008 09:51am
Hi Helen,
Selecting a CMS is a crucial decision and the first thing to do is make sure you have plenty of time for the process (I generally think you need 3 months to do it properly) and that you get the right people involved.
You need to list and prioritise your requirements (and when I say "your" I mean a composite of all the stakeholders in the organisation), confirm your budget, get demos, look at costs then have site visits and take up references (technical as well as user ones) for your preferred suppliers.
And make sure you have IT and marketing involved.
Cards on the table, this is a process that I help clients through, as consultancy work. Having said that, in true e-consultancy style, I would be happy to talk to you in more detail about that, just to point out some of the pitfalls.
You can contact me direct on if you want to, happy to help.
On 11:45:42 17 March 2008 HelenBaines wrote:
Director at Deeson Group Ltd
18 March 2008 13:48pm
Hi Helen
I've looked at Jadu (www.jadu.co.uk) a few times and been impressed by their people and technology, specifically they seem to create a lot of local authority sites which might be useful. We have no commercial affiliation or direct experience of working with them so take the mention at face value!
We've been implementing Drupal (drupal.org - an open source CMS) sites for a while now and have been repeatedly used by large organisations that want the flexibility of being able to choose their technology separately from their supplier, both for initial build and for on-going maintenance.
Thanks
Tim
www.deeson.co.uk/emedia/
Director at Abstracts
18 March 2008 18:08pm
Content Strategist at LBi
18 March 2008 21:50pm
If you are early on in the investigation process, I wouldn't be worried about software just yet. The most, most, most important thing you need to do is to work out what you want: In one sentence, what do you want to do? What content will be in, what's out? (write a list) Who will write/create it? Who needs to sign off on it? (workflow) who will be involved? who won't be involved? What are your time lines? Budget? (initial and ongoing)
Obvious questions perhaps, but unless you've got answers you may be in for an unnecessarily expensive, drawn out tussle with software vendors.
For vendor-neutral advice on introducing a CMS, Step Two Design (an Australian company) have fantastic service and advice - http://www.steptwo.com.au/cm/cms/index.html
Good luck!
Kate
On 11:45:42 17 March 2008 HelenBaines wrote:
Head of Commercial Management at Auros
19 March 2008 08:16am
Hi Helen,
I work for a Content Management system Implementation company/Systems Integrator - namely Auros. www.auros.co.uk
We have investigated numerous Web content management systems over the past 4 years and continue to do so. In our opinion the best solution for the public sector market is Immediacy - www.immediacy.net , with over 50 implementations in the public sector industry alone. We have found it to be a short implementation cycle and out-of-the-box offering more functionality than any of it's closest competitors.
We would be haap to provide you with more information and an overview of the solution at your earliest convnience.
Kind regards
Brad Smith
01179 466800
Auros Ltd
Project Coordinator at East Northamptonshire Council
25 March 2008 11:10am
Thank you all very much for your very helpful comments and advice.
We are in the very early stages of looking at this and have given ourselves a reasonably long timescale to look thoroughly into all avenues and make sure everything is done properly.
Your pointers regarding systems are much appreciated, as well as process advice - considerations, steps to research and implementation etc.
Many thanks!
Helen
Technical Architect at Willis Group Services Ltd
08 April 2008 20:56pm
Good evening
The issues with a project such as this is always content in all the languages, from a CMS perspective any decent CMS solution will be able to handle multiple languages.
For example we are a Sitecore partner (www.sitecore.net), sitecore is a great CMS solution which can easily support multiple languages for different editors/consumers etc using default content as the failback. Sitecore is already used by various local governments in the UK.
A good design using stylesheets and resisting putting text in images can make this a fairly straightforward project.
If you wish to discuss this further, a demonstration of the CMS and language support then please email me direct at
Thanks
Shane Osborne
www.punkyduck.com
On 11:45:42 17 March 2008 HelenBaines wrote: