New CMS Leeds to uni's grassroots takeover

Leeds University has implemented a new content management system (CMS) to help make dealing with online content easier for its nine faculties.

Previously, the university had relied on various "homebrewed, eccentric, localised and quite incoherent" web publishing tech, until the purchase of a new portal system prompted it to start looking into a new CMS to go alongside it, according to Leeds University's web CMS project officer Matthew Hoskins.

Just under two years ago, the university began the procurement process, whittling down a long list of seven vendors to its eventual supplier, Jadu.

User-friendliness swung it for Jadu, according to Hoskins, with usability and functionality rated the two most important qualities of the system in potential users' eyes.

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So far, the organisation has gone live with four implementations of the CMS, including Leeds University's library system. The first implementation began in March and went live in June - a four-month timescale the university has since replicated with other deployments.

At least nine deployments are planned - one per faculty at the university.

"The nature of Leeds is those nine faculties are very different in terms of culture, they're very different in terms of technology. Some have quite sophisticated web technology in place - for them, CMS would come along to complement the technology they're already using. For them, it's not a great step. For others, they have only flat HTML, no workflow, no management structures at all and they really are starting from zero," Hoskins told silicon.com.

In the areas where the new CMS has been implemented, the reaction among users has been favourable.

"A very interesting outcome from that early implementation was a great empowerment of the users and people at authoring level. There was quite a surge of desire for development of content that came very much from grassroots rather than editorial level," Hoskins said. "After the site went live, about a month later, we started getting people saying 'Can we do this? Can we do that? How does this work? Can we make this better?'

"That's quite common - suddenly you're no longer having to understand certain technologies, you can own the publishing process at a non-technical level."

Eventually, the system could be used by up to a quarter of university staff.

"Down the road, this could end up being a very important institutional service," he said.