Phase I Status

Phase I of the WCM Evaluation project is nearing completion.

The survey analysis is complete, and ~75% of the requirements comparison has been completed.

One challenge has been evaluating products that are open source. In many cases, you can't just contact a vendor to have your questions answered. Instead, you have to dig through documentation, demos, and user forums to get the answers. On a positive note, most of the time installing the software yourself (if you have the right server infrastructure available) is pretty trivial, so that has worked out as another easy approach to completing our evaluations.

Once the requirements evaluation for Phase I is completed, the Core group will meet to review the results and select a subset of products to participate in Phase II of the process: structured demos by the vendor for the Core Group and possibly Advisory Group members.

WCM Survey analysis complete

This morning, the results of the Web Content Management (WCM) survey were sent to the Core Group for review. There were 136 total responses from the community.

There weren't many surprises revealed by the survey; it helped to clarify and confirm many existing perceptions. The results will be especially useful in the future, as we now have a benchmark for the level of satisfaction with our current WCM system.

Here are some things we observed in the results:

Many of our web content creators don’t have a lot of prior experience working on web sites. Less than 50% of respondents who are currently using the system had ever worked on a Web site before.

People with less web experience seem to like the WCM more. Collage users who have beginner-level web skills or who had never worked on a web site prior to Collage are 17-39% more satisfied with Collage than people that have prior experience working on web sites.

Our WCM users probably don't have sufficient modern web design skills. While 70% of respondents claim that they have at least a beginner’s understanding of the principles and practices of modern web design, and 80% consider themselves "intermediate" or "advanced" for most Windows + MS Word skills, the results suggest that only 20% likely possess the skills to successfully perform modern Web design tasks.

Overall satisfaction with the system is largely neutral,with the remainder closely split with a slight edge to satisfied users.

Most respondents consider our current WCM easy to use, and like the consistency it creates. Most positive comments about Collage’s strengths were about ease of use and consistency.

Respondents remarked on these weaknesses of our current WCM (in order of importance):

1. Editing and publishing speed. Collage is not fast enough.
2. Insufficient formatting controls. People want to do more with fonts color, styles, and layout.
3. Browser compatibility. Needs to work well and consistently across browsers & platforms.
4. Clunky administrative interface. It should be more streamlined and focused on only the tasks a user needs.
5. The built-in editing tool. Should provide better/more editing control.

Most people that use the WCM understand how to it. Most feel that they have received sufficient training to use Collage effectively on a day-to-day basis.

More detailed analysis has been provided to the Core Group for further review.