Down to the wire

The Web Services team has been working feverishly to complete the hands-on testing of the WCM offerings of three vendor finalists.

A lot of functionality is being tested: multiple browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari); multiple platforms (Windows, Mac); end-user features (such as the WYSIWYG editor) and administrative features (such as batch processing of files & folders, templating and content-reuse). It's important to note that each system has its pros and cons (from both end-user and administrative perspectives), and these must be balanced to select the best solution for our University web content environment.

Some of the challenges at this phase include:

• Ensuring that we test enough features in the right way. We approached this by spending a lot of time testing end-user features first, and then moving on to administrative/back-end portions of each product. This way we could ensure a positive experience for the end-users.
• Learning enough about how each system works. For example, some of the systems make extensive use of XML + XSL in their templating system, so knowing enough to be comfortable and to understand code examples in these languages is critical to completing testing successfully. In the case of these products, learning about & understanding the templating system in each product probably has taken the most time.

The good thing is that we have fully-functional versions of each product. The bad news is, as always, there is just not enough time to learn + test everything!
  
Within the next week, the team will meet with IT leadership to decide which vendor and system will be selected. Thanks to everyone so far for their participation & feedback throughout the process. 

Hands-on testing update

It's been a busy month with the WCM evaluation!

Over the last few weeks, three products have been selected for hands-on testing of the product:

• Hannon Hill Cascade Server
• OmniUpdate OU Campus
• TerminalFour Site Manager

Each of the selected vendors has set up full-featured demo instances of their product and provided access to the Web Services team for hands-on testing.

A select group of campus participants representing key stakeholders for the web content management system were invited to participate in in-person training sessions, as well as to participate in self-paced, hands-on testing of each product.

Web Coordinator Daniel Martinez has hosted in-person training sessions for two of the products; training for the third is scheduled next week.

If you are interested in participating in the training sessions or the hands-on testing, please contact Daniel at daniel.martinez@csuci.edu or call 805-437-3932.

In the meanwhile, the selected vendors were asked to provide multiple client contacts at institutions with similiar needs and implementations. WCM team members will be conducting interviews with these clients to obtain additional perspective on the vendors and products.

We hope to wrap up our administrative and end-user testing, as well as our client interviews, by the end of the month. As they say, it's crunch time!