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.