The challenge
The Controller’s Office is a decentralized organization with approximately 170 employees working in different groups, several of which had previously maintained and updated their own website contents. In addition, there was a general Controller’s Office site which was centrally maintained. Currently there are thirteen service areas under the umbrella of the Controller’s Office (e.g. Accounts Payable, Cashiers, etc.). Because the larger services (e.g. Procurement, Travel, Property) had their own existing websites, each with a very different look and feel and significant variability in the volume and organization of their content, it was sometimes difficult for users to find specific information and there was very little sense of overall identity or comprehensiveness for the Controller’s Office as a whole. Also, when updates and changes to the central website were required, either a web-savvy Controller’s Office staff member or IT personnel was responsible. As a result, there was little quality control, a high risk of human error, and slow turnaround time.
The solution
The Controller’s Office Web Advisory Group was responsible for finding an open source, CMS software that would address these issues. The team proposed eZ Publish to be integrated with the redesign of the Controller’s website. While the look and feel of the new site was designed within MIT, the technical configuration and template development were handled by eZ Systems. It was approximately a five month collaboration that included quality assurance testing and training. Once all the templates were developed, Controller’s Office staff took care of the content implementation process using the eZ admin interface. This process required six MIT staff members to cut and paste the contents from MS Word to eZ Publish Editor, which allowed the staff to become more familiar with the product at the same time. The redesign and the revised information architecture of the website definitely improved the usability. In addition, the eZ Publish search function was integrated to allow users to search the entire website. For the content maintainers, a work flow process for approving content changes was implemented. For example, if the content is updated by a content contributor, the content manager is required to approve the updated content within eZ admin before it is published live to the website.
Benefits
• Approximately 20 to 30% reduction in staff time needed to man age the website.
• 30% faster turnaround time
• Reduced risk of deleting and overwriting files
• Reduced frequency and likelihood of uploading unauthorized or inaccurate contents.
• Demonstration to other MIT departments, labs, and centers of value-added from CMS in general and eZ Publish in particular.
• Significant gains in customer ease-of-use and time-efficiency, resulting from improved structure and organization of Controller’s Office site.
• Complete remodeling of Controller’s Office website “look and feel” – based on clear, consistent, professional “branding”
• Empowered local users (within Controller’s Office service areas) by providing them a usable tool (eZ Publish) to maintain and manage work content.
For more information on eZ Publish, please visit: http://ez.no/
About MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a co-educational, privately endowed, research university dedicated to advancing knowledge and educating students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century.
About eZ Publish
eZ Publish is an award-winning, enterprise-grade Open Source Content Management System and development framework with functionality for web publishing, media portals, intranets, e-commerce and extranets. eZ Publish helps all kinds of organizations – including multinational corporations, humanitarian organizations and educational institutions – succeed at sharing their information.
About eZ Systems
Founded in 1999, eZ Systems is the world's largest Open Source Content Management software company with offices in Norway, Denmark, Germany, Ukraine, Belgium, France and North America. With customers such as the United States Navy, Oslo University, Telemark University, Swissfirst, Massachusetts Insitute of Technology, Elle and Vogue, eZ Systems is the creator of eZ Publish, an award winning Open Source Content Management System with more 2 million downloads, more than 150,000 installations and registered users in more than 130 countries. The eZ philosophy of openness and information sharing is still the basic guideline for the company and the eZ Ecosystem.
