Ingeniux Selected as New Content Management System
I’m pleased to announce that we have selected Ingeniux as our new content management system (CMS). The selection comes after nearly eight weeks of work and with considerable assistance and input from our Web vendor, BarkleyREI, and the CMS Selection Group, which included staff, faculty, and student representation.
The CMS finalists were Ingeniux (based in Seattle) and Hannon Hill (based in Atlanta). Both CMSs have a strong foothold in the higher education space with hundreds of college implementations between the two companies. Both CMS companies spent a full day on campus in April where they met with the Web staff, key staff from Information Technology, and provided two-hour demos of their CMSs in front of our selection group.
We started the CMS selection process with a clear understanding of our CMS functional requirements and objectives. These were communicated early on in the Web redesign project in the original RFP and then again during the CMS selection process. Both vendors submitted full proposals, which covered in detail how they matched up against our functional requirements. Their on-site demos also addressed how each product addressed our requirements. Both Hannon Hill and Ingeniux met most of these requirements, but in the end, Ingeniux came out on top.
We spoke with seven colleges that are currently using Ingeniux (from more recent implementations to long-term clients of nearly eight years who have gone through multiple product releases and redesigns). In all cases, the schools were very satisfied with the Ingeniux product and with ongoing support, maintenance, and product upgrades (and the ease of upgrading to new versions).
Why Ingeniux?
What impressed us with Ingeniux was the usability of the user interface. It’s definitely a very easy system for content contributors to learn and use. This is something else we heard from the college references we spoke with and this is very important to us given Saint Anselm’s distributed workflow and content production by multiple departments. Ingeniux also offers very detailed and flexible content workflows for content approval.
Ingeniux’s Web editor also works on a PC and Mac and in multiple browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. It also does not require the install of a Web editor (it’s entirely AJAX-based), so long gone will be the days of needing to call someone to install your Active-X based Web editor.
Ingeniux also has a very robust taxonomy engine, which supports site-wide content sharing utilizing content keywords and tags. This is very important to make content easily shareable between department sites, e.g., if we produce a news or magazine feature, we should be able to easily share this content with an academic or administrative department (and vice versa). Being able to easily tag content is also important if you want to link to similar content of interest to Web visitors in sidebars or at the end of a page. For example, “Learn More” or “Related News” or “Also of Interest.”
We were very impressed with how Ingeniux easily allows you to share content in multiple lengths, e.g., some content authors might just want to utilize a headline in a sidebar, another user might want to use a headline and teaser text, and so on. This can easily be accomplished with Ingeniux.
Ingeniux is a “baked” CMS and publishes full pages out to a separate Web server verses being a “fried” CMS, which queries page content from a database each time it is requested by a Web visitor. Now there are benefits and drawbacks to both approaches, but a couple benefits of a “baked” CMS are that pages are served up faster and hopefully there is better search engine optimization (SEO).
Ingeniux also allows you to serve up multi-format output, meaning we can serve up PHP, ASP, JS, or ASPX pages through the CMS. This is a real plus and allows us more flexibility.
What also tips the hat toward Ingeniux is their commitment to ongoing product development based on the needs of their higher education clients. This can be seen in more recent offerings like their enterprise blogging platform (BlogXite) and their enterprise rich media module (PodXite). Both “Xites” are available as part of Ingeniux’s Developer 360 program, which we will be participating. Lastly, Ingeniux has also recently launched Cartella, an enterprise level social media/networking platform. We don’t plan to implement Cartella in our redesign project, but it’s great to see that Ingeniux has developed products in this area as well. In each case, these applications integrate with Ingeniux’s core CMS, so content produced in one is available for site-wide content distribution.
More information about Ingeniux will follow as we begin implementing the CMS. Thanks again for the efforts of everyone at the college, including the CMS Selection Group, Information Technology, and everyone who attended the on-site CMS vendor demos.
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