What does establishing a standard and visual consistency among the sites mean?

Sites that are a part of UB will have identifying features that support the UB brand, and make for a consistent environment through interface, structure and navigation. Sites within an administrative or academic area will also have features to identify them as part of that area. For example, standard elements within every CIO page will identify the pages as belonging to both CIO and UB. The design challenge is to create a balance between supporting the brand, consistency of interface and navigation with meeting the specific business needs of the academic or administrative unit.

Will the project involve students, student organizations or personal faculty websites?

The project is concerned with official UB websites only. This system is no way intended to replace public Web hosting environment for the entire campus.

What are we trying to accomplish with WCI?

The Web Content Initiative project has been charged to produce and implement recommendations for improving the coordination and alignment of campus Web communications in identified pilot sites. This work will lead to campus-wide recommendations for the university to implement, producing the infrastructure, standards and tools for a branded, message-centric, user-friendly Web environment. By combining expertise in their respective areas, project team members will research and identify best practices in Web communications and opportunities for the development of new and emerging Web communication tools throughout our campuses.

How does the WCI project become operational post-project?

The WCI Project is responsible for developing the process by which Digital Communications Transformation (DCT) will be operational once the project is over. DCT will operationalize the work of the WCI project and scale it out to the university at-large. The approach is being informed by members of the DCT Advisory Council, comprised of leadership from across the university.

Are there any practical suggestions, and what sort of educational resources does University Communications have to offer?

A series of communications are planned to help people understand the process involved. We also are planning to produce documentation and training materials.

What was the objective of the discovery and content audit process?

The primary objective was to identify the business needs and user needs of the system. Discovery created the framework for decision-making through an analysis of the institution, industry and audience. Discovery produced white papers that extracted key findings for each tenant, including: defining the business case, identifying current practices and usage, benchmarking industry and competition best practices, and evaluating industry-specific research. Additional needs analysis targeted audience members for each site.

What is information architecture?

Information architecture is the art and science of structuring, organizing and labeling information to help people achieve their goals.

What is the composition of the Information Architecture Team?

The internal IA team is made up of UB staff with skills in information architecture, user-interface, usability and content development. The team worked with a vendor to produce a user needs analysis, needs and function analysis (mental models), IA  standards, structure and navigation systems that can be applied globally, decanally and site specific, as well as detailing site-specific IA for each pilot site.

What was the charge to the CMS selection team with regard to technical scalability?

To consider the needs of the eight pilot sites, but at all times keep in mind that practices and infrastructure will need to be scaled for UB enterprise. The team sought to have examples of where a particular product was utilized on the scale of this enterprise and where it was working well.

Were there vendor demonstrations? How will the campus survey be carried out? Who is responsible for this stage?

The CMS Selection team organized a series of vendor demonstrations for the UB campus for the top three vendors. The vendors presented their product, and performed specific scenarios at our request, including pre-determined scenarios. We asked for campus input on these vendors and products as part of the evaluation process.

Did the product selection team actually select the product?

No. The top-level sponsors selected the product. The CMS selection team put forward the alternatives and reasoning, and its recommendations. The recommendations of the CMS team were extremely influential in the final decision, and included input from the campus community.

Who will be the administrators of the CMS?

UB's content management system is a large enterprise application designed for use in complex organizations.  Overall the application will be administered by a central support team, but rights and privileges can be delegated to departmental administrators of websites.  With the proper permissions, the Day CQ5 authoring tool allows content providers to edit and publish their pages directly.

Will the system be monolithic—a single, central CMS—or a single CMS system that may be installed in multiple places that communicate with each other?

UBcms is a single, central system, configured in a manner to ensure continuity when there are system troubles.  One of the selection requirements for Day CQ5 product was its ability to serve organizations as diverse and complex as UB, and to add additional servers when needed to support usage growth.