Magnolia CMS Brings Centralized Management to 294 Sites at Texas State University

 New case study details additional collaboration benefits from recent Magnolia 4.4 upgrade

NEW YORK, NY — Magnolia, the open source content management vendor that delivers simplicity on an enterprise scale, today announced publication of a major case study detailing how Magnolia CMS brought centralized management to 294 web sites at Texas State University (TSU), winning over faculty and staff, and drastically reducing administrative overhead.

TSU, located in San Marcos, Texas, is one of the largest educational institutions in the U.S. with more than 32,000 students from around the globe. While it is ranked among America’s Best Colleges, website administration had gotten out of hand – with 250 sites built, hosted, and managed individually by departments and other entities. Each site worked differently – centralized coordination and updates were out of the question.

The university’s first attempt to implement a centralized CMS received a failing grade: after two years, they had managed to get only a dozen sites into the system, resulting in stale content and unhappy users. Since switching to Magnolia Enterprise Edition, they now dynamically coordinate updates to 294 sites, with increased reliability, and significantly reduced infrastructure costs. Moreover, users love to work with Magnolia.

“Our switch to Magnolia CMS brought tremendous operational benefits under budget, plus its simplicity and ease of use quickly won over the 1,000 faculty and staff with website editing privileges,” said Sean McMains, TSU’s Technical Lead for Enterprise Applications. “Its high quality open-source code, including its adherence to Java standards, allows our programmers to easily customize the system to our needs.”

TSU’s recent upgrade to Magnolia 4.4 brought additional benefits such as collaboration controls to coordinate simultaneous editing. “Our 4.4 upgrade was really simple,” continued McMains. “The new soft-locking feature helps editors coordinate their work, and deferred deletion lets us keep sites consistent when we activate lots of changes.”

“We are delighted that such a prestigious institution as TSU has been able to roll out hundreds of sites on Magnolia CMS, with only a small web team and within the typical budget constraints of higher education institutions. It shows that our focus on ease-of-use for authors as well as developers provides outstanding value for higher education content management requirements,” said Boris Kraft, President of Magnolia Americas.

TSU case study available online

The TSU case study is available for immediate viewing and download at http://www.magnolia-cms.com/clients/case....

Faster, Cheaper, Better: Recycle Meaningful Information to Deliver Incomparable Student Services

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Submitted by jthumma on

Humans have hunted from the earliest times. Maybe that’s why we often accept the burdensome quest for information. We’re accustomed to the chase—even fooled into thinking we’re doing something valuable. Yet time lost in pointless pursuit means something is sacrificed. In the case of college enrollment, a drawn-out chase can mean losing top candidates to other institutions and ending up with a mediocre catch.

During peak season, enrollment office employees frenetically pursue information and answers, compiling scattered documentation in the hope of making quick, prudent decisions. Admissions, student aid, registrar, scholarship committees and other areas each have separate forms requiring distinctive information.

Yet as each department collects what it needs, useful information that could be shared is often requested again…and again. Information that could move decisions forward sits idle, garnering little or no attention.

Regrettably, as processes are deferred, institutions risk losing top candidates to other institutions.

Make informed decisions, quickly

Whether we’re considering undergraduate or graduate admissions, student financial aid, scholarship applications, or faculty search, the overriding goal is to garner and retain top people. Even though roles and responsibilities differ among departments, most draw vital information from transcripts, applications, test scores, essays, and references. Often, specific data found on forms is valuable in multiple places. Unfortunately, departmental software systems that store this precious information create data silos, resulting in information that is unknowingly collected multiple times for varying purposes.

Gathering information several times—even if it’s done efficiently—wastes resources, results in redundancy, generates errors, and causes delays.

Why not re-use your information to satisfy current needs and anticipate what lies ahead? Enterprise content management (ECM) and business process management (BPM) software, integrated meaningfully with your business systems, redefine efficiency. By centralizing and securing access to content, then pushing and pulling information wherever it’s needed according to your pre-set business rules, ECM and BPM free your staff to work efficiently and focus on the services for which they were hired.

Augustana College using Drupal

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Submitted by Bryan on

Augustana College, a United States college affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, is using Drupal.  According to Augustana's Web Editor the site was developed by Tim Broeker of Electric Jet (Mnpls) using Drupal 5.  Electric Pulp, a local Sioux Falls company, also contributed to the project by doing the design and CSS work.

I don't think I've ever met Tim Broeker, but what is interesting about this Drupal site developer is that he also has a Joomla! Core Team connection.  Yes indeed, open source does matter.

Screenshot of Augie.edu

 

Open source and new college grads

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Submitted by Bryan on

Linux.com: "The key to being successful in the IT industry is interning while still attending college and taking some certification courses after graduation. Do some research. Find an open source technology company that will provide you with the tools and resources you will need to build your career. Open source spans platforms, middleware and applications from data centers to desktops. There are many companies that offer internship programs and certification courses."

Complete Story

Drupal goes to Harvard

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Submitted by Bryan on

This is very cool, HarvardScience has chosen Drupal for their CMS.  I'm looking at Drupal for a science oriented server on the Intranet side.  Hmmm...ideas from Harvard...

Choosing a CMS

During the six months before I began building the HarvardScience site, the Harvard News Office had been working with designer Claudio luís Vera of Studio Module. The result was 28 beautiful templates, which had been chiseled, filed, and polished to the client's adoration. Unfortunately, during this time the News Office had still not made up its mind about what CMS to use. In fact there was still some muttering about how a custom CMS was the way to go.

So approximately six months ago, I built the first draft of HarvardScience using Drupal over the course of a weekend. The result was exactly what I had hoped for - the news office was so excited by the speed at which the site could be built they decided to go with Drupal. The rapid development of a prototype or draft site can be built using Drupal made the CMS issue a fait accompli strategy.

Complete Story via Drupal.org

OnStar and my '76 Chevy Nova

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Submitted by Bryan on
I wonder how OnStar could have made my 4-door 1976 Chevy Nova any slower than it already was?

Will a new anti-theft tool from General Motors and OnStar be enough to make your car not worth the hassle of stealing?

The Stolen Vehicle Slowdown, a new feature added to OnStar, takes away the ability to use a car's gas pedal, while allowing braking and steering controls to work.  More...

By the time my Dad gave me the Nova for college during the second half of the 1980's...the car had already it earned it's nickname, The Rustmobile.  I miss that car...

United States students continue to fall behind in IT education

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Submitted by Bryan on

All I can do is shake my head in the direction education has taken in the United States. I've written about this topic in the past, a little here and on another blog of mine. In one of those blog posts, I wrote the following.

American society as a whole seems to have less value for education, especially in the sciences and math, than when I was growing up. Maybe I’m more sensitive to these numbers since I am a scientist at heart…but isn’t anyone else disturbed by this trend? While I feel there should have been something done to help reverse this downward spiral sooner, I’m glad at least that it is finally getting some some well deserved attention by the Bush administration.

College students in the United States are not showing up in those university programs that are focused on physical science, computer science, math, and engineering. There are a number of politicians, parents, and students that will blame the public school education system for the current state of education in the United States. I have some serious doubts whether fingers should really be pointed in the direction of the teachers or even school system. I think in many ways, those fingers should be pointed right back to the parents and their children. Perhaps life in America is so good that by the time the student becomes a young adult, life hasn't prepared them to face the challenges and disappointments they need to do well in the sciences.