university of oklahoma - big dreams ... few resources

The University of Oklahoma

Melanee Hamilton & Erin YarbroughOU Web Communications

big dreams ...few resources.

1

Melanee HamiltonDirector of Web Communications

Erin YarbroughAssociate Director, Web Communications

Dave HoeckerTechnical Architect, IT

the crew

2Three of us from OU are here at Ignite and just to challenge you all, here are some facts about us – see if you can figure out whoʼs who:

One of us loves espresso and is always first to call shotgunOne of us is a proud BSG fanAnd one of us loves mac and cheese pizza

-- We also have 3 developers, a designer and a migrations manager on the CMS team

background: about OU WebComm

2007 2008 2009 2010

-Started using CQ4-OU homepage live in CQ

-Move from CQ4 to CQ5-Calendar project began-45 live sites in CQ

-Upgrade to CQ 5.3-150 authors in CQ-60+ live sites in CQ-Calendar and Map

3Before we get too far into what weʼre doing now, though, letʼs go back a bit just to give you some history about our projects.

- Web Communications was born in ʼ07- One of the first things this office did was to search for a CMS- Weʼve been using CQ since June ʻ07 and...- Migrated to CQ5 fall ʼ09- I think you could classify our office as the unruly teenager now…- There are now about 150 authors in CQ- We have about 60 sites live in CQ- And weʼre finishing up our beta releases for Map and Calendar


ranked

#3

out of the top Colleges/

Universities in social media134,000 facebook fans

5,500 twitter followers

4We are also manage the OU home page and are the voice for OU on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.We have a video production staff, a Luminis portal team and a whole office full of dreamers.

how we use CQ

migrations

portal, map & calendar

5When we started using CQ in 2007, our only goal was to migrate sites into the CMS and use CQ as a resource and site management tool.

While thatʼs still one of our largest goals and uses for the system, we also use CQ in almost every other project we touch:- We use it as a content repository for things like Luminis portal content- We also aggregate content through CQ from some best-in-class or open-source resources


site migrations

create OU YouTube videos

lead social media

manage luminis portal & content

man

age

OU

soc

ial m

edia

make a

ca

mp

us m

ap

make a campus calendar

develop CQ components

CQ

hel

p d

esk

promote WebComm

maintain OU web guidelines

manage OU home page

manage “unwind” campus blog

follow best practices

find new technologies

conduct usability tests

manage blogging platform

6We have the same problem I bet everyone here has as well – we get projects pushed on to us from on high, plus we get too excited about new projects and technologies NOT to take them on. So we end up with too many projects, a lot of excitement and not enough people to make those dreams a reality.

We have official goals, but our actual goals are to work on cool projects + get the required projects finished + leave enough time in the day for a YouTube video or two. And the only way to do all of this is to complete projects with a little creative thinking.

Necessity breeds innovation

agenda, yo

1) Doing something innovative

2) Letting someone else be innovative

3) Dream, dream, dream...

7Innovation comes in many forms, but the themes we want to showcase are:Doing something innovativeLet someone else be innovativeDreaming

The first topic we have is about doing something innovative. These are projects that we've spent a good deal of time on by using CQ as the repository for content...

doing something innovative: calendar

cq5 calendar

8If anyone heard us speak last year, you heard that we were working on a calendar in CQ5 as a Day beta customer. That calendar is in production and weʼve learned a great deal about not only calendars, but also how we can utilize CQ for what itʼs good at, plus build on top of the existing functionality to easily meet our needs.


3) Define the calendar owner

4) Start creating

events

1) Create calendar

“view” page

2) Create calendar “edit” page

9This is how we set up a CQ5 calendar:

- First we create a view page, which weʼll talk more about in a minute.- Next we create a calendar edit page. This uses the OOTB calendar template with just a couple customizations.- One of these customization is that weʼve enabled a field for us as administrators to set an “owner” for the calendar which comes in to play when people are trying to push events through workflow to this calendar. This field tells the workflow step who to send the request for approval to.- Then users can start creating events using a customization of the OOTB event form. One of the fields in this form is the “Push to other calendar” field which allows users to send this event to workflow to other calendar owners in CQ5.


event form

10Here is the customized event form that authors use to create events. One of the fields weʼre really excited about is this field at the bottom where you can choose to push your event to another calendar for approval. You select the calendar you want to submit to. This kicks off a workflow using a Dynamic Participant step which sends the event to the “recruitment” calendar owner, for example. The owners of these calendars are set when we create the calendar and is a field that is only editable by our group.


ou.edu/calendar

check it out!

11One of the needs we had going in to the calendar project was that we already had design and UI functionality in mind for the published calendar. So, instead of reworking the lenses and other calendar options Day has built into a calendar system that works quite well, just to meet the needs of our design, the solution was to take the existing calendar content and build a “feed” page that queries that content and displays into whatever format weʼd like.

Weʼre using the CQ calendar as the content repository and built a new “calendar view” template to accommodate custom site designs and pull in inherited content such as headers, footers, and more.

doing something innovative: map

ou.edu/map

this one, too!

12The next project that weʼve worked some innovative solutions in to is the campus map.

This year we finished OUʼs 3rd version of an online map. And, while this latest version is still in beta and functionality is still in development, weʼve reconfigured the entire map project to allow for quicker future development and dispersed content ownership.

doing something innovative: map

building info

13The backend content is completely authored through CQ so that the Visitor center can update building information while the Disability Resources Department can update building accessibility information. All of this content is pulled into a map using Googleʼs API3 and the app builds pages based on CQ content.

One item weʼre currently building out is a location edit page in CQ which will allow us to place pins or draw polygons in the correct places for each building instead of having to insert lat/long data. This will eliminate any work our dev team has to complete when we have a new building or a building is demolished. All content for each building at that point will be manageable by anyone with permission.

doing something innovative: Luminis portal

ozone.ou.edu

14Here you can see our student portal which is a place where students can get information pertinent to them, pay their school bills and get access to all of those online tools where they have to log in. We have a difficult enough time getting authors on campus to update content on their site - let alone in the student portal as well. The portal is really difficult to author content through, so weʼre working with content contributors to update portal content through CQ.

That way they only have to learn one authoring system and can send content through workflow to our portal manager. Weʼre pulling in pretty basic content right now, but the possibilities are wide open.

agenda, yo




15The next set of work we have to show is all about letting someone else be innovative. We donʼt necessarily have the time to build everything exactly the way we want or as a long-term solution. So, to meet our current needs and allow us to get a lot of tasks done, we try to employ a lot of open-source or best-in-class products that have already accomplished a large chunk of what weʼre looking for.

let someone else be innovative: photo gallery

16One of the standard requests we get is for a photo gallery, but it hasnʼt exactly been a high enough priority for us to insert ahead of projects like calendar or map. Finally, after the entire team just getting annoyed that it kept showing up on the project list, a few of us just put our heads together one afternoon to figure out the most basic solution we could and at least implement a first version of a photo gallery.

The solution we came up with will work nicely with a long-term solution and promotes OU social media through the use of Flickr.

Weʼre using an adaptation of “gallerific” – an open source javascript photo gallery. We took this tool to pull flickr feeds and display within a standard style in the CMS. There are a lot of parameters available in gallerific, but the options weʼve opened up to CQ authors are: which feed to display and the number of thumbnails to display in each set.

let someone else be innovative: get satisfaction

17With a few beta releases this year, we need options for getting feedback and communicating publicly with site visitors. Weʼve employed a tool companies here probably use - called “Get Satisfaction” which adds this feedback tab to the page. Then we can communicate about that feedback through this tool as well.

let someone else be innovative: wufoo

18Another tool our users needed, but wasnʼt something we had time to put on our projects list was a form builder. We wanted something simple, free for authors, several options for content delivery and most importantly – something I could figure out without taking any time from our developers or sys admin.

We decided that, at least for the short term, Wufoo.com was our best option for this since itʼs something I could set up and didnʼt require help from anyone.

We may decide that this isnʼt our long-term solution, but it does have an api that we might be able to utilize for future connection with CQ.

let someone else be innovative: so so social

19Many of our authors need some sort of news feed on their site, and we need them to be able to create this fairly easily - and without our help. There are lots of feed tools out there, but we particularly liked the jquery So So Social plugin due to all of the different feeds it pulls in out of the box. This is a project that we just put in to development - weʼll implement this similar to how we implemented photo gallery – pretty basic styling and functionality, but the dialog in CQ will allow you to insert the parameters for pulling these different feeds.

agenda, yo




20We have a lot of projects weʼd like to get to because there are always new things to get excited about.

dreaming: map & calendar

Upcoming Events:Oct. 5 - Climate and Energy Week: Film Screening

21Some of our future projects with the calendar dig deeper into CQ as a repository and aggregator of content. Weʼd like to connect the map content and the calendar content. Since this is all stored in CQ, we could tag the event location with an actual building node in our map structure in order to link directly to the building location from the calendar. Also, we could display upcoming events associated with a particular location in the map view.

There are plenty of additional things weʼd like to connect the map and calendar to – perhaps promoting via facebook, incorporating flickr event photos, the OU2GO iPhone app and more.

We have developed a REST-based API that allows for content to be consumed by applications on various platforms. Our map interface and calendar view page are only the first applications to consume the content.

dreaming: what else?

Connect to the OU2GO

iPhone app

Share more content with

oZone student portal

harness the power of our

130,000 fans

convert viewers into

students &

donors

create a profile

gallery

push

emergency messages

to CMS sites

mobile templatesfor CMS sites

expand our

searchcapabilities become a

bloggingresource for campus

promote new

social mediainitiatives and utilize user-driven

content

migrate more

sites into CQ5 ...and faster

create a tool for searching

majors

utilize

location-basedcontent more / better

22With so many projects and systems available to us, we always have a laundry list of projects weʼd love to get to. Here are just a few of the projects on our list. This is also why we appreciate getting to meet so many other CQ customers in order to see what you all are doing to meet these goals or even realize new dreams after seeing what can be done with CQ.

the end

Melanee Hamilton & Erin YarbroughOU Web Communications

twitter: @ouwebcommblog: blogs.ou.edu/webcomm

peace out!23

Follow our progress with CQ and and how we connect it with other projects?

university of oklahoma - big dreams ... few resources

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