SiteExecutive Success Story: Tulane School of Public Health

Tulane mitigates impact of Katrina with SiteExecutive

Tulane SPH&TM homepage screenshot

http://www.sph.tulane.edu 

Client Type
Higher Education

Services Delivered
SiteExecutive WCM software
 
Benefits 

  • Accelerate site deployment
  • Eliminate content authoring bottlenecks
  • Streamline creation and management of faculty directories
Challenge: Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine (SPHTM) faced a dilemma common to many colleges and universities: growing numbers of content authors, volumes of content and proliferation of departmental, professorial and other one-off Websites. From the outside, the proliferation of Websites had the effect of diluting the School's brand. Internally, the various sites were established on decentralized hosting environments and infrastructure, increasing support cost and complexity.

What the School required was a Web content management system that would empower content owners with an easy-to-use service for publishing content and deploying new Websites. And at the same time, enforce design, navigation and technical standards to enhance the School's image and streamline the cost and effort of Website provisioning.

Solution: After evaluating its options, SPHTM chose SiteExecutive as its Web content management systems. With SiteExecutive, SPHTM has implemented a highly decentralized Web publishing environment driven by its non-technical content experts.

When large institutions implement new Web content management systems, they are often faced with a massive content conversion effort. At SPHTM this was mitigated by leveraging the SiteExecutive Content Import Utility. Templates used to control the look and feel of the new Website were created using the SiteExecutive Dreamweaver import, which allows designers to create templates in Dreamweaver and import their designs directly into SiteExecutive.

Tulane also required functionality to manage large directories of school faculty.  In response, Systems Alliance developed a Faculty Database Module that maintains faculty directories, allowing content administrators to store customizable information related to each faculty member.

On August 29, 2005, only weeks from launching the new Website, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, flooding the City. Tulane employees shut down their entire infrastructure in preparation for the storm.  During this difficult time, a temporary Website was hosted for SPHTM at the Systems Alliance data center in Dallas, Texas.  Tulane employees were granted access to University buildings in October and the system infrastructure was restored by the end of the month. Team members picked up right where they left off and after less than two weeks of content updates, the new Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine Website went live on November 11, 2005.

 

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