Having been in contact with dozens of higher education institutions over the past few years, I am convinced, now more than ever, that open source technology, particularly Drupal, is the best option for these organizations. I know I'm echoing what many in the Drupal community have been observing for a while, but I'd like to describe why Drupal makes so much sense for a University. I'm stating the obvious but I want to take a step back because the obvious is important and sometimes overlooked: enterprise technology is unwieldy.
In the US, the average higher education institution permanently implements, not by design, but by necessity a set of content management tools for the website. Universities and departments and faculties have to quickly distribute a large amount of information, from semester to semester, related to topics such as research, event management, courses or student enrollment. These departments tend to have their own technology "fiefdoms" run by a technical director or a web developer who works in his or her office with little oversight from an executive unit. For example, one department may run a proprietary content management system (CMS), while another may run a custom CMS with its own technology stack. This presentation from Stony Brook University http://goo.gl/LDqlWe illustrates the problem I am describing. The knowledge and talent to manage and maintain these systems breaks down and documentation is often sparse or non-existent. Furthermore, the Chief Information Technology Officer has the daunting task of establishing the vision, oversight and management of technology across dozens of departments and faculties; a task that requires time and a significant investment.
Integrating everything into a single platform (CMS) will pay great ROI to institutions struggling with multi-technology CMS management. Drupal is the solution for integrating and managing disparate content. Here's why:
Systems Integration - Drupal offers a variety of web services capabilities in the “Services, View Data Export, RESTful Web Services, and Web Service Client modules.” Drupal can be configured as a services endpoint (receiving calls and returning data to third-party systems) or configured to call other services (receiving data from applications such as event management systems). For institutions publishing native mobile applications, these web services capabilities can seamlessly serve content to native applications. Some institutions use Drupal as the primary source of content in their mobile applications.
User Account Management - Managing web users in institutions can be complex, often with duplicate records managing users across multiple websites and systems. Drupal can tie into user database systems such as Microsoft's Active Directory or LDAP using the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) module. Or, the CAS module can be used to make the Drupal database itself the master for user records.
Multi-site – Drupal offers several approaches to configuring Drupal installation to run many websites. The traditional multi-site approach is the most flexible, providing the ability to store content for each website in different databases and/or sharing MySQL tables as a Drupal user table. If the requirement is to share content across multiple websites, another approach is to use the domain access module, which allows sharing of users, content and configuration settings between sites.
Mobile Responsive UI – Drupal 8 will come out with responsive themes out of the box, offering mobile compatibility without the need to install a new theme. This is especially useful for mobile content management.
Intranet – Building the University Intranet with Drupal reduces the overhead of talent needed to manage the technology of more than one site for both the web and the intranet. You can read more about Drupal as an Intranet solution in an article I wrote last year.
508 Accessibility - This is a requirement at most institutions in the US. These modules offer 508 compliant features: Text Size for text wrapping and Accessibility for validating a site's accessibility compliance. Alt-text for image manipulation is available in a contributed module.
Editorial content and editing workflows – Some departments or faculties do not require a lot of controls and authorizations for curating and publishing content, but for those that do, Drupal has very manageable and easy-to-use content review modules. implement.
Social Marketing and Email - Built on the premise of being a social collaboration tool, Drupal extends the concept of "community" by offering capabilities for participation both inside and outside the CMS. Institutions that manage tools like phpBB have the option of migrating forums to Drupal. Additionally, Drupal excels at integrating with social media and email marketing services. All social media modules; Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Pinterest are available in the community. Email marketing tools like MailChimp, Constant Contact, and Pardot integrate closely with Drupal.
Flexibility - Departments and faculties have different communication needs across campus, depending on their size and field of study. What works for business school may not work for medical school.
There are no license fee payments - All proprietary platforms require a permanent link through usage contracts with annual licenses, which ultimately offer limited functionality options and minimal or very expensive customization possibilities. Open source licensing of Drupal gives institutions a less expensive technology solution, offering hundreds of feature possibilities not typically available in most other CMS.
Two years ago, Drupal was being adopted by more than 70% of the top 100 universities: institutions like Harvard, Stanford, Cal Berkeley. Other notable institutions such as the University of North Carolina and Cornell have followed suit.
Translated from English by SeeD
Paul Chason Managing Partner, Mediacurrent