Abstract
This assignment is aimed to introduce students to how a project is to be managed and developed. This project is about planning for the project management of the move of a large corporate website from static HTML version to a data driven system based on a Web Content Management System. To plan for the project an evaluation for three options has to be made between Joomla, Drupal and SharePoint. As the project plan is to be for a 9 month period the time scheduling have to be made within this period. Also have to do Gantt chart and resource utilization in Microsoft project & Microsoft excel and make lesion learned report.
Project Management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to project activities in order to meet or exceed stakeholders’ needs and expectations from a project.
Project management is the discipline of organizing and managing resources in such a way that the project is completed within defined scope, quality, time and cost constraints.
Executive Summary
Introduction:
This document serves as a course requirement of ITPQM assignment given by Greenwich University. It supersedes the previous HTML version to a data driven system for Web Content Management System (WCMS). Key parts of this report will be the choice of the content management system and the evaluation of M.S Excel and M.S project. A business criterion has to be selected regarding the chosen WCMS, which would be chosen after evaluating it in MS Excel. This assignment helps us to understand whether MS Excel and MS Project have features and functions that would support in a Project management.
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Research On Web Content Management System (CMS)
CMS stands for Content Management System, a software application used for the creation, storage, and management of web content in many formats.A Web Content Management System (WCM, WCMS or Web CMS) is content management system (CMS) software, implemented as a Web application, for creating and managing HTML content. It is used to manage and control a large, dynamic collection of Web material (HTML documents and their associated images). A WCMS facilitates content creation, content control, editing, and essential Web maintenance functions. The software provides authoring (and other) tools designed to allow users with little knowledge of programming languages or markup languages to create and manage content with relative ease.
Most systems use a database to store content, metadata, or artifacts that might be needed by the system. Content is frequently, but not universally, stored as XML, to facilitate, reuse, and enable flexible presentation options.
Administration is done through browser-based interfaces, but some systems require the use of a fat client.
A presentation layer displays the content to Web-site visitors based on a set of templates. The templates are sometimes XSLT files.
Most systems use server side caching boosting performance. This works best when the WCMS is not changed often but visits happen on a regular basis.
Unlike Web-site builders, a WCMS allows non-technical users to make changes to a website with little training. A WCMS typically requires an experienced coder to set up and add features, but is primarily a Web-site maintenance tool for non-technical administrators.
This means users will not need to hire a web design company every time they want to update the site or add content.
Benefits of WCMS:
Upon completion of this project plan WCMS derives following benefits:
- Customizable pages and portal elements (banners, colors, etc.) that can be tailored globally or targeted individually
- Targeted announcements based on Banner criteria
- Web-based tools to manage user and group profiles, announcements, content and layout, and performance and usage
- A portal interface to control channel and content delivery
- An integration suite to share data between third-party applications, and databases
- Increased capacity to growth any organization.
Project Scope
Scope:
The objectives of WCMS scope:
- Procure and install the selected web content management system
- Plan, test and deploy initial information architecture framework and update, document or leverage from existing
- Templates
- Workflows for known sites
- Roles and responsibilities
- Content guidelines
- Support and training materials
- Services to be provided
- System schematic – logical and physical design
- Plan, test and execute
Scope Elements:
Several elements lack sufficient clarity without further analysis to determine whether they are in or out of scope:
- Number and scope of site migration: the number of Humanities departments that can be accommodated within the project is unknown. The scope of the University Relations migration is not fully defined.
- Use of authoritative course information is currently available using the “template system” and some academic departments expect this functionality. Whether it is in scope for Phase II is dependent upon analysis of complexities involved.
- Fully redundant off-site disaster recovery of editing and publishing functionality may prove too complex and costly.
Out of Scope:
Other deliverables that are out of scope for the WCMS Project include:
- Creation of strategic and implementation plans for corporate response to web security and policy/regulatory compliance beyond Design Review Board process.
- Web standards work for development and integration (with the exception of standards and release policy for code passed via system to web layer.)
- Full or extensive evaluation and mitigation for compliance and accessibility issues
- Extensive service definition of the new web services to be deployed
- Retirement/repurpose of existing web content delivery infrastructures
- Design/revision of new campus template “Look and Feel”
- Resolution of funding source for hiring of operational staff.
Project Dependencies:
The dependencies below introduce risk that must be mitigated and, therefore, are included in the Risk Management Plan.
Other Web Program Components
- Web Function and Design Project: template design and information architecture deliverables have many functional and schedule-related interdependencies.
- Web Service Definition Project will derive information from
- WCMS as a result of practical migration experience and the WCMS project will require the Service Definition project to provide direction.
Web Governance:
The WCMS project will rely upon Web Governance to develop policy where needed for implementation or operations.
Description of Joomla, Drupal & SharePoint:
Drupal:
Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal to power scores of different web sites, including
- Community web portals
- Discussion sites
- Corporate web sites
- Intranet applications
- Personal web sites or blogs
- Aficionado sites
- E-commerce applications
- Resource directories
- Social Networking sites
The built-in functionality, combined with dozens of freely available add-on modules, will enable features such as:
- Electronic commerce
- Blogs
- Collaborative authoring environments
- Forums
- Peer-to-peer networking
- Newsletters
- Podcasting
- Picture galleries
- File uploads and downloads
General features
- Collaborative Book- collaborative book feature lets one setup a “book” and then authorize other individuals to contribute content.
- Friendly URLs- Drupal uses Apache’s mod_rewrite to enable customizable URLs that are both user and search engine friendly.
- Modules- The Drupal community hascontributed many moduleswhich provide functionality that extend Drupal core.
- Online help- Have built a robust online help system built into the core help text.
- Open source- The source code of Drupal is freely available under the terms of the GNU General Public License 2 (GPL). Unlike proprietary blogging or content management systems, Drupal’s feature set is fully available to extend or customize as needed.
- Personalization- A robust personalization environment is at the core of Drupal. Both the content and the presentation can be individualized based on user-defined preferences.
- Role based permission system- Drupal administrators don’t have to tediously setup permissions for each user. Instead, they assign permissions to roles and then group like users into a role group.
- Searching- All content in Drupal is fully indexed and searchable at all times if one take advantage of the built in search module.
Content management
- Polls- Drupal comes with a poll module which enables admins and/or users to create polls and show them on various pages.
- Templating- Drupal’s theme system separates content from presentation allowing you to control the look and feel of your Drupal site. Templates are created from standard HTML and PHP coding meaning that you don’t have to learn a proprietary templating language.
- Threaded comments- Drupal provides a powerful threaded comment model for enabling discussion on published content. Comments are hierarchical as in a newsgroup or forum.
- Version control- Drupal’s version control system tracks the details of content updates including who changed it, what was changed, the date and time of changes made to your content and more. Version control features provide an option to keep a comment log and enables you to roll-back content to an earlier version.
Joomla:
Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.
Joomla is used all over the world to power Web sites of all shapes and sizes. For example:
- Corporate Web sites or portals
- Corporate intranets and extranets
- Online magazines, newspapers, and publications
- E-commerce and online reservations
- Government applications
- Small business Web sites
- Non-profit and organizational Web sites
- Community-based portals
- School and church Web sites
- Personal or family homepages
Joomla is designed to be easy to install and set up. Many Web hosting services offer a single-click install, getting your new site up and running in just a few minutes. Since Joomla is so easy to use, as a Web designer or developer, we can quickly build sites for your clients. Then, with a minimal amount of instruction, we can empower our clients to easily manage their sites themselves.
SharePoint:
SharePoint is a collection of products and software elements that includes, among a growing selection of components, web browser based collaboration functions, process management modules, search modules and a SharePoint can be used to host web sites that access shared workspaces, information stores and documents, as well as host defined applications such as wikis and blogs. All users can manipulate proprietary controls called “web parts” or interact with pieces of content such as lists and document libraries.
Some Features of SharePoint:
Team Collaboration, Review Workflows, Premium Web, Slide Library (splits a PPT presentation into individually viewable slides on the site without breaking the PPT file open), Premium Web Application, Premium Root Site, Management Library, Global Web Parts, Enhanced Search, Base Web Application, Spell Checking, Signatures Workflow ,Reporting, Premium Site, Publishing Web, Base Web, Base Site, Basic Search, Translation Workflow – workflow for sending a document through rounds of translation into multiple languages, Expiration Workflow, Excel Server, Search Web Parts, Publishing Site Issue Tracking Workflow .
EVALUATION ON DRUPAL, JOOMLA & SHAREPOINT
Joomla:
- Joomla is designed in a way that it can work perfectly in a shared hosting environment.
- It is a package that is least expensive and most common to all users.
- Its installation feature is simple and just like any other descktop software.
- It can support several extensions, add-on and plug in.
- Joomla is written in PHP with general purpose scripting language and best suitable for web development.
- Joomla is integrated with CiviCRM and other common packages like GetActive or DemocracyInAction.
Drupal
- Drupal can work just like Joomla in shared hosting environments.
- It has powerful content editing tools for common users and for web developers for creating websites without bothering about codes.
- Drupal is a bit diffuclt in installation procedure than that of Joomla.
- Drupal is also developed in PHP and offers common functionalies of Joomla or perhaps more sophisticated ones, which would be difficult for non technical persons to master it than that of Joomla.
- It contains non-profit centric add-ons like event registration, online donation, email newsletter etc.
- Eventhough drupal has plugins they are less powerful than that of Joomla.
SharePoint:
- Sharepoint uses application server as IIS.Net where as Joomla and Drupal uses , CGI and Apache.
- Applicatin cost is $4000 compared to the other two which are free to use.
- Security feature is more of a plus point in SharePoint than that of Joomla! And Drupal.
- Ease of use, performance and management are more easy and manageable compared to both Drupal and Joomla.
- But SharePoint supports ASP.net programming language, if the site which was built using PHP then it will be difficult to use SharePoint to establish the same site online.
KEY FUNCTIONALITIES OF A WCMS
Content management systems manage content creation, review and approval processes for web site content. Content management system provides content version control, collaboration utilities, and user or document level security.
Some of the functions of CMS are:
- Content Authoring: it is the ability to create content through a content editor, import of content, capability to deploy, present the content and aggregation of items.
- Content acquisition: it is the ability to gather content through import or metadata.
- Content aggregation: process of gathering information from different sources into one overall structure.
- Output and content presentation: Presenting content through different ways such as HTML or XML
- Workflow management: the process of managing to create flows of sequential and parallel tasks that must be accomplished.
- Version control and management: lets multiple users make simultaneous changes to content and keep track of them.
- Security management: Access to the content are controlled through authentication, role and directory management, access control settings and passwords.
- Product technology and support: defines the technical architecture of the product, the technological environment in which the product can successfully run. Such as product and application architecture, software usability and administration, platform and database support, application standards support, communications and protocol support and integration capabilities.
Project Goals and Objectives:
The objectives of WCMS with the original scope:
- Procure and install the selected web content management system
- Plan, test and deploy initial information architecture framework and update, document or leverage from existing
- Templates
- Workflows for known sites
- Roles and responsibilities
- Content guidelines
- Support and training materials
- Services to be provided
- System schematic – logical and physical design
- Plan, test and execute
WSM criteria of WCMS:
Criteria to which alternative to choose for Web Content Management System (WCMS):
Corefunctionality
When most people think of content management, they are thinking of the creation, deletion, editing and organizing of pages. They assume all content management systems do this and so take the functionality for granted. However that is not necessarily the case. There is also no guarantee that it is done in an intuitive fashion.
Not all blogging platforms for example allow the owner to manage and organize pages into a tree hierarchy. Instead the individual ‘posts’ are automatically organized by criteria such as date or category. In some situations this is perfectly adequate. In fact this limitation in functionality keeps the interface simple and easy to understand. However, in other circumstances the absence of this functionality can be frustrating.
Theeditor
The majority of content management systems have a WYSIWYG editor. Strangely this editor is often ill considered, despite the fact that it is the most used feature within the system.
The editor is the interface through which content is added and amended. Traditionally, it has also allowed the content provider to apply basic formatting such as the selection of fonts and color. However more recently there has been a move away from this type of editor to something that reflects the principles of best practice.
The danger of traditional WYSIWYG editors is twofold. First, they give the content provider too much design control. They are able to customize the appearance of a page to such an extent that it could undermine the consistence of design and branding. Second, in order to achieve this level of design control the CMS mixes design and content.
The new generation of editors takes a different approach. The content provider uses the editor to markup headings, lists, links and other elements without dictating how they should appear. Ensure your list of requirements includes an editor that uses this approach and does not give content providers control over appearance. At the very least look for content management systems that allow the editor to be replaced with a more appropriate solution.
The editor should also be able to handle external assets including images and downloads. That brings us on to the management of these assets.
Managingassets
Managing images and files are badly handled by some CMS packages. Issues of accessibility and ease of use can cause frustration with badly designed systems. Images in particular can cause problems. Ensure that the content management system you select forces content provider to add alt attributes to imagery. You may also want a CMS that provides basic image editing tools such as crop resize and rotate. However, finding such a CMS can be a challenge.
Also consider how the content management system deals with uploading and attaching PDFs, Word documents and other similar files. How are they then displayed to users? What descriptions can be attached to the files and is the search capable of indexing them.
Search is an important aspect of any site. Approximately half of users will start with search when looking for content. However, often the search functionality available in content management systems is inadequate.
Userinteraction
If you intend to gather user feedback, your CMS must provide that functionality or allow third party plug-in to do so. Equally, if you want a community on your site then you will require functionality such as chat, forums, comments and ratings.
As a minimum you will require the ability to post forms and collect the responses. How easy does the CMS make this process? Can you customize the fields or does that require technical expertise? What about the results? Can you specify who they are emailed to? Can they be written to a database or outputted as an excel document? Consider the type of functionality that you will require and look for a CMS that supports that.
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Rolesandpermissions
As the number of content providers increase, you will want more control over who can edit what. For example, personnel should be able to post job advertisements but not add content to the homepage. This requires a content management system that supports permissions. Although implementation can vary, permissions normally allow you to specify whether users to edit specific pages or even entire sections of the site. As the number of contributors grows still further you may require one individual to review the content being posted to ensure accuracy and consistent tone. Alternatively content might be inputted by a junior member of staff who requires the approval of somebody more senior before making that content live.
In both cases this requires a cms that supports multiple roles. This can be as simple as editors and approver, or complex allowing customized roles with different permissions.
Finally, enterprise level content management systems support entire workflows where a page update has to go through a series of checkpoints before being allowed to go live. These complex scenarios require the ability to roll back pages to a pervious version.
Being able to revert to a previous version of a page allows you to quickly recover if something is posted by accident.
Some content management systems have complex versioning that allow you to rollback to a specific date. However, in most cases this is overkill. The most common use of versioning is simply to return to the last saved state.
Although this sounds like an indispensable feature, in my experience it is rarely used expect in complex workflow situations. That said, although versioning was once a enterprise level tool it is increasingly becoming available in most content management systems. This is also true of multi-site support.
Multiplesitesupport
With more content management systems allowing you to run multiple websites from the same installation, I would recommend that this is a must-have feature.
Although you may not currently need to manage more than a single site, that could change. You may decide to launch a new site targeting a different audience.
Alternatively with the growth of the mobile web, you may create a separate site designed for mobile devices. Whatever the reason, having the flexibility to run multiple websites is important.
Multilingualsupport
It is easy to dismiss the need to support multiple languages. Your site may be targeted specifically at the domestic market or you may sell a language specific product. However think twice before dismissing this requirement.
Even if your product is language specific, that could change. It is important that your cms can grow with your business and changing requirements.
Also just because you are targeting the domestic market does not mean you can ignore language. We live in a multicultural society where numerous languages are spoken. Being able to accommodate these differences provides a significant edge on your competition.
That said; do think through the ramifications of this requirement. Just because you have the ability to add multiple languages doesn’t mean you have the content. Too many of my clients have insisted on multilingual support and yet have never used it. They have failed to consider where they are going to get the content translated and how they intend to pay for it.
Success Criteria:
- A central WCMS is implemented and accepted by primary stakeholders including academic and academic support web site
- Clear roles and responsibilities are established for content creation, maintenance, and the support of the technology
- In-scope web sites are to the content management system
- Stakeholders are kept informed of developments and are provided with opportunities to comment and participate
After Evaluation of WSM criteria I have created this WSM model which can help me to choose best CMS system for WCMS.
Work Breakdown Structure:
Project Name: Web Content Management System
- Project planning/feasibility study (requirements stage)
- Study on the project issues
- Develop the project plan
- System analysis
- Analysis of its requirements pre analysis
- selecting a supplier
- How many servers will be required, procuring hardware etc.
- Procuring hardware and software
- System design
- Develop system design
- Context diagram/ system boundary
- DFD
- ERD
- Final database
- The final solution map
- Develop content management activities.
- CMS objects
- CMS emails
- Find relevant contents
- Moving contents from old website to the new one.
- Archiving mechanisms
- Operating environment made ready
- implementation/coding
- Creating basic pages with different logged areas
- Implement menu structure
- Implement site authentication
- Implement site modules
- web editors trained for use of CMS
- integration and testing
- Developed module for testing
- Test modules
- Test full site
- Test in the working environment
- Acceptance
- Check developed module and suggests changes
- Client testing
- Acceptance by the sponsors for the launch of new system
- installation
- Move site from developers server to live server
- Changes made
- System installed in the real environment.
- Deployment (training)
- Train IT support staff
- Construct training schedule
- Give training for use of the CMS system
- Verify user readiness
- Give editor course after 6 months of deployment.
-
Implementation Plan:
The high-level timeline follows for implementation. [A key weakness in estimating dates is the current unknown availability date of the vendor. Here we assume availability to develop SOW as soon as the contract is finalized.]
Assumptions for the following timeline include:
- Contract negotiations are successful
- Actual award is not delayed after successful negotiations
- Vendor can engage as soon as contract negotiations are complete
- Two weeks off over winter break and one week over Thanksgiving break
- Availability of other team resources as specified below
- Twenty percent reduction in capacity due to furloughs and staff loss
Implementation Strategy:
The strategy to implement the new centrally supported WCMS site process includes the following work elements.
- Procurement – negotiate a contract with the vendor and complete the purchase of the application.
- System Design and Installation – design and installation of hardware, software, and process components supporting the application environment
- Requirements, Configuration, and Development – requirements elicitation, configuration and development of the application to meet user requirements
- Deployment Management – create a deployment plan for release of infrastructure, configurations, development projects, and assure release readiness.
- Documentation and Communication – collect and organize documentation and project communication.
Implementation Work Package Description:
Procurement:
- Procurement and Business Contracts will procure software, consultation time, and three-year support contract from the selected vendor.
System design and installation:
- The technical aspects of the system implementation will be conducted by a core technical team including two ITS team leads, PM, and rotating technical experts depending upon work products (programming, security, server admin, network, architects, IDM manager, etc.) Disaster recovery is a deliverable of this workgroup. Requirements will be gathered, options reviewed, and feasible option implemented. Because no precedent at UCSC for off-site disaster recovery is available, the options will be researched and analyzed for feasibility. The lack of precedent will be verified. Specific deliverables are listed in section 4.2.
Functional Requirements, Configurations & Development:
- Logical configuration of the application to meet business needs will include developing knowledge of the application function as well as the partner business requirements. Also key will be engagement with the vendor to understand best practices.
- Unlike technical configuration, functional configuration includes definition of business requirements related elements such as users/roles/groups, workflows, and user interface configurations. Hannon Hill Cascade Server has components that combine templates, configuration settings, and user groups together. A logical analysis of the best configuration is critical to maintaining scalability and functionality.
- This configuration team will engage and include technical team members and migration team members in developing requirements and specifications for configuration and development. To the extent required to meet project deliverables, the team will gather business requirements, create specifications, and develop scripts, API interfaces, and external application integration. Specific deliverables are listed in section 4.2.
Deployment Management:
A core team including team leads will be responsible for deployment planning, will develop a checklist of activities and tests that must be performed prior to deployment, and will be accountable for their successful completion prior to deployment.
Documentation and Communication:
This team will be responsible for assuring that documentation to be handed off to the service team is created by the appropriate sub-teams and is stored/ organized in the appropriate place prior to project close. This includes:
- Technical documentation
- Technical training materials
- Application configuration
- User training materials
- Requirements
Develop content management activities
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