What can you tell us about the team that built University of Massachusetts Boston (http://umb.edu)?

Our core internal web team, at the time, was made up four developers, two designers, and a content specialist. We worked together with the communications department and their web editor. They provided content review, editing, and video and image production as well as assistance in editor training and documentation development.

From the top down, we were governed by an executive committee of three university administrators, and we also had an internal project manager. The university engaged Viridian Spark, a development firm with higher education experience, to assist with the site blueprint, content inventory, writing training, art direction, and providing the site build kit.

What can you tell us about the site in general? What are the goals of the site and the main audience?

The site, in general, is a radical departure from our old site, utilizing a new look and feel as well as better organized and fresher content. There are many departments and colleges at UMass Boston, all with unique needs and wants that ExpressionEngine made easy for us to incorporate. The site was pruned down to approximately 6,500 entries from more than 40,000 static, out-of-date, not properly branded pages.

One of the primary goals of the redesign was to enhance the perception of the university to the outside world and provide stronger marketing to prospective and current students, faculty, and parents. We also wanted to add the ability to tell the various UMass Boston stories, as opposed to the traditional educational institution site that follows an organizational chart.

Our mobile site is also built in the EE installation.  This made it very easy to access data that already existed to display on handheld devices. The mobile version was built based on survey data citing what specific pieces of information our audience wanted available at their fingertips.

Video hosting has now been placed with BriteCove.

What was your major consideration in using ExpressionEngine for this?

Our existing site at the time had ExpressionEngine 1.7 layered on top of static pages.  We had many editors who were already trained in the control panel and editing and creating their pages. They all loved it! There were also several stand-alone, grant-funded projects for which we choose EE, and we accumulated a significant in-house knowledge base in executing complex implementations with EE.

We also found that there seemed to be no middle-ground for CMS pricing; it was either EE or products like Sitecore, or Hannon Hill, the latter being quite expensive and outside of our core expertise and server model.

Hosting at EngineHosting was a no brainer! Our development platform was up and running in an afternoon.

Getting down to the end, the 80/20 rule applied and we had a very aggressive timeline to launch. Not having a learning curve to overcome was a huge factor in the successful launch of our new site.

Were there any Commercial Add-ons that proved useful? If so, which ones? How did they help?

We use several commercial add-ons:

Pixel & Tonic - Matrix, WYGWAM, Assets, and Playa.
Solspace - Super Search, Static Page Caching, Freeform, User
Structure
NSM Better Meta
Accessible Captcha

Did you do any custom add-on development?

Once we really dove into creating our site, the Structure tree grew significantly (it’s currently 6500+ entries and climbing!) and became a bit unwieldy to use. We wrote an accessory that allows users to search easier and select a parent in the publish panel for quicker access to their pages. We use an EE2 version of Brandon Kelly’s “Edit This” extension and a modified version of Erik Reagan’s “CP Pad Lock.”

Our team also spent a lot of time developing our course catalog, course wizard, campus directory, and e-commerce forms for university giving. Though these are not exactly add-ons, they all used CodeIgniter and are embedded into the EE architecture, with all the tables in the EE database.  Due to time constraints, they were not initially developed as add-ons, but may well be in the future!

What is next on the plate for umb.edu? Any additional functionality you can tell us about?

We are fast approaching the end of our 90-day settling period! Once that ends, my white board is filled with feature requests and sub sites for conferences and events.

We are getting ready to roll out Better Workflow to a select group of editors as a pilot. Many groups have asked for a content workflow and approval process and functionality, but don’t fully understand what it involves until they see it in front of them. Some editors are using the workflow now and it will be rolled out to more as necessary.

Other items in the queue:

• R25/25 live Calendaring integration
• Vulnerability Scanning - Site Security Hardening
• An IT Service Catalog
• News feed integration
• Potentially replacing Google Analytics
• Better Caching
• Custom work for grant-funded projects

Do you have any other information you’d like to share with the community? Tips from this project you’d like to share? Lessons you’ve learned?

Don’t try this on your own!  Hire an outside firm that specializes in higher-ed to assist with content, site blueprint, art direction and initial build of the site.

Make sure you have a project manager and plan, plan, plan. That includes everything from how you are going to train editors (we currently have 150+) and provide them with documentation, to the actual roll out, load testing, QA/QC…. the list goes on.

During the last four months of the project, we had daily scrum meetings to see where everyone was, where they were going, and collaboratively review any sticking points that may have popped up.

It’s a lengthy process. Don’t expect to roll out such a complex site as this overnight. From the start of our RFP process to launch, it was a two-and-a-half-year endeavor!