Magnolia CMS Succeeded Where Others Failed at Texas State University

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Logo Texas State University

Texas State University is one of the largest educational institutions in the United States with more than 32,000 students from around the globe. The university, located in San Marcos, Texas, continues to be ranked among America’s Best Colleges.

Texas State University is committed to public service as a resource for personal, educational, and economic development. The university offers its students and staff extensive information and helpful materials through its website.

Statistics

The Situation: 250 Individual Sites and a Stalled CMS Implementation

When the university went through a name change, they realized that centralizing the management of all websites would make the update process a lot easier and more efficient. Centralized management would also allow them to centralize and optimize support.

Texas State University had already bought an expensive proprietary system two years earlier in the hope it would address their needs. Unfortunately, it did not. In fact, the two years with the project turned into a veritable nightmare that left everybody – the management, web-team and the users – frustrated.

• The University was running about 250 unique websites which were built, hosted and managed individually by departments and other entities within the university.
• Each site looked and worked differently.
• Coordinating the web-masters of the 250 websites was nearly impossible.
• Updating the content of all websites - one at a time - was inefficient and time-consuming.
• Access to support was decentralized, which resulted in additional cost.

The Challenge: Migrating 250 Sites, Unifying the Look and Feel and Integrating Legacy Systems

Texas State University needed to replace its failed system. The alternative should scale out to the 250 and more websites of the university’s departments and organizations. Texas State University needed an efficient, easy-to-use Content Management System that could help them reuse content across the various sites. With about 300 content authors, the university aimed to integrate the CMS with their LDAP directory server as the central authentication hub.

The university wanted to unify the branding, functionality and look-and-feel of its different websites. This would help visitors to instantly recognize the multiple sites as parts of Texas State University.

The university’s students and staff work independently. Hence, the university had to adopt a Content Management System that was both user-friendly and appealing enough to draw them in.

The Solution: Incremental Implementation of Magnolia

The implementation of Magnolia was done by the University’s in-house web-team. The project saw incremental deployment. Each month, the team added new features to Magnolia and built a number of nifty add-ons. These include a custom Apache cache and templates that output micro-formats for events.

This deployment strategy allowed Texas State University to steadily improve the system and pay attention to users’ feedback. In just a few months, the first new departmental website was up and running. It quickly gained very positive feedback from its users, which made it easy to roll out the solution to further departments.

The project team also trained the users on Magnolia processes and operation, which allowed them to get direct feedback concerning usability.

Texas State University stayed with Magnolia because it worked as advertised:

• Flexible open-source software that can be easily customized and tweaked to their specific needs.
• The enterprise qualities of Magnolia Enterprise Edition provided the scalability, performance and maintainability such a large organization demands.

The user interface is intuitive and easy to use, and the design of Magnolia is attractive enough to make working with Magnolia fun, which encourages users to update and manage content.

Operational Benefits: Reduced Annual Costs and Unified Internet Presence

Magnolia has helped Texas State University reduce its annual CMS costs. It has also allowed the university to achieve a unified Internet presence with Magnolia through a system that is scalable, easy to use, and easy to maintain.

The university particularly likes the LDAP login module of Magnolia for its easy integration with their authentication architecture. This has saved users the hassle of remembering another login and reduces management overhead of log in credentials.

Magnolia provides a lot of extension points. This allowed the university to integrate Magnolia with legacy systems like the university’s Web calendar.

Future Plans

Texas State University has licensed several Magnolia Enterprise Edition servers and has a service-level agreement with Magnolia in place. About 240 websites have been moved to the new infrastructure, with more being migrated daily, even while new functionality is constantly being added.