After a process of careful evaluation, eZ Publish from eZ Systems was selected to help the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Controller’s Office meet its primary objectives - to provide easy-to–find, relevant information for the MIT user community, and to offer a secure, efficient, user-friendly tool for content maintainers to control the website’s contents and design.

The challenge
The Controller’s Office is a decentralized organization with approximately 170 employees working in different groups, several of which had previously maintained and updated their own website contents. In addition, there was a general Controller’s Office site which was centrally maintained. Currently there are thirteen service areas under the umbrella of the Controller’s Office (e.g. Accounts Payable, Cashiers, etc.). Because the larger services (e.g. Procurement, Travel, Property) had their own existing websites, each with a very different look and feel and significant variability in the volume and organization of their content, it was sometimes difficult for users to find specific information and there was very little sense of overall identity or comprehensiveness for the Controller’s Office as a whole. Also, when updates and changes to the central website were required, either a web-savvy Controller’s Office staff member or IT personnel was responsible. As a result, there was little quality control, a high risk of human error, and slow turnaround time.

The solution
The Controller’s Office Web Advisory Group was responsible for finding an open source, CMS software that would address these issues. The team proposed eZ Publish to be integrated with the redesign of the Controller’s website. While the look and feel of the new site was designed within MIT, the technical configuration and template development were handled by eZ Systems. It was approximately a five month collaboration that included quality assurance testing and training. Once all the templates were developed, Controller’s Office staff took care of the content implementation process using the eZ admin interface. This process required six MIT staff members to cut and paste the contents from MS Word to eZ Publish Editor, which allowed the staff to become more familiar with the product at the same time. The redesign and the revised information architecture of the website definitely improved the usability. In addition, the eZ Publish search function was integrated to allow users to search the entire website. For the content maintainers, a work flow process for approving content changes was implemented. For example, if the content is updated by a content contributor, the content manager is required to approve the updated content within eZ admin before it is published live to the website.

Benefits
Approximately 20 to 30% reduction in staff time needed to man age the website.
30% faster turnaround time
Reduced risk of deleting and overwriting files • Reduced frequency and likelihood of uploading unauthorized or inaccurate contents.
Demonstration to other MIT departments, labs, and centers of value-added from CMS in general and eZ Publish in particular.
Significant gains in customer ease-of-use and time-efficiency, resulting from improved structure and organization of Controller’s Office site.
Complete remodeling of Controller’s Office website “look and feel” – based on clear, consistent, professional “branding”.
Empowered local users (within Controller’s Office service areas) by providing them a usable tool (eZ Publish) to maintain and manage work content.