About

Texas A&M University, with its main campus in College Station, Texas, was founded in 1876 and is recognized as a premier research university, with globally recognized faculty.  There are currently over 45,000 students enrolled in the university.

In 2003, Texas A&M University at Qatar opened its doors in Education City in Doha, Qatar, which is also home to four other prestigious American universities as well.  Texas A&M University at Qatar is a college of engineering, headed up by a dean, with 30 faculty members and 80 staff members, all who reside in Qatar and work on the campus in Education City. The university in Qatar offers the same educational opportunities in petroleum, mechanical, electrical, and chemical engineering to students from Qatar and the Middle East that are available at its main campus.  In its third year, the university is still ramping up its four-year program, with over 140 students who are currently freshmen, sophomores, and juniors. Next year, the university will add a senior-level program, graduating its first students in 2007.

Challenge

One of the first departments to be established on the campus of Texas A&M University at Qatar was Information Technology Services (ITS).  The head of ITS is Dr. Timothy Chester, the university’s first permanent employee in Qatar and the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the Qatar campus. One of Chester’s priorities when he arrived in Qatar was to establish basic IT services, including connectivity to the university’s operation in the U.S.  A second priority, of equal importance, was to develop a Web site to support the university’s local recruiting and admissions initiatives. Since the Web site would be independent of the university’s U.S. site, Chester took the opportunity to look for a content management system (CMS) in which to build the Qatar site from scratch.

One of the main challenges in his search for a CMS was the need for a foreign language capability, specifically Arabic.  As Chester explains, “Students in the Middle East are as online savvy as students in the United States, if not more so. It was therefore key to have a Web site support our recruitment efforts.  And since our engineering program here is an English language program, we knew we were appealing to students who have the ability to speak and read English. The challenge was not the students, but their parents, as they typically may speak English, but may not read it.  Because I envisioned our Web site as a self-service site, I wanted the parents of our prospective students to be able to view information on how to apply for admission, what programs are available, and what type of financial aid is available.”

In addition to the ability to post information in Arabic, Chester also wanted a Web content management system that was easy to use, not only for the faculty and staff who would be updating and adding content to the site, but also for the translators who would take the English content and translate it into Arabic.

Chester’s search for a CMS solution included products from Microsoft, Vignette, Stellent, and RedDot Solutions.  Because of their foreign language capability and ease of use, ITS chose RedDot Solutions and has since published the university’s site with RedDot CMS, both in English and Arabic.

Solution

According to Chester, “The foreign language capability was the reason we chose RedDot CMS primarily. The second reason was that, of all the products, we thought RedDot CMS was really the most user friendly and our own experience has proven this true.  If you look at some of the products from other competitors, they’re still far more complex than they need to be and certainly more challenging for the average end user.  For instance, I recently went to a conference in the U.S. and saw one of the other solutions that we initially evaluated that is being used by another university. It was obvious that their end users have to go through a lot more complexity than our users do.”

RedDot CMS was implemented within a couple of months, which was in line with what Chester anticipated and about half the time that he has seen other CMS implementations take.  Chester is pleased with the way the university’s staff has adopted RedDot CMS. End users are trained on RedDot CMS informally by members of the IT department, with a couple of hours of orientation, followed by 8-10 hours of mentoring as they become familiar with the program.  “The training is going well, as we expected, since we purchased RedDot CMS based on its ease of use.  RedDot CMS is not too difficult or overly complex, so our users are typically up to speed and proficient with the system within a couple of weeks.”

Chester adds, “We have some departments that are heavy users – they’ve taken the ball and run with it.  Getting the site up there and running is one challenge and to have end users from a world where they think Web publishing is typically done by technical people and convince them that ordinary people can now take ownership is another. But two-thirds of our end users are maintaining the site themselves, which I think is great.”

At the university, there is a staff member who is considered the official translator. The end users put the content into the Web site in English, it gets work flowed into the queue, translated, and then easily flowed into RedDot CMS in Arabic. The Arabic pages on the site provide information on the institution, the academic programs, and the admissions process – all of which is important for the parents of prospective students.  The rest of the site, which is targeted towards the students, is in English only.

Results

This year, Texas A&M University has 650 applicants from Qatar and other countries in the Middle East, which is, as Chester states, “an incredible number given the size of the country and the size of the program.” Chester attributes much of this success to having Arabic on their site. They are, in fact, the only American university in Education City to have Arabic content on their Web site.

For Chester, RedDot CMS is saving the university valuable cycles of IT resources.  “If you wanted to do a quantitative analysis you could, because Web publishing, which used to be the domain of IT people, is now in the hands of people with non-technical skills.  You could compare the hourly rates of these people and recognize that there is a substantial cost savings when you are able to empower people so they can do technical things without the need of high-priced IT staff to support them.  You don’t have to do the analysis to see that there’s a real savings there.”

Chester says that one of the biggest benefits of RedDot CMS is “the ability to take an average, ordinary Web site that is never updated and turn it into something that is alive and dynamic – and one that’s owned by all the departments on campus, not just IT.”  He adds, “RedDot CMS allows us to give lots of people ownership of our Web presence and when you do that, you get people motivated and enthusiastic about it. Then there’s up-to-date content being posted all the time.  That improves the quality of the information that is available to our students, our potential students, our faculty, and staff.  And that’s what it’s all about.”

The university is currently in the process of deploying RedDot XCMS for document management and business process modeling.  As Chester states, “We want to leverage the Web to automate some of our processes and we were looking for an infrastructure that allows us to do that.  The ability to use the same RedDot interface that our end users and programmers know already was the determining factor in going with RedDot XCMS.”

Facts & Figures

Customer: Texas A&M University at Qatar

URL: www.qatar.tamu.edu

Site Launch: October 2003

Project duration: 3 months

Greatest challenge: Multilingual capabilities (Arabic) and ease of use

Editorial server: Windows 2003

Database server: SQL Server 2000