About

Founded as the second college campus of the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, the oldest university in Columbia, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Cali offers majors ranging from communications to engineering to over 6000 students attending its 11 undergraduate and graduate programs. Since its creation in 1970, Javeriana Cali is considered one of the most prestigious institutions of higher education in Colombia, admired both for its architecture and its mission to provide cultural enrichment and academia excellence to its student community.

Challenge

Before using RedDot, the Javeriana Cali Web team relied on a team of technical staff to update content on their Web site. As the university’s Web site expanded and the amount of content increased, keeping track of content accuracy and ownership became difficult. Different people were responsible for creating and editing different content, making the university’s content management process extremely slow and bureaucratic. The problem was magnified due to the fact that Javeriana Cali’s Web sites were heterogeneous, managed by different departments and maintained on different servers without any unified Web standards or guidelines. With the loss of control over content publication, the university site faced the challenge of maintaining brand integrity, as well as scalability for its different Web sites.

Solution

After recognizing their online challenges, Javeriana Cali decided to implement a content management system that involved not just technical staff, but also their business users. Involving non-technical staff, who were primarily responsible for internal and external communications for the university, aided in Javeriana Cali’s aim to strengthen their brand. Javeriana Cali also needed a content management system that granted users ownership of their respective content, provided easy administration and a quick training time for employees, reducing reliance on IT and other technical staff. After researching several content management providers, the university selected Open Text Web Solutions as the ideal Web content management solution. With Open Text Web Solutions, the university was able to simplify the creation and publication of content for the Web. Web Solution’s easy to use and flexible interface allowed Pontificia to combine its different processes for updating content across the university. As a result, Javeriana Cali end users were able to adapt to the CMS interface quickly and experience minimal disruption when transitioning to the site’s new navigation.

Results

Migrating Javeriana Cali’s Web site to Open Text Web Solutions was quick and efficient. During a 4-month process, staff members were able to complete an entire site redesign and migrate a total of 1000 pages to the new CMS. Since the site migration, the content editing process at Pontificia has been delegated to approximately 50 employees, greatly improving efficiency and the time required to publish to the Web. As the Javeriana Cali content management process has become more automated with Open Text Web Solutions, the university continues to experience significant benefits as more corporate Web site content is managed through the CMS. Open Text Web Solution’s flexible templating, which separates content from layout, allows for instantaneous content updates. Javeriana Cali’s technical team is now able to dedicate their work to more “core business” projects that are focused on promoting the institution’s growth and expansion. Javeriana Cali has already planned to install multilingual capabilities throughout their Web site, which already has an English variant.