Catalog CMS

[Anthony]

We are on the lookout for a web CMS for our academic catalog. I'd be grateful to hear recommendations or warnings from other university faculty and staff. Vendors need not reply at this time. We are ready to upgrade from a Word-to-PDF workflow.

I reviewed the older threads here and took some notes, but since they are a little old I thought I would ask again for any fresh recommendations or warnings.

[April Taulbee]

We're also in the investigation stage for a catalog CMS and would be grateful to be included in any direct or forum replies.

April Taulbee

[e-mail]

[Susanne Starck]

I work at Harper College, a community college near Chicago. We had a similar challenge last year. We wanted to produce an online catalog, a printed catalog, with a single source of data. 

Our academic area manages curriculum in Curricunet and Banner. My department, marketing, manages the website with Omniupdate CMS.  

We now pull data directly from Curricunet and Banner as XML and have it publish directly to our online catalog. The catalog is built in Omni CMS. Because it's structured data this process also produces a complete catalog in a PDF format. 

We recentlyfine-tuned it so that we could have different versions of the catalog available for review. For example, right now we have the spring 2014 information online. Data continues to be entered into Curricunet for fall 2014, and we are able to review it, and publish that to a review area. If we needed to correct something in the spring 2014 version, we could and it would not harm the fall version.

The PDF file is pretty impressive. It produces an index of all pages, page numbers, etc. If we modify curriculum in Curricunet, we simply publish it with one click to our web site and download a new PDF. All the pages automatically reflowed including page numbers and the index is automatically updated.

I'm probably not explaining this very well, but if you would like to talk to someone here, let me know.

This afternoon we are swapping our current site for a responsive version. We didn't modify the catalog to be responsive, but that's next.

Susanne Starck

Marketing Services, Harper College

goforward.harpercollege.edu

[Lynn Zawie]

We use OmniUpdate to maintain and originally build our online catalog.  We currently have both the undergrad and grad bulletins in the CMS and are working on adding a new one for our health sciences.  We went from a print catalog maintained in quark with pdfs online to a fully functioning online html version with print on demand options.  (no one even bothers to print it anymore but it is an option) We pull our course descriptions from PeopleSoft and maintain the rest of the info in the CMS.  http://sb.cc.stonybrook.edu/bulletin/current/  I am happy to give you more details offline.  It has worked out really well for us!

Lynn Zawie

Web Production Coordinator

Stony Brook University

631-632-4429

[Patrick Moriarty]

We have had a great experience working with the team at OmniUpdate getting the College of DuPage catalog online. OmniUpdate helped us develop a dynamic method to take our course list XML feed from Colleague and parse it into our template pages. Our next step will be to parse our degrees and certificates list into pages when Curricunet is upgraded in the near future.  Our catalog is easily updated and available in web and printable PDF formats.

The OmniUpdate team has been a great partner with the College of DuPage in getting a catalog website online that is easy to maintain and update in a timely manner.  

Patrick Moriarty
Web Developer and Designer
College of DuPage
www.cod.edu

[Anthony]

Thank you for the responses thus far. This is helpful information.