Introduction

This paper seeks management approval for a secondary web hosting platform for use by University staff (and students), to compliment Squiz as our primary platform. Covering both the content management system (CMS) and the service provider, it defines the problem, the options, the evaluation process and the recommendation.

Problem definition

The University currently has one primary CMS, Squiz, that supports most of the core University websites. However, there are many sites either not on Squiz or that are 'overly constrained' by Squiz. The constraints include:

Limited functionality: Squiz doesn't do everything that all clients want, and even when it doesn't support the required functionality it is often in an way that is not appreciated.
Limited development capacity: The Web Team have insufficient development capacity to meet all requests and there are very few skilled Squiz developers available even if a business unit was able to pay for resource. The only other Wellington-based development shop is Squiz and they are expensive.
Overly complex for simple sites: Squiz is complex to use and for simple sites with a limited life it is seen as overly complex.

Many business units have sites built on different CMS. Sometimes theses other CMS are the result of a distant/legacy decision, but other times they are a recent decision to meet the client need when Squiz is unsuitable (or even not available to them) and nether ITS or the Web Team can assist. The consequences of this situation include:

Branding is inconsistent with the main University site, possibly damaging our reputation.
Funding and effort is fragmented, meaning that we get little to no reuse of work done for any of these sites.
Support and maintenance differs, meaning that some are out of date, insure and therefore at risk.
Unsupported: Neither ITS nor the Web Team are able to support the range of sites and platforms, leaving many users feeling unsupported, even though the site is for core University business.

In our 'quadrant model, the secondary hosting platform must need the needs of the low-medium control row and both the low and high complexity columns.

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Therefore, the University has decided to add a secondary hosting platform to our 'service offering'. For the Web Team this means that we can sensibly meet the needs of more clients in a sustainable way. For ITS this additional service will reduce the risk of 'unsupported solutions' and the workload of supporting many different secondary solutions.

Process

The process to add this to our service offering will include:

Listing and agreeing the selection criteria
Listing and agreeing the solutions to be evaluated
Evaluating the agreed solutions
Obtaining management agreement with our preferred solution
Providing this solution to the first client(s), to prove the deployment and training actually works.

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