University CMS workshop session

I ran a workshop at last month's IWMW 2012 conference on how we manage the University of Edinburgh's corporate CMS, our challenges and where we're looking to in the future. The initial presentation led into a couple of activities and some great discussion among the 30+ higher education web managers who came along.



Here are my introductory slides:

Managing and supporting a central cms for a devolved community (IWMW12 workshop B5)

View more PowerPoint from Neil Allison

Following this presentation a colleague and I did a couple of activities to promote discussion about how attendees manage their websites, and more specifically the people that contribute to them.

First, we asked everyone to compete 2 post it notes - blue for where they felt they were right now, and yellow for the future - and stick them to an appropriate point on a pair of axes.

Slide detailing task for first discussion activity

My colleague Joe took a photo of the resulting whiteboard (annotated on his phone).

Image courtesy of Joe Farthing  @josephfarthing

In the second activity, we returned to the personas we use at the University of Edinburgh to represent the CMS user group and help us plan development and support provision. We asked everyone to think about their user group and estimate the proportions that mapped to our personas and whether they had further user types.

Slide detailing second discussion activity

 We collated all the data provided in these activities into a spreadsheet.

CMS discussion activity data (Google docs spreadsheet)

Workshop session profile on IWMW2012 Lanyrd website