There have been lots of questions about our migration away from our content management system (hereafter abbreviated CMS) Serena Collage and what that means to all the Collage users at Columbia. We would like to answer some of those questions now.
Q: Why are we getting rid of Collage?
A: Serena, the company that develops and maintains Collage, has decided to discontinue Collage.
Q: I spent a lot of time building my division's web site. Will I have to rebuild it once we move to a new CMS?
A: No. The Web Development team will move all the content from Collage into the new CMS.
Q: Since we will be moving to a new CMS, should I wait to edit my pages in Serena until the new CMS goes live?
A: No. The new CMS will not go live until mid-2009. Please continue to use Collage as normal.
Q: How will the migration to a new CMS take place?
A: Once a date to switch to the new CMS has been established, we will schedule hands-on training sessions with the new CMS for the week prior. All Collage users will be expected to attend one of the training sessions.
When the date to switch comes, access to Collage will be turned off so that we can transfer all the content from Collage to the new CMS. Once all of the content is transferred, we will turn on the new CMS.
Q: Why can't we just use software like Dreamweaver or FrontPage to create our websites?
A: Part of having a useful, robust website is maintaining a consistent design across all of our pages. The difficulty of maintaining a consistent design is multiplied when you have 100+ web authors within one organization as does Columbia. Maintaining the consistent design would be impossible if everyone used Dreamweaver or Frontpage.
A CMS also keeps a history of our site. Every change made to each page is archived so that you can revert the page back to a prior state. Dreamweaver and FrontPage do not offer this feature.
