OU Campus - the best web CMS in the industry...
Updated July 07, 2015
OU Campus - the best web CMS in the industry...
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
9.19.11
Modules Used
- Web CMS (core product)
Overall Satisfaction with OU Campus
OU Campus is the primary interface through which our public website(s) are edited and upon which web content is managed for our entire organization. Although there has been no real support 'from the top' of the organization regarding this product's adoption across our institution, OU Campus use has spread by word of mouth, and prospective users contact me on a regular basis requesting training on and access to the system for editing their website content. To date, we have had a 100% user adoption rate across the campus. Basically, everyone who has started using OU Campus is still using it today. The specific business problems that OU Campus continues to address are: (1) empowering users and content contributors campus wide to manage the content on their respective web pages, (2) decreasing the amount of time it takes for new content to be published live to our website, and (3) our public website content is more fresh, relevant and accurate as a direct result.
- SIMPLE TO USE - non-technical users of the product learn the functions and features easily, and they continue to use OU Campus on a regular basis.
- PLATFORM-AGNOSTIC & NOTHING TO INSTALL - OU Campus can be connected to anything that can be accessed via FTP, and that content can be managed through a web browser.
- ENTERPRISE-LEVEL SOLUTION - content can be repurposed to multiple outputs (mobile, PDF, CSV, HTML) in a single step, OU Campus has site-wide dependency management tools built-in. Web-based image editor is built-in. Simple to multi-step workflow and content scheduling (publishing/expiring content) is built-in. Web content snippets (bits of code) as well as digital 'assets' management (images, scripts, code sections, data, etc.) is built-into OU Campus. Site export and ZIP Import (with auto-extraction) is built-into OU Campus.
- OUTSTANDING CUSTOMER SERVICE - If you ever need a question answered, OmniUpdate's support team is second to none. My experience over the past 8 years has been that I get a response within the business day (and typically within an hour).
- I used to have an issue with the 'Browse...' button on the initial 'Insert/Edit Link' interface, but that's already been fixed/resolved/improved.
- I think the reporting interface could use a facelift - at this point you can pull out CSV files and manipulate them in Excel (which works well), but providing something more visual for displaying system-wide data/reporting would be great (I believe there is something in version 10 that addresses this, but we're not yet migrated over to that version).
- I think a visual template editor (with drag-and-drop capabilities) would be a great addition to this product. Something that allows for reshaping CSS DIVs, drag-and-drop of page elements (in HTML5/CSS3 and/or for XSL functions).
- Maintenance on dozens of sub-sites across our web presence are now being managed directly by the owners of the respective content, making our website's information more fresh and relevant to site visitors.
- OU Campus has been directly responsible for improving our entire Student Services and Counseling functions by providing relevant and important updates to students.
- Website style / theme consistency has been achieved through OU Campus, reducing the amount of confusion for site visitors and improving our marketing of our brand.
I have evaluated Ektron, PHP Nuke, Drupal, Joomla!, typo3, Reason and SharePoint. OU Campus outshines all of these in the web CMS space. The OU Campus interface is more intuitive, more user-friendly, and the system itself is more flexible and scalable and capable in almost every way. I have yet to find a use case where OU Campus couldn't help in some way.
OU Campus Feature Ratings
Using OU Campus
Evaluating OU Campus and Competitors
Yes - We replaced direct FTP access (horrible idea), Dreamweaver (similarly horrible idea) and PHP Nuke (through which our public website was hacked twice in a single month). We simply had to do something different, because the existing setup was producing nothing but problems and legal liability issues. Additionally, when our users were allowed direct FTP/Dreamweaver access to our website, they were producing completely inconsistent content.
- Product Features
- Product Usability
The ease-of-use - both for user and administrators - absolutely sold this product to us. It is important that technology be something that solves a problem for users, but in many cases, technology actually can make users' jobs harder, however, OU Campus does not do that - it truly simplifies people's work day and makes them more efficient.
I wouldn't. We ended up with OU Campus, so we did our work in choosing our product well.
OU Campus Implementation
Change management was minimal - Change management did not play much of a role in our implementation of OUCampus, because the software worked out-of-the-box with our Web pages as soon as copies of them were uploaded to the staging/editing environment. All that remained from that initial upload was any enhancements that we wanted to incorporate into the editing experience for our end-users, which we have rolled out gradually over the last 9 years.