Nottingham Trent University Selects Percussion Software's Rhythmyx 5 Enterprise Content Management Solution

London - 11 October 2004 - Nottingham Trent University has selected Percussion Software's Rhythmyx 5, a leading enterprise content management solution (ECM), to enable the launch of a new content-rich Web site with improved functionality for students within eight weeks. The university will be launching new self-services capabilities that will enable students to apply online, retrieve prospectuses, access information about fees, and select and secure their accommodation through the Web site by 2006.

Rhythmyx will also be used to manage the content of the university's new intranet. The new site will host a range of information about policies and procedures, HR and finance and will allow academics and other university employees to access this information from a single source, easily and efficiently, for the first time.

Nottingham Trent is one of the UK's largest universities, housing over 24,000 students and 900 teaching staff. Its national and international reputation, built upon the excellence of its teaching methods, research and collaborative activities, means it has established itself as one of the most successful universities in terms of the number of applications it receives.

"Our main goal was to improve the Web site experience for students, through the launch of self-service offerings," commented Susan Clarke, director of e-business at Nottingham Trent. "It was essential that the chosen ECM was easy to use and would allow the university to devolve content authoring and publishing responsibilities to the staff, so each department could update information about their courses and news, without relying on the IT team."

Nottingham Trent looked at five content management vendors before selecting Percussion Software's Rhythmyx 5. The key reasons for selection of Rhythmyx were its ease of use and content re-use capabilities and the fact that Percussion Software's consultants were able to implement the solution to meet the university's tight deadline of eight weeks. Its standards-based architecture, using XML, XSL, Java and other industry standards was a further attraction, as the solution easily integrates with the university's Web servers, databases and middleware, without any requirement for systems re-engineering or re-training of IT staff.

Susan Clarke explained, "Previously, content updates required HTML coding and were therefore carried out by our IT department. Rhythmyx's Active Assembly will enable users in our departments to easily create multiple layouts and group and arrange content into Web pages themselves. This is accomplished through an intuitive graphical, browser-based interface, without assistance from IT."

"Information on our degree courses and departmental news will be published more quickly and efficiently and departments will be able to re-use existing content. The solution's scalability will enable us to evolve our e-business capabilities in the future and publish content to multiple channels when the need arises."

Joseph Wykes, Percussion Software's managing director for European operations said, "With the introduction of fees within higher education, students are more discerning than ever about their university choice, placing more pressure on universities to market themselves effectively. Web sites are now an intrinsic part of universities"™ marketing mix and play an important role in attracting prospective students from the UK and overseas. Rhythmyx will provide Nottingham Trent with a robust and scalable platform to enable it to promote itself effectively, both now and in the future, thereby ensuring that it retains its competitive position as one of the leading UK universities."

About Nottingham Trent University

The Nottingham Trent is a large, diverse and vibrant modern university. Its mission is to deliver education and research that shapes lives and society and in doing so the university offers a strong course portfolio designed to meet the needs of both students and industry.

The quality of learning at the Nottingham Trent is demonstrated by the fact that it has achieved "excellent" grades in ten out of the last eleven subject reviews undertaken by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education. It has also become one of the UK's top universities for graduate employment - with around 97 per cent of full-time students graduating from the university in 2002 gaining jobs or going on to further study within six months of completing their courses. For further information please visit www.ntu.ac.uk.