Indiana University's Kelley School of Business Chooses Percussion's Rhythmyx ECM Solution
Leading Business School to Rely on Rhythmyx for Over 200 Web Sites, Bringing Efficiency and Enhanced Branding Support to College's Web Presence
The Kelley School began its search for a content management system (CMS) to address several challenges that were growing daily. It needed to eliminate the bottleneck created by existing content production processes that required significant levels of technical expertise from internal staff, and to empower its many non-technical content authors and owners by enabling them to easily capture and present content in an effective manner. It also needed to give content contributors and page designers within the School of Business a robust, easy-to-use content management solution that would enable them to respond rapidly to changes in the competitive online environment.
Other content management challenges the Kelley School faced included:
- Easily applying brand consistency and a global "sense of place" to over 200 disparate and autonomous Web sites;
- Allowing the school to encapsulate all Web content in a flexible framework of sites, to both interoperate at the site level and support vertical site awareness; and,
- Effectively engaging in online strategic marketing and search engine optimization initiatives, including the ability to evolve, deploy and retire strategic marketing campaigns across sites at an institutional-level.
After an extensive analysis in which vendors were rated on more than 100 specific requirements, the Kelley School selected Percussion's Rhythmyx solution.
"As a result of our evaluation, we felt that Percussion's Rhythmyx solution offered the best overall fit for our specific needs," said Michael Littell, Associate Director – Internet Marketing at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business. "We plan to use Rhythmyx as the core component of a comprehensive Web system designed to operate as a flexible framework of Web sites, and as an institutional-level strategic marketing tool."
"Empowering content owners, by giving them the ability to readily capture and publish meaningful content and to make changes rapidly in their appropriate areas, are some of the most visible improvements we expect from our Percussion solution," he added. "We'll also be using Rhythmyx to apply brand and navigational consistency, at an institutional level, across our extensive Web presence."
A primary factor in Kelley's decision to work with Percussion was Rhythmyx's De-Coupled Delivery architecture, which will enable the school's production Web servers to continue to deliver content, regardless of whether the CMS environment is up and running. This is a critical requirement, which the Kelley School found to be satisfied by Rhythmyx. On the other hand, the majority of competing systems require some type of agent or connector component on the production servers that rely on communication with the CMS to continue delivering content. Such connections force the production systems to depend on the CMS, which becomes a single point of failure – if the CMS goes down, content delivery stops. The Rhythmyx's De-Coupled Delivery architecture eliminates the need for these connections, and content continues to be delivered, regardless of CMS status.
"Content management at universities presents a number of unique challenges, not the least of which is how to support the creativity of individuals, departments and various campus communities while simultaneously accommodating institutional branding and marketing goals," said Barry Reynolds, CEO of Percussion Software. "A university ECM solution also must support large numbers of content authors in a cost-effective manner that is not overly dependent on expensive technical staff or IT support services. Moving to a comprehensive enterprise content management solution like Rhythmyx will enable the Kelley School to meet these demanding requirements and get timely, accurate and dynamically changing information into the hands of students, faculty, staff and prospective students and families."
About the Kelley School of Business
The Kelley School of Business at Indiana University has been a leader in American business education for nearly 85 years. With an enrollment of over 5,000 students, it is among the premier business schools in the country and is consistently ranked in the top tier by U.S. News & World Report. Its MBA degree program has been a long-time fixture in Business Week's listing of top-20 graduate business programs and currently ranks No. 18. The Princeton Review this year ranked the school No. 1 for “best-quality MBA teaching.” Its students are among the favorites of corporate recruiters who are looking for promising managers, marketing talent and finance graduates.
