Bowling Green State University Taps Percussion's Rhythmyx ECM to Manage Large-Scale, Multi-Site Web Presence

WOBURN, MA - June 20, 2005 - Percussion Software, a leading developer of practical software solutions enabling customers to maximize the value and quality of enterprise content, today announced that Ohio's Bowling Green State University (BGSU) is using Percussion's Rhythmyx Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system to manage Web-based communications to its audience of more than 50,000 students, faculty, staff, alumni, and prospective students and their families. BGSU's Rhythmyx solution is designed to significantly improve the university's primary means of communicating its brand – its extensive Web presence, which includes hundreds of Web sites for campus departments and organizations.

According to Bruce Petryshak, Bowling Green State University's Chief Information Officer, Rhythmyx presents information via the Web in an organized, concise, current and consistent manner. "We've found that Rhythmyx meets our needs by effectively managing content in a way that facilitates content reuse and consistency," he said. "The flexibility that it offers with regard to supporting the university's intellectual property and integration with other University applications is one of its major benefits. Rhythmyx is playing an important role in our multi-year effort to align our enterprise IT strategy – driving content for multi-channel delivery to other strategic systems and integrating with applications campus-wide."

Major requirements for the CMS included: gaining a standardized workflow for content review and approval; reducing duplication of effort with automated content sharing; easy management to keep content current and accurate; maintaining look-and-feel and branding consistency on an institutional basis; ease of use for both technical and non-technical users; and improved recovery of lost data.

"We looked at about a dozen competitors who had enterprise CMS tools, narrowed it down to five and then examined the pros and cons of each product and rated each vendor on a number of criteria," explained Deb Wells, BGSU's Manager of Web Development. As a result of the evaluation, BGSU selected Percussion's Rhythmyx Enterprise Content Management solution.

Rhythmyx's success at Bowling Green State University is due to the many benefits the system has delivered, including:

• Ease of use for both technical and non-technical users associated with managing and publishing content;
• Reduced duplication of effort by providing an automated system for sharing and easily reusing content;
• Increased ability for shared support;
• Improved capacity to recover lost data;
• Flexible workflow for approval of changes to content;
• Reduced dependence on IT technical staff to implement simple content changes;
• Reduced training time for the hundreds of end user content contributors; and,
• Ensuring that information on BGSU Web sites is timely, accurate and consistent, with a consistent look-and-feel – without IT intervention.

Everything about BGSU's Web presence is large-scale. With 20,000 students, 4,000 faculty and staff, plus a large alumni base, and about 11,000 families of prospective students annually, the BGSU Web site audience easily exceeds 50,000 people at any point in time. The site itself consists of hundreds of Web sites for the many campus departments and organizations. These include some 120 different areas under the Arts & Science college alone. There are also 42 sororities and fraternities, the University alumni, development and marketing departments, and 30 different groups under Student Affairs.

BGSU is well on its way to achieving its aggressive goals for both content management and authorship. The current 10,000 pages of content under management by its Rhythmyx system is expected to grow to an estimated 40,000 Web pages, while the initial number of about 650 content contributors is expected to grow to about 1,000.

To view an in-depth case study of BGSU's Rhythmyx implementation, read the case study .