December 04, 2002

Survey Results

A few weeks ago we asked districts and schools in our region to fill out a survey about content management. You can read the results in a 1.3MB PDF document. The highlights:


  • Seventeen school districts, one private school, and one tribal school completed the survey.

  • Most participants are relying on traditional communications tools, like print publications, rather than web publishing.

  • Most participants see the value of the web increasing in the next year.

  • The most pressing issues identified by the participants were:

    • Challenges in keeping web content current.

    • Lack of resources to devote to web publishing.

    • Difficulty de-centralizing the content creation and publishing (including making a system easy enough for end-users to use).

    • Problems keeping the look and content of the website consistent.


  • Most districts are using more than one web publishing strategy; some content is served from databases, while other pages are either plain HTML or making use of templates.

  • Only two participants are currently evaluating a content management system (CMS).

  • When considering a CMS, the top feature priorities are ease-of-use for non-technical contributors and workflow/approval.

  • Most districts are interested in maintaining a system at their district location rather than having it hosted elsewhere.

  • The participants have a varied technical infrastructure, with Microsoft as the predominant platform.

  • At least one district mentioned open source software as a potential CMS solution.

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