Just some interesting stuff coming out. Basically the vision is that we need structured ways of managing all content. But this may not (yet) be a solvable problem.

However, the speaker suggests that to implement a CMS to produce our ‘web site’ is not what we should be aiming for. The ‘web site’ should be a filtered view of content that the university is managing – so the CMS should be managing the content (not necessarily centrally) and then we should be able to delivered a filtered view of it – one version of which will be our web site.

This chimes really with the questions we are asking at RHUL. We have a vision of content management being harnessed for the benefit for the whole institution – we don’t just want a web content management system. However, while we tackle this larger problem, we still struggle with our web content.

Interestingly the speaker has just said that he worries that CMS tried to put structure on data which may be a false premise. Perhaps this is why the web stuff is where we start (that is the corporate web presence) – as this has a reasonable structure (or the institution feels control over the structure)