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UMass Memorial Health Care
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>> site information
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When UMass Memorial Health Care System -the largest health care system in Central and Western Massachusetts – decided to launch a Web site, they knew that a content management system would be an important requirement for maintaining the site.
In evaluating content management solutions, UMass Memorial sought a tool that would easily enable non-technical contributors to add content to the site, within a controlled environment. According to Phil Clough, Director of Systems Administration, UMass Memorial also required that the content management system tie into their existing NT domain to authenticate users.
UMass Memorial evaluated a number of CMS solutions before selecting PaperThin’s CommonSpot Content Server. Ultimately the ability for UMass Memorial to develop and maintain the site in CommonSpot, and also implement NT Authentication, were the winning factors in the decision.
Initially, UMass Memorial launched an intranet site to allow doctors, staff and departments within the multi-hospital system to communicate with each other and share information. According to Clough, while many within the organization were initially skeptical about the value of an intranet, the technology quickly proved its value.“A great example of this was one staffer who used to spend a week each month printing out and distributing financial reports. Now using the intranet site that task takes less than a day – a tremendous time savings.”
Following the successful proof of concept of the intranet site, UMass Memorial launched its Internet site, , in the summer of 2001. With the exception of initial training and consulting by PaperThin, UMass Memorial has completed all of the development for both sites in house.
For the UMass Memorial intranet, the site designers were able to build a simple template hierarchy that allows them to control the look and feel of each page on the site. Almost all of the 400-500 pages were created using just two CommonSpot templates. All of the site's navigational components and layout characteristics are controlled in the base template, thus greatly simplifying the content contributor’s job of supplying content. UMass Memorial has also employed several of CommonSpot’s personalization features, including scheduled elements and targeted audiences, to ensure that sensitive financial data is only available to those users who have proper permissions. The scheduled element has also been used effectively as a doorway to other external applications. An example of that, according to Web Team Leader David West, was enabling physicians access via CommonSpot to a restricted Child Protection Group database. Recently, as a result of being able to access and analyze data from this database via CommonSpot, one UMass Memorial physician was able to apply for and receive grant money for additional research.
Within UMass Memorial 's 700+ page Internet site, several interactive applications are provided to the end-user. One example is the heavily used ‘Find a Doctor’ feature, which allows users to search for a doctor, and query and filter results based on geography, specialty and other criteria. By leveraging CommonSpot's powerful integration features and object-based architecture, UMass Memorial was able to easily embed custom-developed applications directly into the site's framework.
At present, content contributors from ten different departments across the organization are responsible for updating the intranet and Internet sites.“We have noticed that as users have become comfortable with CommonSpot, they are coming up with innovative ideas for how to deploy the tool to help them do their jobs more effectively, and bringing us suggestions for new features and enhancements,” Clough noted. “Content contributors also appreciate the fact that no additional software is required to use CommonSpot – they can just navigate to their browser and start updating,” he added.
“Overall we have been very pleased with how CommonSpot has helped us to achieve our objectives on the Web, and we are looking forward to expanding its usefulness for the organization,” added Clough.
Site Information
URL: www.ummhc.org
Site Type: Internet,Intranet
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