Step One: Your Team, Expectations and Timelines
Step One: Your Team, Expectations and Timelines
Before you begin the process of site migration, it is important to establish the following:
- Team - Determine who will be involved and what specific roles each person will play.
- Expectations - Understand the time commitment and skills required to become a KU CMS site administrator to create and maintain the site.
- Timeline - Establish a timeline and milestones for your site migration project
Assembling Your Site Migration Team
Existing Teams
If you already have a team in place that can address site migration – great! This is a good time to review the following considerations and determine if you need to add anyone to the team and/or update your processes.
Team Members and Roles
If you are assembling a site migration team, here are the things that your team members will need to address:
Content:
- Who will review all site content?
- Who will create/write any new content?
- Who needs to approve all site content before launch?
- If individuals or groups outside the team (e.g., department chairs, subject matter experts, etc.) need to review and/or approve the site content, identify who those individuals and groups, and inform them of the project and your timeline as soon as possible.
Site Creation:
- Who will build the site and individual pages?
- When/how will those individuals receive training and develop skills (See “Expectations” below)
Pre-Launch Approvals:
- Who needs to approve the website before launch?
Official Site Review and Launch:
- Who is responsible for submitting the official request for site approval and launch?
Site Maintenance:
- Who will maintain the site after it is launched?
Establish a Team in Microsoft Teams
As you are getting underway and assembling your site creation/migration team, consider establishing a “Team” channel in Microsoft Teams. Each “Team” channel has its own conversation thread and shared file storage. There are many other collaboration tools you can add-on. See Microsoft Teams for detailed information, including how to create a Team.
Expectations
Time and Knowledge/Skills Required to be a CMS Site Administrator
CMS site administrators are responsible for creating/building CMS sites and often play critical roles in day-to-day site maintenance.
Becoming a CMS site administrator requires a time commitment to develop the skills and knowledge required to create sites and implement guidelines and best practices.
As teams and individuals are scoping their site creation or migration project, it may also be important to provide leadership and supervisors with clear estimates for the time and investment required to become a CMS Site Administrator.
Recommended Training and Skill Building for KU CMS – Sunflower Site Administrators
Intermediate to Advanced KU CMS (Drupal 7) Users
- Approximately 3 – 5 hours of training, skill/knowledge building
- Recommended training:
- Workshops for KU CMS - SUNFLOWER are in development.
- Recommended skill building and knowledge development:
- Full review - New KU CMS - Sunflower version of cms.ku.edu (available in mid-July)
New KU CMS Users:
- Approximately 10 – 15 hours of training, skill/knowledge building
- Recommended training:
- Workshops for KU CMS - SUNFLOWER are in development
- Recommended skill building and knowledge development:
- Full review - New KU CMS - Sunflower version of cms.ku.edu (available in mid-July)
Ongoing Site Maintenance
In addition to the initial investment in training and knowledge/skill building, site administrators also need to understand their time commitment as site maintainers.
Regular Updates
How much time is needed for regular day-to-day site maintenance varies for each KU CMS site. To estimate the likely time investment, consider the following:
- Size and scope of your website
- How often the information on your site changes
- How active your stakeholders are in updating the content they oversee
Scheduled Site Reviews
We strongly recommend that each CMS site schedule at minimum a bi-annual review of the full website to identify out of date content, broken links, and new opportunities to improve the user experience. The scheduled reviews will likely involve site administrators, but may also include many other team members. We recommend scheduling your site reviews and assigning responsibilities to specific team members well in advance.
Site Updates Calendar
We recommend using a shared calendar or other formal process to manage regular updates to your site throughout the year. Calendaring tools in Microsoft Outlook, Teams and SharePoint provide supported options.
See howto.ku.edu for information about calendaring in Outlook, SharePoint and Microsoft Teams.
Site Migration Project Timelines
Your migration team should establish clear and realistic milestones for your site migration project. As you establish your timeline goals, keep in mind that all current KU CMS sites in Drupal 7 must be migrated to KU CMS - SUNFLOWER no later than November 1, 2021.