Nottingham University Cuts Costs Using Install Once, Publish Anywhere CMS Strategy

Nottingham University - China Campus

Nottingham University is publishing a dedicated website for its Chinese campus - but has ducked the traditional staff and infrastructure costs thanks to its choice of content management software.

The university re-launched its main UK site almost a year ago using the flexible and user-friendly Contensis (http://www.contentmanagement.co.uk/) web CMS solution.

Now, with a need for a dedicated Chinese website (http://www.nottingham.edu.cn/en/index.aspx), that investment in Contensis is paying off in a number of ways. As well as having multi-lingual capabilities out-of-the-box, Contensis allows managers to publish unique content to servers situated around the globe - allowing for local delivery of customised content without the lag and processing overhead of relying on central servers to power all sites.

While most CMS products rely on central storage and serving of content, Contensis allows IT managers the flexibility to push multiple versions of their site to multiple locations around the world, often in different languages and on varying server platforms.

Tom Wright, web team leader for Nottingham University, said: "This is a huge step forward for us in ensuring that our international campuses make use of the same technologies, avoiding additional costs and simplifying support, which has been a significant milestone for us."

Because Contensis provides a multi-lingual module, and most of its modules are already available in eight languages, publishing a non-English website could barely be simpler.

Key site functionality is ready to be dropped into templates in those eight languages and a gallery that allows content mangers to instantly create pre-styled rich media content (without having to call on a designer) smoothes the process even further.

Richard Chivers, Chief Technical Officer of Contensis, explained: "Both Contensis and the team at Nottingham University are agreed that ninety per cent of everyday CMS requirements should be met out-of-the-box and, true to that, they have delivered their new Chinese site with only a few hours of consultancy from us".

"The capability to push a unique site out to servers in China, while being developed and maintained from the UK Contensis installation has saved time and costs for Nottingham University. We have other clients who use this capability to publish identical versions of the same site to servers around the world, to keep response times to a minimum for their users. It's all about flexibility. You can use Contensis in the way that you need to."