Social Communications

Great title huh? You can take the boy out of SEO…etc etc

So, it’s been pretty much radio silence from me over the past few months – essentially I suppose because my role has changed a little and I’m involved in more long term projects than quick win ones.

One of the major things I’ve been working on at the OU is the mainstreaming of Drupal at the OU as the CMS of choice (for non-learning sites). There’s a whole load of work around the environment, security, update strategy, single sign on, theming etc that we’ve had to get to grips with but I’m reasonably confident that come October time the OU will have a great Drupal infrastructure in place. The aim is that it will be both manageable from a support perspective and flexible enough to give developers what they need in order to build the sites they want.

Alongside this work there’s also been some pretty deep thinking about how Drupal can serve as a web publisher for our Content Management System Documentum. Now I’m no Documentum expert so for those of you like me, think of Documentum as basically a big file repository (docs, images etc) where instead of 10 people each having a copy of a single document, the document exists in one place and ten people (if they have the right permissions) can work on it. This obviously means that there is a lifecycle to the document (i.e a version is no longer current) and that there is a LOAD of metadata associated with it.

The challenge in linking the two systems has been around how and where Drupal publishes the files, how Drupal accesses these files, how metadata is handled and how the lifecycle of a document is managed (e.g. how do i ensure that the version of the document on the drupal site remains the right one when the document is updated x number of times in Documentum?).

I’m not entirely sure how much detail I can go in to on this (at least one member of the team is hoping to do the conference circuit for a couple of years on the back of this work ) but it involves some nifty XML work and a rather cool OU custom Drupal module (which we will hopefully be sharing back to the community once we’re finished).

If everything goes well I’ll be able to show you the first live site with all this working by October. Fingers’ crossed!

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