Down at the hospital we are in the process of moving a huge portion of our intranet into Movable Type — about 90%. This includes departmental sites, informational sites, applications and just about a bit of everything else.
It’s a really remarkable and interesting solution that I think will pay huge dividends. If it goes smoothly, which I have no doubt it should, we’re going to be able to provide very low cost (both in effort and monetarily) distributed authorship and increase functionality for both our users and stakeholders.
By providing them with not only a vehicle to update their pages themselves, but also with tools to provide news, announcements, knowledge management and more — we’re really taking a huge step forward in turning our intranet into something that should show some big enterprise-wide ROI. With out the cost and hassle of a “real” content management system.
We went down that road and found it sorely lacking.
All thanks to a simple blogging tool, some great plug-ins and some creative thinking. Oh, and for the standards geeks out there — the whole thing is built with valid (and tableless) XTHML and CSS as well.
I’ll get more into the details in later posts but I’ll give you a little background and an overview here. Both Brian Fling (my coworker) and I have been using Movable Type for personal project for a few years and we long ago came to realize that this is something we should begin to explore down at the hospital.
For our last redesign the team worked out a Movable Type solution for the home pages and “hub” pages so that the internal communications team could supply “channels” of news and announcements targeting the different audiences down at the hospital. We also used MT to run our events calendar.
When it came time to put solutions to goals, one of the larger being to reduce maintenance on our end with some kind of distributed authorship, we started to talk seriously about Movable Type and ways we could leverage it to help us out.
Both Brian and I had done some work with extending MT beyond the blog, pardon the expression, and his work on Seattleparent.org really proved that MT could be much more than a blogging technology.
I got to work on devising a “technology independent” Web standard template and Brian started working on a way to roll this MT solution out. What we came up with is a solution that, using MT, CSS and ASP includes, allows us to run almost the whole intranet off a handful of template pages.
At the same time we figured out ways to pull some of our applications into Movable Type. Things like our Policies and Procedures and Electronic Forms pages, which once were quite the bear to maintain, proved to be a natural fit and are now as easy as adding or editing an entry in MT.
We’re doing some unorthodox things so I imagine we’ll have to develop some kind of curriculum to get our content owners up and running, but I don’t think it’ll be any harder than if we’d had some other content management system set up.
What’s more is that we can leverage Movable Type itself to help us do this. We’re using a modified version of MT-Textile to help get our content owners up to speed with styling entries and we’ve put into place a few K-logs to help document problems, tips and tricks and anything else pertaining to this stuff. This has been a great help to the internal Web team.
It’s also become a supplementary project management tool.
I take a week off and I can come back, check the K-log to see what’s new or if any issues have popped up, etc. It’s really great. We hope to roll similar solutions our to other departments in the hospital as well.
In any case, you can probably tell I’m pretty excited about it. At some point I’ll try and get into a bit more detail about how it all works, but to be honest, it’s not all that complicated. Anyone with solid goals, a plan and a good understanding of the related technologies could put something like this into place.
Don’t let anyone tell you that you need to spend thousands of dollars to do distributed authorship or content management the right way. It’s simply not true.
