The OSU Horticulture Department has had many public websites initiated by individual faculty, located on multiple servers and employing varied technologies. As a result, some of those websites languished or became security risks; many had no search functionality or clear site navigation. Additionally, without a private departmental content management system (CMS), administrative committee work was conducted primarily by email and document sharing on intranet drives, which were not always available to campus personnel.
We will demonstrate and discuss an OSU Department of Horticulture initiative that addresses these concerns. We have implemented a single, centralized CMS with these features:
1. Public group information branded with its own graphic theming.
2. Private group collaborative workspaces, each with its own leaders and membership.
3. User-friendly tools so public content can be easily developed, published, and updated by groups of faculty, staff and collaborators.
4. Multiple security levels for view/edit access to content and documents.
5. Several ways of tagging and organizing content types to allow diverse stakeholders to easily find information.
6. Since the system is supported by multiple faculty and staff members, it is sustainable over the longer term (it takes a village to support a website).
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