<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">You will hear different stories from a variety of places. Developers in education are no different than developers in other areas and will be evangelical about solutions.<div><br></div><div>I cannot fault them, any solution in large organizations requires work. Decisions can be based on knowledge, budget, enterprise requirements, data portability, and a host of other factors. Of course cooperation, trust, and the final outcome are probably the biggest areas that my administrators looked at.</div><div><br></div><div>In my case I run a website (<a href="http://www.nicholls.edu">http://www.nicholls.edu</a>) where roughly 80% is built with single installations of WordPress. I ran though several CMS solutions, but was forced to make a quick decision on my own. I am the only staff member doing web-work, so I had the leverage to choose a tool that I could deal with quickly and efficiently. At the time WPMU was not an option, but it is sure on my wish list now. It started as a choice, so departments could chose between static HTML and WordPress. I did leave the door open for other choices (drupal, joomla), but no one has desired anything else. </div><div><br></div><div>My focus was on end users, so the solution needed to be easy to use, easy to train, and easy to troubleshoot. My primary users are administrative secretaries, so the skill level is mostly based on desktop word-processing applications. After training an entire division of roughly 30 administrators to use Dreamweaver, WordPress became a welcome replacement. </div><div><br></div><div>I did one meeting with our Web Committee and showed WordPress 2.0 in action. I showed a couple of other solutions both OSS and Commercial. The questions I encountered were:</div><div><br></div><div>1. Cost?</div><div>2. Development? How hard is it to replace you or this WordPress thing?</div><div>3. Time frame for conversion of existing sites?</div><div>4. Extendability? </div><div>5. How can this fit into other stuff like on-line learning and student / employee services systems.</div><div><br></div><div>No. 5 was left to a wait and see since we going through a massive upgrade to those systems, but our IT department likes to keep some separation between public and private systems anyway.</div><div><br></div><div>The easy answer:</div><div><br></div><div>It depends on your organization and those involved in the decision.</div><div><br></div><div>Jess</div><div><br></div><div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div>[ :P ] jess planck - <a href="http://funroe.net/">http://funroe.net</a></div></div></div><div><br></div><div><div><div>On Jan 30, 2009, at 6:58 AM, Abhishek wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; ">My business schools (Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta) is one of the top ranked B schools in India and hence the site needs to be spot on, on the first try. Also there might be some scope for outsourcing the template design. However all of the WP activity in education I've been seeing is in the blogs space, and I'm wondering if I should explore some other options (like Drupal, Joomla) for the design of the actual site. I'm pretty confused in this regard.</span></blockquote></div><br></div><br><br><div apple-content-edited="true"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><br></div></div></span></div></body></html>