The Web Group will be working hard over the next six months to make fundamental and exciting updates to YSM’s web presence. This article is the first in a series I’ll be releasing over the next few weeks to discuss each roadmap item in more depth and how it will affect web editors and website owners. To get started, I’ll give you a quick overview of our roadmap for 2014:
Profile System
The school’s existing profile system is reaching the end of its lifecycle and we began the process to completely rebuild the system from the ground up in late 2013. Our development team, a combination Yale employees, offshore programmers in Belarus, and a vendor in NYC, is making excellent progress. The new system is going to be beautiful with crucial enhancements that will make maintaining a profile and organization even easier. We are on track to launch the new system in November 2014.
Tridion 2013
In March we began the process to upgrade to the latest version of SDL Tridion, the School of Medicine’s web content management system. The new version has several new features that will make editing your web content easier and dramatically increase publishing speed. We plan to launch it in November 2014.
Template 3.0
The school’s current web templates (Template 2.0) were launched in September 2010 and they are showing their age. We recently began a project to update the template infrastructure and design, which will not only update the look and feel of the school’s templates but also add essential new functionality, including native support for mobile and tablet devices. This is an exciting opportunity to improve the school’s core website infrastructure, improve search engine optimization (SEO), modernize the underlying code, enhance the designs, and improve our user’s experience. The new templates will launch with the Profile System and Tridion 2013 in November 2014.
There are many other important ancillary projects related to the Profile System rebuild, the upgrade to Tridion 2013 and Template 3.0 that I’ll introduce in a later article. As you can imagine, we have a tremendous amount of work to do between now and November!
We’ll be soliciting your input and feedback on these projects in the coming months. Our next Web Meeting will be in April and will be the perfect opportunity for you to ask us more detailed questions. In the meantime, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me with any questions or comments.