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INTRODUCTION
In the fall of 2004, Gettysburg College was faced with a major decision to select a content management system (CMS) to integrate with our campus system architectures. After investigating several vendor-based systems, we selected an open-source CMS. The open-source solution gave us the initial advantage to incorporate the best of breed functionality from the other vendor-based systems. We integrated the CMS with our home-grown portal (CNAV), and through it data stored in our ERP system (PeopleSoft) and our events system (R25). Our success also placed our campus in a position to leverage these systems into a future customer relationship management system. Gettysburg College desired to leverage the data filtering, group permissions, and business logic already developed and employed in CNAV to avoid duplication of effort in development and maintenance.
HOW WE DID IT
Working with DotMarketing, the original developers of the open source CMS we selected, we were trying to decide how to accomplish this data sharing between CNAV and the CMS system. The initial plan was to create a series of interfaces that would move data from one system to another. While this would work, it would result in a delay of data delivery, since we were not looking at developing real-time interfaces. What we implemented was using synonyms on the databases so that CMS could look directly at CNAV data. This eliminated the need for interfaces, gave us real-time updating of data and achieved our initial goal of not having to duplicate effort.
WHY WE DID IT
The benefit of putting CNAV in between the ERP and the CMS is that the ERP can be modified or replaced without our impacting the public-facing websites. By leveraging the business logic already developed it positioned both CNAV and CMS to be independent of the ERP vendor.
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Below are a few short video clips explaining some of the key integrations between our CMS and Portal:
HighEdWebDev
Poster
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