Managing multilingual content

Canadian business school HEC Montréal has chosen a new enterprise content management system to manage an increasing volume of content on its Web site, which is used by students, faculty, staff, alumni and prospective students. Among the goals is to place more emphasis on the needs of prospective students and to make the site a more effective recruitment tool.

The school has selected Rhythmyx Enterprise Content Management from Percussion Software.

"Our main goal in selecting the solution was to better manage the increasing volume, complexity and multilingual requirements of our Web content," says Kathleen Grant, director of communications and student recruitment at HEC Montréal. "In the next few years, we expect our Web page volume to scale from 40,000 to 60,000 or 70,000 pages or more.

"In addition, the complexity of our content management is increasing, not only because of higher volume, but also because the number of users and content authors is growing. We also appreciate the fact that Rhythmyx makes it easy to maintain French, English and Spanish versions of our pages—which is becoming a requirement for a growing percentage of our content."

Grant continues, "We have a large number of content contributors, so we like the way the solution supports a large number of communities representing groupings of authors. Most of our content contributors are native French speakers, so Rhythmyx's support for a French version of its Content Explorer interface for content contributing and editing is really useful."

Traffic on HEC Montréal's Web site approaches 1 million visitors per month. The new system will manage one public Web site and about 70 sub-sites. Plans call for an additional 250 individual faculty Web sites. The number of content contributors using the solution is expected to grow from an initial 40 to an eventual total of 340 content authors.