Supporting the arts

With more than 35,000 visitors to its public Web site each month, the Dallas Museum of Art wants to ensure that its content is dynamic and up-to-date. Toward that goal it enlisted the help of

Stellent Enterprise Content Management.

The solution has provided museum staff with enterprisewide workflow and collaboration features that help with review and approval of Web site content. The new system also automates the museum's content publishing processes, enabling non-technical content authors to publish their own information on the site. The museum's previous method of circulating site content via e-mail attachments often clogged the e-mail server and led to version control problems.

"Web-related business processes that in the past took up to four weeks to complete are now turned around in minutes or days," says Lance Fordham, Webmaster for the Dallas Museum of Art. "In addition, we no longer have outdated content on our Web site, and the accuracy of the content has improved since the content authors are now directly contributing it to the site rather than me, the Webmaster, retyping the content."

According to a recent news release from Stellent, the implementation allows 250 museum employees from various departments including curatorial, accounting, development, marketing and education to contribute Web site content by dragging and dropping it in its native format—such as Microsoft Word—directly into the Stellent system using industry standard Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV).

After content is submitted and approved, Stellent Site Studio converts the content into Web formats and delivers it to the museum's Web site.

"Stellent's ability to dynamically convert native documents into Web site content on the fly was a critical factor in our selection of this software," says Homer Gutierrez, director of IT for the museum. "This capability allows us to put Web site publishing and maintenance into the hands of content authors—regardless of their technical abilities. As a result, new content is available on our Web site faster, and the site as a whole is more current."

In the future, the Dallas Museum of Art plans to integrate its customer relationship management and collections management systems with the new technology.