Case Studies

Finance Division Policy & Procedure Manual

FPPM Screen Shot 240x240financepolicy.unc.edu

The Finance Division's Policies and Procedures Manual assists University departments in the handling of their purchasing of goods and services, payroll activities, and the accounting of financial transactions. The previous version of the Policies and Procedure manual (also referred to as the "UNC Business Manual") served customers' needs but faced several challenges for both end-users and site administrators:

  • Topical categories needed to be reorganized so users could more quickly located relevant policies, procedures, and forms.
  • Policies and procedures did not have a consistent structure.
  • Overall information architecture and visual design was not always user-friendly and needed stronger Carolina branding.
  • Over the years the large volume of policy and procedure HTML files became very difficult to manage.
  • Without a content management system, administrators could not leverage features such as version history, security, life-cycle management, and metadata.

The Finance Division contracted Web Services to redesign and reorganize the Policies and Procedures Manual as well as implement the Oracle Universal Content Management (UCM) system.  Visitors to the site will discover that policies, procedures, and forms have been reorganized into an intuitive, user-friendly interface. Content can quickly be found either by search, browsing categories, or viewing a full numeric lists of documents. As a sub-site to finance.unc.edu, the look-and-feel is different, but maintains an easy transition for users who want to find important information for the handling of their financial transactions.

The manual was a perfect fit for the UCM. Policies, procedures, and forms, now exist in a structured repository that allows the division to enjoy many benefits of enterprise content management, such as search, revision history, metadata, workflow, and security profiles. Site editors no longer need to work with an HTML file in order to fix a typo or create a new policy, procedure, or glossary term. "WYSIWYG" page editing allows for quick creation and modification and policies and procedures can be edited with a familiar tool, Microsoft Word.

Early feedback has been positive. Jason Clemmons, a Manager in the Honors Department was impressed the with the results: "This looks wonderful! Thanks so much for gathering all this information in a central place and making it easy to read and navigate. I've updated my bookmarks already!" 

Information Technology Services Web Site

ITS Homepage Thumbnail Graphicits.unc.edu

Charged with implementing an enterprise Web content management system for the University, the Information Technology Services (ITS) division turned to its own Web Services team to accomplish the task. As part of CarolinaContent: Phase I, the team used the tried-and-true theory of immersion, working hand-in-hand with Oracle consultants to build a new ITS Web site using the software company’s Universal Content Management (UCM) tool. During the intense seven month implementation, team members served as students, developers and trainers.

The results of this Phase I project are many including an updated Web site which offers a refreshed design and consistent branding across all divisional, project and group sites. For site contributors, the new site is easy to access and allows for editing of Web content through a browser window (with no knowledge of html required). And, in addition to the new Web site, ITS has gained a new team of highly-skilled content management experts to deliver this resource to customers across the campus.

Project Resources:

Help & Support Web Site

Help Homepage Thumbnail Graphichelp.unc.edu

It is known to most as the primary resource for help and support information for the campus community, and as such, the management of technical documentation that feeds help.unc.edu is a top priority for the Information Technology Services (ITS) division. With the introduction of Oracle’s Universal Content Management (UCM) application, the ITS Web Services team spent seven months learning the tool and implementing the University’s new enterprise Web content management system, CarolinaContent, which replaced the previous Knowledge Management Tool (KMT). The new application now serves as the only content repository for the 2,500+ documents which make up help.unc.edu.

Help document contributors will find that the new application is quite different from the KMT, which required users to present documents in DocBook XML format.  CarolinaContent offers intuitive document processing, using style sheets in the well-known Microsoft Word software program, and allows users to post their documentation through an online interface (with no programming knowledge required).  Aside from being user-friendly and offering more functionality than the previous tool, CarolinaContent also provides long-term sustainability and protection serving as a vault for the University’s valuable technical documents.  The system aids in the delivery of technical support to campus customers, and its simple interface will allow more campus units to use it to supply their own collection of technical documents to the campus community.

Project Resource:

 

 

Return to Top