The City University of New York streamlines policy content management with Microsoft Word and Intelligent Content

SITUATION

The City University of New York (CUNY) serves over 450,000 students in its degree programs and adult, continuing, and professional education programs making it the nation’s largest urban public university.

CUNY did not have a cohesive system to disseminate University-wide policy documents. It was imperative that the University community be aware of, and involved in, decision making processes and their outcomes. As part of continuing efforts to further integrate the entities of the City University of New York, the University undertook the creation of a website to disseminate University-wide policy documents.

In designing the Policy Documents Site (PDS), the PDS Team recognized not only a website was needed, but an entire information management system. The team began developing the framework for managing the large number of policy documents to be disseminated from the site https://policy.cuny.edu. The ultimate expression of the PDS System would be an online interface providing users with multiple modes of access such as PDF, HTML, Index, and Search, for policy documents updated in real-time.

The approach chosen for realizing this model was the design and construction of a system combining multiple open-source and commercial software components. This approach allowed the PDS Team to weave together the best purpose-built software available—capitalizing on the stability of established products, while achieving a more agile system than possible with available end-to-end solutions.

While older documents were only available in a hard copy, current policy documents were available in Microsoft Word DOC format. The PDS Team needed to select a format suitable for archiving and dynamic content management. Desired requirements were:

• Open format
• Platform independent
• Human readable
• Hierarchically structured
• Web ready or readily made so

SOLUTION

TheXML was the clear choice for such a format and the PDS team began looking for a software to easily support the creation, editing, and XML from complex policy documents in Microsoft Word.

The PDS Team was seeking software capable of doing the following:

• Handle the diverse complex hierarchical structures of policy documents
• Allow flexibility in defining structure of XML output files
• Allow mapping of elements in input files to elements in output files
• User-friendly graphical interface allowing conversion of updated documents by document administrators
• Ability to generate error reports to guide error correction
• Allow for error correction in both input and output files

The PDS Team evaluated four products to compare their performance. Based on these tests, the PDS Team found only one product, Intelligent Content software by Ictect, met the University’s needs.

Commenting on the software, Steven Quinn, Information Services Manager said, “We selected Ictect's Intelligent Content software as it was the only one that successfully addressed the document and human factor constraints involved.”

By building an information management system capable of dynamic online content generation, the PDS Team was able to provide the University community with an up-to-date source for policy documents. Using Intelligent Content software allows the PDS Team to shape the document conversion to fit University policy documents and staffing, rather than reshaping documents and staffing to fit software.

Ictect is pleased to have provided the City University of New York with their patented Intelligent Content software. The user-friendly software allowed CUNY authors and policy experts to effectively convert policy documents from Microsoft Word DOC format to XML.