Assignment 3/CMS

I conducted this interview with Keith Belton, Webmaster for the Lee County Public Library System in Ft. Myers, Florida. The LCPL system has 12 branches, and a yearly budget of approximately 28 million.
I had been monitoring the LCPL website for the past 9 months. Within the last month a new website was introduced, providing more up to date, user friendly information, showcasing all the programs the library offers, links to use the latest technology and with a great “splash,” reflecting Library 2.0 (See: http://www.library.lee-county.com).
Mr. Belton relayed this information during the week by way of email/phone correspondence. This is what the correspondence revealed. There were two IT departments, one belonging to the county, one belonging to the library. To make the distinction, County-IT and Library-IT will be used. Lee County as a whole was looking for a new CMS for their intranet. The library was instrumental in selecting what they finally used and in testing it, they were the guinea pigs.
Mr. Belton noted the library needed to find a way to broaden staff contribution to their intranet and website. They also needed a platform that their outsourced/ contracted County-IT department could support. Apparently the County-IT people were very Microsoft oriented. They ended up using Microsoft Sharepoint (not open source). It could be used for both intranet and website (one learning curve), and would be supported by the County-IT. The old intranet system (Revise) was very limited and not very amenable to distributing content generation. The old website was a static website that had no CMS, and was a bottleneck for getting information updated in a timely way. The library beta tested about six months on the intranet and then another four months on the external website.
The learning curve was very steep, Sharepoint was not for the faint of heart or for those without a lot of MS server setup knowledge (provided by their County-IT department). Keith also looked at Drupal and Joomla, and sometimes wished they had gone that way, since the administration was much simpler. (That was his opinion of Drupal!) He has always been an open source advocate, stating if they had been a stand-alone library looking for a CMS, he would have gone with Drupal. At one point during the months-long process of setting up Sharepoint, he went home and setup a Drupal server in 3 hours! (That amazed me after the information that our class has learned about Drupal!)
The advantages of integrating with the county-wide system, and of having one platform for county and internal library use were just too great to pass up. He continued to say that their case was special, but they have been able to utilize it well. “There have been times we felt like we were wrestling with a (Microsoft) bear, but the benefits have been worth it.” The situation where the county was adopting this platform as a whole and providing setup support made the decision a good one.
Keith did not feel this had been a top down decision. County- IT built a test intranet server just to evaluate the technology and invited the library to try it. It worked very well for them as an intranet. The county was looking for a more robust platform that could integrate with office and county HR workflows, etc. They really liked Sharepoint as an intranet platform. The county-wide platform was becoming obsolete as well, and so they all saw the advantages of using the same platform.
I asked him if they steered away from Open Source due to security reasons since the county was involved. Keith thought it wasn’t so much of steering away as focusing on what they knew and could support well. LCPL has a good deal of autonomy, and if they had really decided that Drupal or something like that was what they wanted, they would have been able to argue strongly for that and gotten it. If that had happened more of the support would have been on the shoulders of the 5 person automation department of the library.
As a county agency it probably was more cost effective to go with Sharepoint over Open Source, as the library had no direct costs for the system. The cost to the county was around $100K, so an Open Source would have been much cheaper upfront. Integration with the existing system and utilizing the existing expertise of the County- IT folks were also big benefits.
I learned that technology needs can be satisfied in ways that benefit more than one organization. In this case, what worked for the county could also work for the library, saving money and man hours. Though Open Source may have been the first choice of the library IT staff, working with the county relieved them of any cost associated with Sharepoint,and the library gained extra support form the County-IT department. If they had gone with Open Source, the five person Library-IT staff would have also had the responsibility of the supporting the county, which Keith says would have put a strain on them. For LCPL it was a win-win situation.

Keith Belton kindly gave me permission to use his name and the name of the Lee County Public Library System, Ft. Myers, Florida.