Managing and synchronizing content across various platforms and departments is a real challenge for universities. Since 2016, we’ve been at the forefront of developing sophisticated content syndication solutions, helping some of the largest organizations worldwide streamline their content management processes. Our expertise and solutions offer a proven pathway to not just overcome these challenges but to excel at them, ensuring that your university’s digital presence is both cohesive and compelling.
Imagine a future where your institution’s narrative is powerfully aligned across all channels, driving engagement, fostering innovation, and setting new benchmarks for academic excellence.
Solutions and Example Scenarios for Higher Education
At the heart of Content Sync lies a world of unparalleled possibilities for your digital content management. Our platform is designed with flexibility in mind, ensuring it can be precisely tailored to streamline critical publishing events, facilitate composable content across diverse markets, and oversee mass content updates with unmatched efficiency. Content Sync’s strength lies in its adaptability to your specific needs and workflows, offering a solution that evolves with your requirements. Let’s explore together how Content Sync can transform your content strategy, making it more dynamic, responsive, and successful than ever before.
1.
Content Syndication
Centralize the creation and update of general information pages, with automated distribution to all relevant sites. Enable customizations to reflect department-specific nuances.
Example Scenario: A university updates its history page to include recent achievements and accolades. Through Content Sync, this updated content is automatically reflected across hundreds of college, department, and program sites, allowing editors to track the update progress in real time. Content Sync’s compatibility guarantee with all contrib and custom modules ensures that the updated content is consistent. Departments have the ability to add specific milestones or achievements relevant to their discipline, offering a tailored view of the university’s history and success to prospective students, faculty, and partners. This approach ensures that the institution’s narrative is cohesive yet personalized, enhancing its appeal to a diverse audience.
2.
Composable Content
A central repository allows department editors to share and update standard content elements like course description paragraphs. Other departments can easily find and import these elements to quickly create new content like specific course listings.
Example Scenario: The Science Department updates a standard paragraph detailing the prerequisites for a new advanced biology course. This component is shared in the central repository. The Biology and Environmental Science departments can then import this updated component to quickly update their course listings, ensuring consistency in course information across departments or sites. Customization is available for each site to add specific faculty names or lab requirements.
3.
Content Cloud API
Enhance app development process by aggregating content from various departmental Drupal sites for a unified content repository with rapid content delivery leveraging auto-generated client libraries and a responsive image API.
Example Scenario: Aiming to globally engage prospective students, a university sets out to upgrade its digital offerings. It focuses on creating a series of applications, such as a virtual campus tour and a student portal, which require up-to-date, rich content from across its departments. Leveraging Content Sync’s Content Cloud, the university aggregates this content, ensuring it’s readily available and optimized for users worldwide, regardless of device. This approach allows for rapid development and deployment of high-quality, interactive applications. As a result, prospective students enjoy a comprehensive digital experience that showcases the university’s facilities, programs, and campus life, significantly enhancing the institution’s appeal and streamlining the recruitment process.
4.
Content Repositories
Faculty or department editors publish general educational content, such as course descriptions or research findings, into a central repository. Editors from different departments can search for and import this content into their local sites with ease, customizing it to add department-specific details or insights.
Example Scenario: A university’s central science department conducts groundbreaking research on climate change. The findings are summarized and published in the central content repository. Editors from the Environmental Studies, Geography, and Public Policy departments import the summary into their respective sites. Each adds their own contextual information, such as how the research impacts their specific field of study or suggestions for coursework that aligns with these findings. This allows for the broad dissemination of significant research while enabling each department to highlight its relevance to their disciplines.
5.
Event Information
Centralized event information publishing with automated updates for date, time, and venue changes. Local sites can add specific details like local speakers or related events.
Example Scenario: The university’s main events team organizes a virtual open day. Using Content Sync, they publish the event across all college and department sites. When a change occurs, they update the main event page, and all linked pages automatically updated, ensuring consistency and reducing manual update errors.
6.
Streamlined Content Unpublishing, Removal, and Reversion
Centralized management of content allows academic departments to unpublish, remove, or revert content across all associated sites, ensuring that only current and accurate information is accessible to students and faculty.
Example Scenario: A university’s research department prematurely publishes findings of a significant study that later turns out to require further verification. Using Content Sync, the central content team quickly reverts the published content to its previous state across all platforms where it was shared, including departmental sites and the main university news page. This action safeguards the institution’s reputation for accuracy and reliability in academic research until the findings can be confirmed.
7.
Taxonomy Terms / Tags
Automatically update and synchronize taxonomy terms (like course codes, department names, research topics) across all university and department sites to maintain consistent categorization of content.
Example Scenario: When a new interdisciplinary program is introduced, Content Sync updates the taxonomy across the university’s sites, adding terms for the new program. Departments involved can then tag relevant courses, faculty bios, and research projects with the new terms, ensuring students and researchers easily find all related information.
8.
News Articles & Press Releases
Syndicate news articles and press releases to relevant departmental sites with options for customization and additional commentary.
Example Scenario: A press release on a new research breakthrough in renewable energy is published by the university. Content Sync automatically routes this to related departments like engineering and environmental science. Content Sync automatically assigns a canonical URL to the content on target sites, preventing penalties for content duplication by search engines. Each department adds its unique perspective or related academic opportunities, such as relevant courses or seminars, before publishing to their audiences. This ensures cohesive and relevant dissemination of news, all while minimizing the manual effort required from different editorial teams and safeguarding SEO integrity.
9.
Research Publications
Automatically distribute new research publications across relevant department sites, with capabilities for departments to highlight specific papers or authors.
Example Scenario: A research team publishes a groundbreaking paper. Content Sync pushes this publication to all relevant departments, where it can be featured prominently on their sites. Departments can add their own commentary or highlight local contributors, enhancing visibility and recognition without the need for manual content requests.
10.
Biographies
Enable faculty and staff to manage their own biography content centrally, ensuring it is automatically updated across all university sites where their profile appears.
Example Scenario: A professor updates their biography with recent publications and achievements. Through Content Sync, this updated biography is automatically reflected across all departmental and research sites, ensuring that students, colleagues, and external visitors always have access to the most current information. This empowers faculty members to maintain their public profiles efficiently and ensures that the university’s digital presence showcases the achievements and expertise of its staff accurately.
11.
Course Materials
Facilitate the sharing of course materials and updates from the central repository to specific faculty or department sites, allowing for local additions like supplemental reading materials or faculty notes.
Example Scenario: A new course outline is approved and shared from the central academic repository. Faculty members receive the content automatically on their sites and can append localized content such as specific reading lists or faculty contact information. This centralized distribution saves time and ensures students receive comprehensive and up-to-date information.
12.
Policy Documents
Automatically distribute updated policy documents to relevant departments and student portals. Enable annotations or department-specific addendums.
Example Scenario: The university updates its academic integrity policy. Content Sync automatically pushes this update to all departmental sites and student portals. Departments can add annotations specific to their academic discipline, and student services can include links to resources for academic support and counseling services. This ensures students across all departments receive consistent information on policy changes, supplemented with resources relevant to their specific needs.
Implement a Successful Content Strategy at Scale
The scenarios highlighted here represent just the tip of the iceberg. With Content Sync, you’re empowered to configure and customize the system to align perfectly with your unique objectives and challenges.
Our examples are meant to illustrate the incredible versatility and adaptability of Content Sync across a wide range of scenarios—from enhancing the student experience with up-to-date course materials to showcasing groundbreaking research across departments. This is just the beginning. Imagine what you could achieve by leveraging Content Sync’s powerful features to create a more connected, dynamic, and informative digital ecosystem for your university. Explore a world of possibilities, where every piece of content serves a purpose and contributes to your institution’s overarching goals.
Leading Content Syndication Tool
Join our happy customers worldwide who are already using Content Sync. Many of the largest organizations in the world trust Content Sync with publishing even their most sensitive content.
Additional Resources
Dive deeper into the world of content syndication with our expertly crafted articles, designed to equip you with the knowledge to succeed:
