Aarhus University (AU) in Denmark announced in late June that they have selected Typo3 as their new common content management system for the entire university. Typo3 beat Sitecore in the final stages of the evaluation and will be implemented by Linkfactory, a small Danish consultancy.
Aarhus University selected their existing CMS (a local system called SIAB) back in 2003 and did their homework before deciding upon Typo3. They did several interviews with other universities to learn about their experiences. Aarhus University also looked beyond the CMS and carefully considered the system integrators as they needed help for the implementation. The main criteria for selection was the long term prospect for the CMS coupled with scalability, as the Typo3 solution will gradually accommodate all faculties and departments over the coming two years.
According to the publicly available project plan (in Danish), the project team has since been busy planning the migration. AU seem determined to build their own skills and have graciously shared a detailed report from their visit to the 2009 Typo3 conference, which was held in Frankfurt in September. The conference attracted more than 350 people from 30 countries. To quote from the update:
The mantra for future development of TYPO3 is “strong defaults – expert options” – a slogan we fully support.
I’ve previously compared Typo3 to a solid German car, which resulted in many constructive comments; partly because it publicly asked about the future of Typo3. It seems to me that Typo3 is growing in popularity and has a very strong foothold in higher education in the German-speaking market. When the upcoming version 5 hits the market it will be with a brand new interface. As usual, only time will tell how smooth the experience will be for contributors and how painless the upgrade experience will be for existing customers.
While open source systems are generally popular among higher education, there is still no clear market leader. To share some individual examples, King’s College in London uses Microsoft SharePoint, New York University uses Day Software and the University of Southern Denmark uses Sitecore – so no clear trends here. You can meet all the institutions on our higher education track in Aarhus in November.
Full disclosure: Aarhus University is a member of the J. Boye Community of Practice. J. Boye was involved in the CMS selection at Aarhus University
Ric van Westhreenen October 9th, 2009 9:29
In the Netherlands, three major universities use TYPO3: TU Delft, TU Eindhoven and Erasmus University Rotterdam. Also some parts on the University of Amsterdam (UvA) use TYPO3.
In the Netherlands, TYPO3 is clearly the marketleader.
Joost van Berckel October 10th, 2009 9:29
The position of TYPO3 in the Netherlands is growing rapidly, like Ric already had mentioned. Since 2003 I was starting to work with TYPO3 at the TU Delft. At that time it was used for only one small website, but after some months of playing around with this great open source cms we found out that TYPO3 was going to be used a lot at the TU Delft.
Sigurd Magnusson October 12th, 2009 9:29
You’re right that there’s no market leader, but that open source systems are typically focussed on by the higher education market.
The University of Ohio Libraries recently did a presentation on their review of open source CMS software, which reviewed several packages including Drupal, Modx, Plone, TYPO3, before proceeding to work with SilverStripe. The slides show they went to quite some effort on reviewing the various packages, and it shows comparative scores against usability, etc:
http://connect.ala.org/files/47927/silverstripe_cms_selection_implementation_pdf_11804.pdf
Jeg er en URL-hacker | Artikel | J. Boye December 7th, 2010 9:29
[...] I stil med Aarhus Universitet og mange andre, så benytter Topdanmark det open source-baserede content management system Typo3 til deres hjemmeside. Et hurtigt opslag på Typo3 dokumentationen afslører ellers at man let kan beskytte sider og filer med en adgangskode. En anden mulighed er at lave tidsstyret visning. Man må formode, at et større selskab som Topdanmark godt ved dette, men af en eller anden grund vælger de alligevel at lægge fortroligt materiale ud på åbent tilgængelige URLer. [...]