Updated: Uni of Sydney to rollout Adobe Marketing Cloud

The University of Sydney is rolling out Adobe’s Marketing Cloud platform in a bid to ramp up its digital interactions with prospective and current students, staff and alumni.

The education institution has purchased Adobe’s Experience Management, Target and Analytics products to manage its Web content and digital assets and is also giving 7500 students and staff access to Adobe’s Creative Cloud offering.

In a statement, University of Sydney director of marketing and communications, Marian Theobald, said Adobe was selected after conducting an evaluation process for its robustness, agility and multi-device functionality. The university is currently using Teamsite for its CMS, with digital assets on shared drives.

“Our website is now as fundamental to our operations as our lecture theatres and laboratories,” she commented. “If we are to continuously develop a website that is both engaging and usable for our wide range of stakeholders, we need a CMS that is robust, flexible and clever.”

Given the size of the website, Theobald told CMO that Uni of Sydney is taking a phased approach to rolling out the Adobe stack. The evaluation and procurement process was jointly led by marketing and communications and ICT, and university staff from several other faculties and professional service units also participated in the process.

"The program will have quarterly releases starting from December 2014, and we are scheduled to complete the rollout by the end of 2016," she said.

In the first phase of the rollout, analytics will mainly be used to support evidence-based decision making. Theobald did, however, flag plans to use Analytics and Test/Target to deliver a personalised experience to the user.

"We are particularly interested in being able to deliver a more personalised experience for international students looking for specific information on the website," she said.

The university sectors as a whole is facing significant digital disruption with the rise of competitive online learning providers as well as massive open online courses (MOOCs), which are often offered at no charge. The University of Sydney’s IT director, Mat Myers, said the Adobe platform rollout strongly supports its ongoing efforts to be a digitally savvy institution.

“Our move to Adobe Marketing Cloud strongly aligns with the University’s digital strategy to facilitate a connected and more engaged university community through the introduction of leading edge technology and services,” he said.

Theobald said success metrics include increased stakeholder satisfaction as a result of a more usable website and a reduction in the time needed to make changes; better availability and performance of both the website and the content management system; and the development of a website that meets the University’s Web strategy principles of being governable, rewarding, engaging and usable.

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