For organizations with a large number of web properties to manage–because of sheer size, numerous departments, multiple locations or open access to employees and students–a content management system (CMS) is the best tool. This week Pantheon Systems, Inc., a powerful website management platform for WordPress and Drupal, announced Pantheon for EDU: the only product of its kind designed to support schools in managing large, sprawling websites by providing organization, security, centralization and ultimately control of the entire system.

With Pantheon for EDU any school can manage an entire portfolio of websites and provides a high level of role-based permission management. With Pantheon, IT Teams can provide templates across every member and department to create centrally controlled branding–and each individual site can access these templates and modify them for their own user experience.

In a university environment there are a multitude of departments all of which will have their own websites. Each department also may have its own IT department, web design team, and specific audience–one size does not fit all, but standardized branding and centralized management still benefits even IT teams on the periphery of the organization.

Pantheon for EDU provides a dashboard that gives broad, granular control for centralized management. Source: Pantheon Systems, Inc.

For example, a university may use Pantheon to permit the Astronomy Club to make and control their own website. With a central template codebase, minimal effort is needed for the club’s (possibly single person) IT team to build a website that looks like it belongs on the school’s website and even add apps that connect it with the rest of the school’s ecosystem (e.g. students can use their login to access an internal calendar, leave messages, etc.)

This increases the ease of joining the university’s web for the club; but it also has huge benefits for the security of the university. Any website connected to a university represents part of that school’s public face–should one of these websites get hacked (due to outdated code or a student running a site they don’t have time or expertise to administer) it looks bad for the school. With Pantheon, the university gets centralized control over the code used behind those websites and can even shut one down remotely if suspicious activity is detected.

A platform many universities already use

As of today, 19 of the top 20 universities run on Pantheon including ASU, Columbia, Cornell Medical, Harvard, MIT, Rice, Stanford, and UC Berkeley. Pantheon also announced more than 50 agencies have joined Pantheon for EDU Partner Specialists in order to support universities including including Cheeky Monkey, ForumOne, Kalamuna, MediaCurrent, Palentir, Spark451, SystemSeed and Unicon.

The launch of this new educational institution focused product adds to the power behind Pantheon’s management platform. Last month, Pantheon announced an enterprise-level offering of the same platform (which Pantheon for EDU mirrors in feature set and capability).

Pantheon for EDU is now available to any any institution with a .edu top level domain (TLD) for free to set up and design in the dev sandbox, subscription is only required once the site launches to the public. Just sign up on Pantheon’s website and it’s instantly available.

photo credit: dcJohn via photopin cc