Which Content Management Systems Do Universities in Australia and New Zealand Use?

image with New Zealand fern overlayed on Sydney Opera House

Summary

  1. Australia and New Zealand’s 47 universities use 13 different content management systems (CMS) for their main university websites.
  1. This set of institutions has opted for proprietary solutions over open-source with Squiz Matrix being the dominant supplier at just over 40% market share. Drupal occupies second place and TERMINALFOUR, third.

Introduction

We have previously identified the content management systems that universities and colleges in Canada, the UK and the US use: see the links at the end of the post.  We’ve been meaning to cover other geographical areas for a while and we’ve finally getting that process underway.

We’ve addressed the two jurisdictions collectively: to ensure the post covers a critical mass of institutions and systems, and to recognise that universities and colleges look to their peers for validation of potential solutions and options.

Approach

From the relevant official government information sources for tertiary education in both countries we developed a list of 47 institutions: 40 in Australia and 7 in New Zealand.  Our review analyses the websites to which the principal domain for these 47 universities resolves.

We identify which content management system hosts a website through a mix of automation and detective work.Our automated detection uses our eQAfy service to examine a page’s metadata, cookies, files and directories referenced in page source, as well as the content of associated CSS and JS files.

In practice, about one third of sites announce their underlying CMS from the following metadata tags in the source code:

meta name="generator" content="Name of CMS Here"

or

meta content="Name of CMS Here" name="generator"

About 50% of sites reveal the underlying CMS through the files, directories referenced in the page source code. The remaining sites usually need a bit of non-invasive detective work to figure out which CMS is in use.

Results

Our sample group of 47 institutions uses 13 different content management systems. 21 universities use Squiz Matrix, which we note has also established a position in UK higher education, but has yet to enter the North American market.

On balance this set of universities has eschewed open-source solutions and favoured proprietary CMSs in an 80:20 ratio.  We’d be interested to hear the rationale for this preference: feel free to use the comments.

We also note TERMINALFOUR's presence in both Australia and New Zealand, complementing its expanding higher education market share in the UK and US.

Six systems have single customers. These resemble legacy systems that are likely to be replaced with solutions having larger pools of developers, better integration with other on-campus systems and emphasise digital marketing over simply serving content.

Figure 1. summarises our results:

Relative CMS market shares for the 47 universities in Australia and New Zealand that comprised our sample group

Figure 1: Relative CMS market shares for the 47 universities in Australia and New Zealand that comprised our sample group.

Previous Results

Three earlier posts covered the content management systems universities and colleges use in Canada, the UK and the US.  You can access the posts below:

Canadian University and College Content Management Systems: Which Content Management Systems (CMS) Do Canadian Universities Use?

UK University and College Content Management Systems: Which Content Management Systems (CMS) Do UK Universities Use?

US University and College Content Management Systems: What 2,575 US University Websites Told Us About Content Management Systems

Two Requests

Please share these blog posts with colleagues, associates and others interested in website maintenance, marketing and communications in higher education.

To make sure we remain on topic or cover new issues we need your input. You can leave comments, email us at info@eqafy.com or DM us at @OnCoFo.  We’re in the problem-solving business, so we’re always looking for new problems to solve. Thank you.

 

 

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