An important part of your website or application’s user experience is its content. Good information helps your users achieve their goals and builds trust in your property and IU.

But information can become outdated, leaving your users confused or misinformed. When content is present on multiple pages or hard-coded into applications, it can be difficult to find and correct every instance. And content that’s incomplete, inconsistent, or hard to understand reduces confidence in your property as a whole.

Consider a content strategy

To avoid these problems, consider employing reusable content for your property. Reusable content is information that is created once and can be published multiple times.

Unlike copied-and-pasted content that needs to be managed and updated system-wide, good reusable content is centrally managed, and delivered dynamically to where it’s needed.

Using a trusted, single source ensures that content on your pages will be:

• High quality: Writing and editing teams develop centrally managed content.
• Consistent: Using a centralized source across IU properties reduces the possibility of conflicting information.
• Up-to-date: Information changes automatically populate across all properties.

What is CCore?

CCore (Content Core) is IU’s platform for single-sourced, reusable content.

It’s also the home of multiple types of reusable content, delivered by a set of APIs:

• CCore Services: All the ways that IU helps people get things done, from email and learning management tools to software downloads and student systems; soon to drive the UITS Services Directory and expand beyond IT at IU
• CCore People: The people who work at IU, what they do, and how they work together; currently powering the IT Pro Database
• CCore Knowledge: In-depth help documentation, including the IU Knowledge Base

Other areas in development include CCore Assets for image management at IU, and CCore Resources for tracking valuable information around the web.

We believe these pieces of content enhance each other’s value, so CCore creates relationships between each application. When you look up a service in CCore, you automatically find the latest support information about it, the team that owns it, and the people on that team.

As we develop more CCore applications, we hope these links will be a rich source of value for the IU digital campus.

How can I use CCore content?

Developers can add CCore information to projects via CCore APIs, which are documented on the CCore Dashboard.

Each application has an open API, which delivers publicly available content without the need for authentication and is suitable for unsecured applications or sites. Some restricted information or customized versions of content can be retrieved by authenticated APIs. See the CCore documentation or ask us for more information.

How can I create CCore content?

If you have information that belongs in CCore, such as a new service or how-to document, contact the teams who maintain that content.

These teams help to ensure your content is in the right place, is reusable, and can remain verified and accurate.

While you make your content reusable, CCore content teams make sure it is:

• Minimal: Straightforward, concise content is best for single-sourcing
• Atomized: Information broken down into smaller chunks (steps, component services) is more useful to publishers
• Generic: CCore content can be specific or customized, but consider creating content that is available to benefit other IU sites
• Semantic: Proper metadata marking gives front-end developers the ability to create impressive experiences.

If you have content that could be reused but don’t quite know where it would fit, get in touch with UXO and we’ll find the best solution for you. New CCore development depends on feedback and ideas from our partners!

For the latest about CCore, visit the CCore homepage.