Hannon Hill is committed to improving standards in education. Cascade Server offers flexible deployment, a zero footprint client, and unlimited users and sites. Contact us to learn about how Cascade Server can improve your school's online presence.
Gonzaga University is a private, four-year comprehensive university. Gonzaga's educational philosophy is based on the 450-year Ignatian model that aims to educate the whole person -- mind, body and spirit -- an integration of science and art, faith and reason, action and contemplation. At Gonzaga, "cura personalis," or care for the individual, is their guiding theme.
Gonzaga was founded in 1887, and enrolls about 5,400 students in 92 undergraduate and 21 graduate programs.
Gonzaga University used the Microsoft content management product MCMS 2001 for four years, but were frustrated by their poor search rankings and the lack of support.
“Our search rankings were really a problem because our old CMS dynamically delivered content, rather than publishing flat files to the web server,” said Paul Edminster, Web Services Manager, Gonzaga University.
Gonzaga actively evaluated CMS products over the course of three months, and in the summer of 2005, selected Cascade Server.
Gonzaga chose Cascade Server because they needed a flexible CMS that would allow editors to manage subfolders, manage their own resources, and reorder navigation menu items. They also wanted to improve their search engine optimization with a system that published out flat HTML files and generated Friendly URLs.
Other factors that affected Gonzaga’s decision were:
- Standards support
- Cross platform compatibility (Windows and Mac)
- Active Directory integration
- Direct database access
Gonzaga relaunched their website in the fall of 2005 using Cascade Server, and saw their search rankings improve within one week.
Edminster explains that there were other benefits as well: “Another key advantage to Cascade Server is the ability to publish and manage multiple sites of differing technologies. For example, we can publish an ASP site to an IIS server and publish a PHP site to an Apache server.”
Gaining its current moniker in 1974, Southwestern Oklahoma State University traces its roots back to 1901, when it was founded as the Southwestern Normal School. Located in Weatherford, OK, with a branch campus in Sayre, OK, SWOSU is Oklahoma’s premier regional university. Enrolling over 4,500 full and part-time students from 35 states and 33 countries, SWOSU has more than 210 faculty, 56% of whom hold doctorates, and offers over 50 majors, 40 minors, 4 Masters programs, and a Doctorate of Pharmacy. 15 of SWOSU’s academic programs are nationally accredited, the most among Oklahoma’s seven regional universities.
SWOSU’s website content management staff consists of a web services manager, seven contributors that provide daily, department-specific updates for specified pages (athletics, public relations, human resources, distance learning, and information technology), and a student employee that handles publishing updates for all other departments. The staff houses Cascade Server on one server, and publishes to two web servers for replication.
Instituting Cascade has enabled SWOSU’s Web Services Department to use resources more wisely as the majority of their contributors come from other University departments. Although the workload and amount of content constantly grows, the Department has been able manage it efficiently without the addition of staff. Additionally, Wilson says “…being able to allow contributors certain rights regarding editing, deleting, and publishing has been wonderful. I feel they can’t ‘mess up’ the website. Prior to purchasing Cascade Server, we used Dreamweaver to edit the website, so we couldn’t allow users to make updates due to the fact they could have access to code we didn’t want them to have access to.” Cascade Server's customizable access rights, workflows, and other types of user permissions allowed Wilson to grant SWOSU contributors easy, personbalized access to the system without sacrificing control and security.
As SWOSU's website begins its transition to full dependence on Cascade Server, there are certain features that will become even more valuable as the move progresses. Wilson predicts “…when migration of pages is complete, I’ll be able to really look at what Cascade can do for us.” In the meantime, however, Southwestern Oklahoma State University’s decision to use Cascade Server has provided a solution that, even without full implementation, enables them to manage vast amounts of content in an organized, efficient way, and effectively utilize their limited resources.
MCG Health System is composed of MCG Health, Inc., the not-for-profit corporation that manages the Medical Center. It is also composed of the Medical College of Georgia, and the Physicians Practice Group. As an academic medical center, MCG Health System has a tri-part mission: to provide exceptional patient care, to foster medical education and training, and to conduct leading-edge research.
The MCG Medical Center complex forms the core of MCG Health System's facilities and includes a 483-bed adult hospital, an Ambulatory Care Center with more than 80 outpatient clinics in one convenient setting, a Specialized Care Center housing a 13-county Level I regional trauma center and a 149-bed Children’s Medical Center. The Health System also includes a variety of dedicated centers and units and more than 90 satellite clinics.
MCG Health System has tremendous amounts of information to manage ranging from public content like physicians and their specialties to more mission critical information like policies and procedures for the Joint Commission. Content was stored on multiple servers and updated by hand via a tedious process. Information was out of date and subject matter experts had a bottleneck with the Internet Manager and the separate Intranet Manager.
MCG Health actively evaluated several CMS products over the course of three months researching numerous solutions. There were several key factors that were required by MCG Health for their CMS. Items included:
- End-user intuitiveness
- Flexibility
- Product support
- Cost
After several presentations from multiple vendors and thorough due diligence, MCG Health chose the Hannon Hill Cascade Server solution.
MCG Health spent three months implementing Cascade Server, two months testing and tweaking the Internet and intranet site, and rolled the product out in February of 2005 to staff and administration. Improvements to the MCGHealth.org website included:
- Fully integrated Greystone.net medical content
- Dynamically generated bread crumbs based on page and folder metadata
- Automatically generated site map representing a comprehensive overview of all the content on their site
- Consistent page headings and titles important for quality
- Constant page layout with header and footer throughout
- Multi-lingual content in English and Spanish
Improvements to the MCG Health intranet website included:
- Centralized policies and procedures
- Departmental access to appropriate content
- Thorough refreshing of information
- Structured workflow for content changes
This free white paper is designed to explain the benefits of a CMS for higher education. It will cover:
- Process of Choosing a CMS for Higher Education Purposes
- Identifying and Understanding System Users, i.e. Students, Staff, etc.
- Identifying the Target Audience, i.e. Prospective Students, Faculty, etc.
- Common Objections and Responses Regarding a CMS
- Key Advantages to a CMS
- What to Look for When Choosing a CMS
We only ask for a short amount of information so that we may better serve you. We take your privacy seriously.
This free white paper is designed to explain the benefits of a CMS for managing course catalogs for higher education. It will cover:
- The Course Catalog Process
- Publishing for the Web vs. Publishing in Print
- Organizing Content in a CMS
- Managing Workflow
- Website Interactivity
- Website Updates
- Multiple Publishing Formats
We only ask for a short amount of information so that we may better serve you. We take your privacy seriously.