With 123 Cascade users in attendance, a fantastic venue at the Georgia Tech Hotel & Conference Center, and an awesome line-up of client speakers, this year’s Cascade Server User’s Conference was a tremendous success. The conference began with a quick sign-in where attendees received their swag bags and a welcome from Hannon Hill founder and CEO David Cummings. Bradley Wagner, Director of Engineering, followed up with a session detailing the future of Cascade Server, and the remainder of the conference consisted of two tracks, executive and technical, each with its own set of sessions and speakers throughout the day. Attendees were free to move between the business and technical track at any time, ensuring that they could get the most from their conference experience.
As the conference's “People + Process + Systems” theme suggested, collaboration was a key factor in its success. From colleagues helping one another solve implementation issues to our own team answering attendee's questions, cooperative effort at the 2008 User’s Conference was very prevalent. In addition, many dedicated Cascade Server users presented at this year’s conference, including Terri Vaughan of Clemson University, Justin Klingman of Beacon Technologies, Eric Palmer of the University of Richmond, Nathaniel Graham of University of Missouri, Richard Merrill of Autograff, Jon Whitener of University of Detroit-Mercy, and Daniel Horwitz of ProHealth Care. The Open House, hosted at our office, offered a casual atmosphere for attendees to get to know each other and familiarize themselves with the Hannon Hill team. We have uploaded the presentations and associated files for the conference on our Cascade Server Knowledge Base. The conference videos will also be available on our knowledge base shortly, so be sure to check back soon!
Thank you to all of the attendees and speakers who joined us in Atlanta for the 2008 Cascade Server User’s Conference, and helped make this the most successful one to date. See you next year!
» Check out the 2008 User's Conference presentation materials
Last Week, Hannon Hill released the newest upgrade in the 5 series, Cascade Server 5.7. This upgrade boasts impressive new features such as Content Type Index Blocks and new Block icons, AJAX left-hand navigation, Script Formats, a TinyMCE upgrade, a new “New” Menu, type-ahead search, and permissions performance improvements. Content Type Index Blocks allow rapid indexing of all Pages that use a particular Content Type, and is great for aggregating content of a particular type from across a number of different folders without having to pull in other Pages of different types. New Block icons have also been added to allow users to distinguish between Index, XML, XHTML, Text, and Feed Block types without having to render or edit the block itself. AJAX left-hand navigation allows users to expand/collapse the left-hand navigation (using the '+' and '-' icons) without causing the entire page to reload. A new content transformation type has also been added in Cascade Server 5.7, allowing users to create a new type of transformation asset called a Script Format, which can be applied at the page region level just like a stylesheet would be applied, without requiring users to learn and employ XSL to transform block, structured data, or XHTML content in a page.
Cascade Server 5.7 is also equipped with a new WYSIWYG editor, TinyMCE 3, which comes with many bug fixes and offers useful new functionality and improvements. The new “New” menu offers two important improvements; the menu will scroll if the height of the menu exceeds the browser height, and the menu now loads with the page so there is no delay in loading for the first time after a page load. Additonally, type-ahead search was incorporated in this release, which allows users to view search results instantly when typing terms into the search box.
» Learn more about the release of Cascade Server 5.7
To facilitate and enhance collaboration among Cascade Server constituents, Hannon Hill recently launched its official customer success community. This community is designed to be an interactive outlet for discussion and sharing of ideas, thoughts, and files. Featured in Hannon Hill Success Community is an idea exchange where clients can suggest product improvements, and vote and comment on the ideas of others. Additionally, success.hannonhill.com also features wikis and forums that serve arenas for sharing user generated content.
» Check out the new customer success community