Gonzaga University
About
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.
Challenge
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.
Solution
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
Results
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.”
April 2010 Update:
Five years since the initial implementation of Cascade Server, Gonzaga University has expanded it's use of Cascade Server.
The main website for Gonzaga University has gone through two web redesigns, while the Law School's website, which was migrated into Cascade four years ago, has had one redesign. The redesigns were conducted in a way that allowed for the new configuration sets to be developed while both the old design and the new design were being published to two different folders on the web server. Thus, the web team did not experience any lapse in content editing since edits made in the system updated both versions at the same time. Once the redesign was complete and approved, the web server configuration was changed to point to the new site.
Gonzaga also realized the need for fast and accurate communication channels and sought to improve their emergency alert protocol for the school's website. The University implemented new workflows in Cascade that will cause the entire site to switch to an information-only design with minimal graphics in the case of a campus emergency.