Case Studies

Pomona College

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Located in Claremont, California, Pomona College is a private, liberal arts college and the founding member of The Claremont Colleges. Serving approximately 1500 students, Pomona strives to inspire students to engage in creative learning that will enable them to identify and address their intellectual passions.

ChallengePrior to implementing Cascade Server, the web management process at Pomona College was fraught with inefficiencies. The web team used Frontpage and Windows authentication to allow users in administrative offices and academic departments to log into Frontpage sub webs on a staging server. With this process, the web team spent a great deal of time policing damaged markup to the template/page design. Users would make their own style choices within each page, and those design elements would then be directly inserted into the markup that Frontpage produced. Once a user was finished making edits, they would inform the web team of files edited, and the web team would copy and paste them to the live server.SolutionRealizing the need for a more streamlined process, the web team set out to find a new web content management solution and selected Cascade Server in 2008. Cascade Server provided them with what they were lacking in their previous content management process: a formal, comprehensive system. Below are some of the most prominent benefits Pomona hoped to garner from its selection of Cascade Server:

Eliminate the web team need to manually manage the content creation/update process.
Provide the ability to centrally manage the CSS responsible for page design and branding
Allow the web team to automate the proper production of underlying markup necessary for the CSS to do its job.
Permit granular control over page content regions with power to override inherited content or select specific data values from contributor edits.
Present an easy way to reuse large collections of content across sites
Afford users the ability to create user-friendly URLs.
Supply universal contributor access for content changes without need to install special software

ResultsSince implementing Cascade Server, the process for creating and updating web content has seen a drastic improvement. Pomona's web team created a completely new site in Cascade from the ground up. The system houses and manages the school's administrative web site and 20 of the 45 academic departments/programs who can voluntarily opt-in to managing their site in Cascade Server. The Pomona site is comprised of approximately 2,600 pages and 6,000 total assets. However, the web team maintains only a few different templates for the whole site. These templates house numerous regions, which house a host of blocks and formats. In addition, structured authoring has been made possible through custom metadata built into base assets, which are then targeted by XSLT and pulled into page and navigation content. In the future, the Pomona web team plans to use Cascade Server to manage content in multiple outputs and will continue development of structured authoring for increased ease-of-use.http://www.pomona.edu//

Hannon Hill Corporation

Case Studies

Pomona College