Hannon Hill Corporation
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Makers of the Award-Winning Cascade Server content management
software
Gonzaga University
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.”