If you’re looking for ways to integrate rich media in your site, check out David Cummings’ new article “Find the Gold with Rich Media” in iMedia Connection.
The article talks about the benefits of using rich media, but the focus is on how to add rich media without sacrificing web standards and usability, which we think is pretty important as the internet evolves to accommodate new technologies. “The best websites are those that are easy to find, access and navigate,” David explains. “ That shouldn't change when rich media is incorporated, and it's not hard to do if you have the right foundation.”
iMedia Connection, by the way, is really a great resource for anyone involved in online marketing, so when you’re done reading David’s article, have a look around!
Development Manager
Bradley Wagner is the development manager for the Cascade Server product line. He manages an agile team of software developers and coordinates the product releases. He brings a strong background in test driven development and other software design best practices. His primary responsibility is to incorporate a combination of client requested features and cutting edge technology into the Cascade Server roadmap.
Bradley is an Atlanta native who completed his undergraduate degree, a B.A. in Computer Science, at Rice University in Houston, TX. He previously developed Open Source software for the PLT group (http://www.cs.rice.edu/CS/PLT/) at Rice University including the .NET based Dr C# Integrated Development Environment (http://drcsharp.sourceforge.net).
As the head of development for a software team, you're always anticipating the next big thing: a new feature, a new technology to catapult yourself past the competition. The trick is finding the opportune time to shift gears and make the jump. Since the start of the year, the Cascade development team and I have been busy with our next big thing, Cascade Server 5.0.
We like to put out a major release every year. Last year, 4.0 featured a streamlined User Interface built on top of the Apache Struts web application framework. This year, Cascade 5.0 will be a leaner, meaner web application capable of handling more users and more concurrency.
How we do intend to do it? For one, we're moving away from the JBoss Application Server in favor of the more lightweight, flexible Apache Tomcat servlet container. Secondly, we're embracing the Spring Framework which allows for more modular application development and better JUnit test coverage.
To our users, this translates to greater scalability, performance, and reliability through application load balancing and database clustering. Business users can expect a consistent experience, regardless of the number of users in the system and faster page load and publishing times across the board. At a time when hardware is relatively inexpensive, a clustered application is the answer. The load balanced Cascade will accommodate the needs of your growing organization seamlessly.
In the mean time, we've put our monthly releases on hold to focus on the task at hand. We'll continue to put out patch releases as needed until the release of 5.0.
We are excited by the results thus far and look forward to introducing the next generation of Cascade Server in the near future.
Dean studied Communications and graduated from Miami University of Ohio, with a B.A. in Arts and Science. Before joining the Hannon Hill team, Dean worked for the governor of Indiana. Dean’s past business experience includes sales with a flourishing Chinese Outsourcing company in Indianapolis called Golden Beam Technology. Dean is from Indianapolis, IN and currently lives in Atlanta.
Dean is a sales consultant at Hannon Hill Corporation. He spends most of his time prospecting and maintaining current client relationships. Dean takes part in leading product demos of the Cascade Server on a weekly basis.
Texas seems to be a popular state with Hannon Hill these past couple of months, with the signing of Texas A&M Health Science Center and the City of Irving. Now Hannon Hill has been invited to present at Texas A&M University's CMS Showcase Feb. 26th - March 2nd.
Texas A&M is undergoing a branding overhaul and part of this initiative includes a directive to investigate possible CMS integration for the major academic units (colleges) and their respective departments. U-Web (Texas A&M University Webmasters' Guild) has invited several CMS vendors to come and discuss their products with Texas A&M webmasters to give them a feel for what’s available.
While our sales department is quite accustomed to filling out RFP’s and doing onsite demos to help organizations in their decision making, I’m pretty impressed by Texas A&M’s dedication to bringing all of its academic units together. Successful implementation of any CMS is dependent on thorough planning, cooperation, and organization. It looks like Texas A&M is on the right track with this Showcase, and I expect to see other large universities follow suit.
Learn more about Texas A&M’s CMS Showcase at http://uweb.tamu.edu/CMS_Showcase. Thanks for inviting us!
October 23-26, 2007: EDUCAUSE
Seattle, WA
Please visit us at Booth #2524.
November 11-14, 2007: League for Innovation Conference on Information Technology
Nashville, TN
Please visit us at Booth #106.
September 22-23, 2008: Cascade Server User's Conference
Atlanta, GA
Please check back soon for more details. Accomodations information will be posted by the end of April.
October 28-31, 2008: EDUCAUSE
Orlando, FL
Orange County Convention Center
Please visit us at Booth #647.
A business and technology enthusiast, David Cummings founded Hannon Hill Corporation in 2001 with the goal to provide powerful XML web content management (WCM) solutions, with an emphasis on personalized customer service.
A WCM subject matter expert, David’s articles have been published on O'Reilly's XML.com and OnJava.com, in addition to popular web development sites such as SitePoint.com. He has presented at the Silicon Valley Web Guild, for Silicon Networks, and the Independent Computer Consultants Association (ICCA).
With more than 10 years of software development experience, David is an experienced programmer and has written code for commercial applications in Java, PHP, ASP, and Visual C++. Prior to founding Hannon Hill Corporation, David worked as an engineer for IBM.
David serves as chairman of the board of the Technology Association of Georgia Content Management Society. A native of Tallahassee, Florida, David holds a bachelor of science degree in economics from Duke University.
We’re ecstatic about the great feedback that we’ve received on our launch of CMS Tube, and we’re really excited that people are adopting it. We’ve gotten coverage in CMS Watch and CMS Wire, and the coverage has been largely positive. Theresa Regli of CMS Watch understands exactly what we’re trying to convey: “The idea is to help current and prospective customers learn more about the product via demos, training and education, with commentary and discussions with other users as well.” And Angela Natividad of CMS Wire writes, “Hannon Hill demonstrates the strength of its convictions with the unveiling of CMS Tube.”
In addition to the positive feedback, both articles address the fact that, while it is a video enabled website, we don’t have much in the way of community driven content yet. We’re glad that this was brought up because it’s one of the things that we are working on as part of our Cascade Server framework. We currently have our CAST (Cascade Advanced Server Toolkit) components to make user-generated content possible. Because CMS Tube has been such a success so far, we are in the process of redesigning it and incorporating our CAST components into it so that people can rate the videos, add comments, etc. We want to take it from being a video-driven website to a true Web 2.0 site.
In the mean time, check out CAST and CMS Tube to learn more about content management and Cascade Server!