Sales Director
Blaine Herman is responsible for new business and market development for Hannon Hill Corporation. He works closely across all customer verticals to understand their WCM needs and challenges. Under Blaine’s direction, the company has experienced 97% customer retention for the past two years.
Blaine brings more than 6 years of sales and account management experience to Hannon Hill. Before joining the Hannon Hill team, Blaine worked in the technical staffing and recruiting industry.
Blaine holds a bachelor of science degree in arts and science from Miami University of Ohio, and currently serves as president of the university’s Alumni Association in Atlanta.
A lot of software companies build their own proprietary databases to go along with their content management systems. We don’t do this, and it’s not because we’re lazy. Instead, we believe that embedding a proprietary database into a CMS takes away the client’s ability to choose how and where their data is stored.
Since Cascade Server works with any of the industry’s best standard relational databases – MySQL 4.1/5.0, MS SQL Server 2000 SP4/2005, and Oracle 9i/10g, we can provide for a vast amount of flexibility for data storage. It also allows our clients to take advantage of existing skill sets, rather than having to learn a whole new database on top of the CMS learning curve – which would mean additional training and costs.
Another factor to consider while we're on the topic is – what would happen should your organization decide (for whatever reason) to stop using the CMS that you select. What is your exit strategy? If you chose a CMS that utilizes standard relational databases, you really don't have to be concerned with an exit strategy; 100% of your content is stored in a database, which you'll have access to long after you stop using the CMS. Alternatively, if you chose a CMS with an embedded database, once you stop using the CMS, you'll lose access to the database. I expect that a vendor with a proprietary database will tell you that you'll be able to easily extract information from their database. If this is the case, I would recommend that you ask for documentation outlining just how easy this process is. Confirming that you'll have access to your content, post CMS, would mitigate the chances of your organization being in a situation where your content is held hostage.
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.
JSON has really become popular because of the advent of AJAX on websites. Although it can’t replace XML in most cases, there are some scenarios in which it just works a whole lot better. Since XML is self-describing, XML files have to be very verbose. JSON, on the other hand, is a very concise format because it’s purely data – typically in a multi-dimensional array or grid, and that makes it a lot faster.
Because a JSON document is just a data set in a grid, you have to know what the column in the grid means, or you don’t know what the data means. What FileMaker is doing is using Cascade Server to manage content that’s published to JSON, and then using JavaScript that reads the JSON and populates the content on the website. Although they still use traditional HTML on the site as well for SEO purposes, using JSON (and AJAX) for certain content makes the FileMaker website extremely responsive because the whole page doesn’t need to be refreshed for every action.
We’re really pleased with what FileMaker has been able to accomplish with the CMS. Because it’s such a flexible system, Cascade Server can be used to meet all kinds of website requirements. If anyone is interested in learning more about how our CMS integrates with various technologies, please contact us. Or, if you’re a current client using Cascade Server in a unique way, we want to hear about that too.
We’ve had a few people contact us asking why they had to re-opt in for our newsletter. The short answer is that we wanted to make sure you still want to hear from us! We recently changed our email marketing system. Since we’ve collected such a mass of emails from our newsletter opt-in throughout the years, we decided to take the opportunity – as we import contacts from one system to the other – to double check with each of you to ensure you are only getting the emails you want to get. Nothing is more annoying than a cluttered email inbox, right?
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Hannon Hill in the News
Colleges, including UI, struggle with web compliance UI The Daily Iowan (subscription) - Iowa City,IA,USA
Only 14 percent of America's Best Colleges' websites are compliant with web standards, according to the Hannon Hill Corp. And the UI is not one of them. ...
School websites fail accessibilty test
eSchool News Online
Colleges struggle to support web standards
ZDNet
University of Missouri Web Communications
EContent Mag Covers Cascade 4.6
CMSWatch.com Covers Colleges and WCM