Cascade Server User's Conference a WCM Success
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 3:00pm -- Morgan Griffith
With web content management (WCM) users from over 50 organizations attending this year's Cascade Server User's Conference, this year's annual event spoke to the necessity of community and collaboration around content management. Guests began pouring into Atlanta on Sunday, September 27th and the two-day Conference was kicked off Monday morning with a welcome session from Hannon Hill's CEO, David Cummings.
Cummings discussed Hannon Hill's success over the last year, including the addition of over 30 new clients in the higher-education industry. As a result, over 120 universities are currently using Cascade Server to power and manage their campus websites. This trend was evident via the 85% of conference attendees coming from institutions of higher education. Cummings notes, "Our annual conference is a great way to bring these users together to give them a platform to network, share ideas and best practices, and discuss the ways in which Cascade Server can solve their web content management pain points." As Cummings' presentation came to a close, he announced a bonus feature hidden in the Cascade Server 6.4 release - a new Twitter Connector.
The surprises didn't stop there, however. David Klanac, Hannon Hill's COO followed Cummings with his "Cascade Server Roadmap" presentation, exploring the future vision of the WCM product. Klanac also revealed a surprise announcement, which sent the crowd into an uproar - the upcoming addition of a recycle bin to the Cascade Server system, the number one most requested idea on the company's idea exchange.
The remaining two days of the Conference were spent in sessions delving into Cascade's functionality led by the Hannon Hill team and Cascade Server users alike. Session highlights include a two-hour presentation from Karen Berntsen, Information Designer for Carnegie Mellon University on "Managing a University's Multi-faceted Web Presence," which got a huge response from attendees on Twitter and a variety of sessions exploring Cascade Server's new site-content model and connectors strategy.
With over 700 tweets using the Cascade Server Conference hashtag of #csuc09 over two days, users were able to share session feedback in real-time and provide Hannon Hill with valuable insight into client responses to new features. This data and that collected from the company's post-conference survey will be used to help shape the Cascade Server User's Conference in 2010. Look out for the final release of Cascade Server 6.4 packed with new features later this month.
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