Hannon Hill and Higher Education Takeaways from EDUCAUSE

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Friday, November 6th, 2009 at 1:30pm -- Morgan GriffithBookmark and Share

As #EDUCAUSE09 Twitter tweets poured in by the second, there was a lot of buzz around this year's leading conference for higher education technology. Hannon Hill's own Blaine Herman, Amaryllia Liu, and myself headed to the Mile-High City of Denver, CO to exhibit Cascade Server and network with existing clients, prospects, and thought leaders in the higher-education realm.

After chatting with attendees, it became clear that there were some big takeaways at this year's event. Debates around the use of social media at universities and colleges were rampant, and in particular, both Twitter and Google Wave were hot topics for discussion. The Google Wave development team, based out of Sydney, Australia, were on-site at the event, handing out free Wave invites and holding focus groups to better understand the higher education industry.

Jim Collins, Keynote Speaker and author of Good to Great, was widely quoted in the Twitter stream during the event. Attendees were passionate about his discussion of focusing on core priorities and executing them at optimum levels without getting distracted by opportunities that will take away from core competencies. This notion of doing what you do best resonated with the EDUCAUSE audience.

Aside from immersing ourselves in industry developments by simply attending the event, we also had some great conversations about web content management in higher education and where Cascade Server fits into that puzzle. We got a lot of great feedback on Cascade's new Connectors strategy, allowing it to tie in with 3rd party applications such as WordPress and Twitter and chatted with many of our clients, all of whom had great things to say about what their universities are accomplishing with Cascade Server. Almost every Cascade user we spoke with asked about the upcoming release of Cascade 6.4 and we were excited to inform them it will be officially released next week.

We had a great time at this year's event and look forward to attending next year. Thanks to all of our clients that stopped by to say hello and thanks to all of those who stopped by with some very insightful questions and feedback.

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