Blogs - November 2009

Below are the blog entries for November 2009.

Key Themes in Successful WCM Implementations

By Morgan Griffith
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 10:30am

Our client case studies are articles and stories documenting some of the most successful Cascade Server web content management system implementations we've seen. Each time we begin a new client case study, we interview stakeholders involved with that organization's implementation. Our discussions touch on a number of elements in their desire to acquire and implement a web content management system and each organization's story is inevitably unique. However, from conducting these case study interviews, we've noticed there are key themes and takeaways comparable amongst those organizations that have seen the most successful system implementations.

What makes Cascade Server a good fit for most of our client success stories?

One of Cascade Server's biggest strengths is flexibility and customizability. The organizations that have seen the most success with Cascade Server are those who's web content management processes are decentralized and collaborative. Those with a need to publish to multiple web servers and robustly manage multiple websites find Cascade to be a strong fitting web content management solution.

What is unique to client success stories?

Early Representative Buy-In

By and large, the most common theme amongst those who have seen successful implementations and adoption rates is early (and representative) stakeholder buy-in. Particularly in the higher education industry, we've seen immense success from our clients who choose to involve a representative group or sample of users from the very beginning. Synchronization across departments and units on WCM needs and nice-to-haves, timelines, project managers, and goals is an important step in ensuring a successful implementation and post-implementation adoption. 

Client-led Training/Demo Sessions

For many of our clients, making a decision on a WCM system is made easier by allowing users to be trained on and demo the system. Some of our clients whittle their short list of solutions down to a few and then demonstrate each system for a representative group of stakeholders. These stakeholders are then asked to evaluate and rank each system and the results of these evaluations are one factor in the overall decision to pick a solution. Those who have taken this approach have found it gives everyone a voice and ensures that when a solution is chosen, those involved feel vested in the decision.

Capable and Vested IT Department

Because of the immense flexibility and customizability afforded by Cascade Server, it is important that organizations acquiring the system have at least a small technical staff to support the system and its implementation. The process of managing web content is largely collaborative across various types of users and departments. However, this does not alleviate the need for a go-to team to assist in system administration, WCM version updates, and system customization to meed organizational needs.

A few of the client case studies we have coming up, such as our latest one with the College of William & Mary, will serve to spotlight these important implementation themes. If your organization has accomplished great things with Cascade Server and is interested in participating in a client case study, sign-up now!


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Keys to CMS Project Implementation Success - Part 3

By Kat Liendgens
Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 2:45pm

In Part 2 of our Keys to CMS Project Implementation Success blog series, we talked about the purpose of a QuickStart Package and the importance of selecting a small, representative portion of your site for implementation. Choosing an appropriate portion of your site to be implemented in 100 hours or less provides a model to get the rest of your site integrated in Cascade Server according to best practices. Once you have selected the scope of your QuickStart Package, the next step in the process is to think about the project requirements.

Requirements gathering

Proper planning and thorough requirements gathering are key ingredients to project success. Once a client contacts our Services team for a QuickStart project, we send them a Requirements Gathering Guide, which is designed to help you think through the project and to communicate key information to us.  Included in the Guide is a “Statements of Requirements” section, which enables our clients to provide us with detail about their desired project scope before we engage in the planning process.

Why is this important? Imagine you were planning a hiking trip. Wouldn’t you want to know what your desired destination is and how long it will take to get there? If you didn’t determine those factors, you would run the risk of either wandering around aimlessly without reaching your destination or you would run out of food and water halfway through. The same applies to web projects. You want the roll-out to be a “home run” in order to build momentum for use and adoption of your new web content management software. Typically, the main reasons for IT projects failure are poorly defined or changing requirements and scope creep. Therefore, it is important to clearly identify the scope of the project so that it will be a complete success.

Stay tuned for the next part in our Keys to CMS Project Implementations Success blog series in which we'll discuss the timing of the QuickStart.


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Hannon Hill Releases Cascade Server 6.4

By Chris Armistead
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 10:00am

Hannon Hill is proud to announce the recent release of Cascade Server 6.4, the latest feature release of its award-winning content management system.  As previously announced, the future of Cascade Server includes a new Connector strategy that will bridge the gap between Cascade Server and other best-of-breed 3rd-party applications.

We are particularly excited about the WordPress and Twitter Connectors, which are the first two Connectors featured in the product.  Organizations can manage and publish blogs from inside the content management system with the new WordPress Connector.  With the Twitter Connector, users can automatically tweet newly published content while bypassing the need to manually tweet content, links and appropriate hash tags.

These two Connectors are not the only great new features included in Cascade Server 6.4.  Also part of the release are a Drag and Drop Data Definition Builder, the ability for administrators to create Broadcast Messages that will be sent to all enabled users, an EditArea Text Editor that gives enhanced editing capabilities, and an improved content comparison engine that shows changes visually when comparing previous versions of pages.

The new features along with sixteen bug fixes make us confident that Cascade Server 6.4 is our strongest release to date.  For more information, please read the Release Notes and Upgrade Guide.  We encourage you to download Cascade Server 6.4 and begin enjoying the new features and improvements today!


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Hannon Hill and Higher Education Takeaways from EDUCAUSE

By Morgan Griffith
Friday, November 6th, 2009 at 1:30pm

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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