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Blog Archives

Blogs - April 2010

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Below are the blog entries for April 2010.

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Extended Support Hours

By Kat Liendgens
Friday, April 30th, 2010 at 3:30pm

As we've mentioned in our previous blogs, our Professional Services Team can assist you with your implementation of Cascade Server through our QuickStart packages, which are 100 hour projects designed to get you up and running in Cascade. We also offer custom-quoted projects, which vary in scope and can range from a simple 30-hour template integration to large-scale, 300+ hour projects. But what do you do if you don't necessarily have a specific project in mind with which you need Services' help? What if you want us to assist more on an "ad hoc" consulting basis when you have questions, run into snags with your integration, or you simply want us to spend some time looking at your site and providing input on best practices?

For these situations, we offer another option known as "Extended Support Agreements" (ESAs). ESAs are Professional Services hours that can be purchased in blocks containing as few as 15 hours or as many as you would like. These hours never expire. We simply log all of our work for you until the total time purchased has been exhausted. You can request the extended support hours at any time, and we will complete the work as soon as a resource becomes available. The more advance notice we receive from you, the easier it is for us to accommodate the delivery of work in a timely fashion.

Here are some examples of how clients have used ESAs in the past: consulting calls to discuss site migration, strategizing multi-lingual site implementation, minor development work, troubleshooting assistance, and auditing the implementation of a site. Please note that ESA hours cannot be converted to training and vice versa.

If you have any questions regarding Extended Support Hours, please feel free to contact us.

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New Forums, Idea Exchange and Code Examples

By Bradley Wagner
Tuesday, April 27th, 2010 at 3:15pm

Yesterday, we moved the Cascade Server Success Community to a new Forum and Idea Exchange.

First off, I want to apologize for any inconvenience this caused. This move requires that our users create new accounts on both the Forums and Idea Exchange. While we did look into migrating user accounts, there was no way for us to easily do so with the new systems that we wanted.

That said, I think these new systems offer some significant improvements and new features over the existing ones.

Improvements

Forums:

Idea Exchange:

Authentication

Both systems accept Open ID logins and use Gravatar (sweet). The Forums unfortunately don't work with Google's Open ID, but most others appear to work well. You can also opt for just creating two accounts with the same email/password in both systems.

What we moved

We moved over all ideas in the idea exchange that had 10 votes or more, but this, unfortunately, did not include comments. We've recreated the same Forum categories but are starting fresh with the forum content.

We'll maintain the the archived forum and idea exchange content for search, and plan to move over the troubleshooting and FAQ sections of the old forum.

Code Sharing on GitHub

Lastly, we've recently started posting code examples with documentation for commonly used XSLT and Velocity formats on our GitHub account.

We look forward to what these changes will mean to our valued user community and hope you will sign up today!



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SEO Tips

By David Cummings
Friday, April 23rd, 2010 at 10:45am

As the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) and rankings continues to rise across organizations of almost every description, keep in mind some best practices in order to maximize your results. Improving your PageRank is no small feat regardless of your organization size, so here are some SEO tips to follow:

    •    Do the basics like use the keywords in the title, main heading (h1), URL, and page content
    •    Arrange the site hierarchy with the most relevant pages at the top and less important pages in sub-folders
    •    Be selective about what gets linked to from the homepage as that’s the most important page on the site
    •    Work hard at earning inbound links from other sites to your site
    •    Write for humans and not search engines

These tips are pretty straightforward, but it is amazing how many sites don’t do the basics. With these tips in mind, the most important thing is to publish high quality, fresh content on a regular basis.

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Join us for the 2010 Cascade Server User Conference

By Uran Piedra
Monday, April 19th, 2010 at 11:45am

Registration is now open for our fifth annual Cascade Server User Conference! The 2010 conference will take place in Atlanta, GA on Monday, September 13th and Tuesday, September 14th, 2010. Conference planning is underway, so subscribe to our blog RSS for the most up-to-date information about conference sessions and scheduling.

The Call for Speakers for this year’s conference is also open. If you are planning to attend the conference and have an idea for a session, we encourage you to submit your proposal to be considered as a speaker.

We hope you'll join us for the 2010 User Conference! Space and accommodations are limited and the discounted early bird rate ends May 21st, so sign up now to secure your spot!


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Cascade Server Google Search Story

By Chris Armistead
Friday, April 16th, 2010 at 9:00am

While we here at Hannon Hill spend most of our time concerned with all things Cascade Server, we are certainly not immune to internet trends that can pull us away from our work from time to time.  One such internet fad you may have seen is the new Google Search Stories creator inspired by Google ads such as the Parisian Love ad that ran in the Super Bowl. 

Even though for the most part we promote office productivity, we couldn't help but call your attention to this page on YouTube that allows you to create your own Google Search Story in just a few minutes.  In fact, we went ahead and created out own Cascade Server Google Search Story just for good measure. 

We just wanted to pass along something to have fun with since it's Friday, and you've probably had a long week.  Take a few minutes and play around with it, you deserve it.

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Automated Quality Control with Cascade Server

By David Klanac
Tuesday, April 13th, 2010 at 2:00pm

One of my favorite aspects about Cascade Server is the fact that it provides a level of automated quality control.  We've produced swarms of blogs and press releases over the years, and each new one produced reliably appears as structurally immaculate and clean as its predecessor.  Our authors need only to concern themselves with communicating thoughts and ideas while the system dutifully follows a simple blueprint to capture and assemble them for display.  

It's incredible how effective technologies like CSS and XHTML can be in maintaining brand consistency across thousands of pages when markup integrity remains intact.  Cascade affords site managers the ability to focus on achieving the website marketing goals that matter rather than meticulously ensuring the presence and proper nesting of integral DIV elements for an unforgiving CSS.  Furthermore, the aforementioned "blueprint" above is an often unrecognized manifestation of our goal to make sure that the CMS developers in charge of customizing the tool don't need a software engineering degree to harness Cascade's quality control capabilities.  Rather, they can feel right at home with utilizing the same W3C XML technologies that have become the cornerstone of the web.

I've pitched this value proposition to prospects and new customers for a long time now, and it's cool to see that it's a message that hasn't become lost in an increasingly commoditized industry.  Sure, there are literally thousands of CMS products out there who offer the means to automate XHTML output for content authors.  But it makes me proud to see how elegantly Cascade still delivers a solution that is powerful enough to produce high-quality content output for a Sun Java portal in two dozen languages yet gets out of the way of the marketing and communications professionals who need to make changes quickly and move on to their next task.

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Workflow Changes in Cascade Server 6.4

By Bradley Wagner
Thursday, April 8th, 2010 at 2:15pm

We've made some changes to the Workflow functionality in the past few versions of the Cascade Server 6.4 series that we felt were worth an explanation.

Workflow inheritance and requirement

Before 6.4, the folder setting to inherit Workflows from parent folders was the same as the one that required Workflow. The options were "None Required", "Inherit from parent folder", and "Do not inherit". It was impossible to inherit Workflows but not require them in a particular folder. 

As of Cascade 6.4, the settings are separate:

Workflow

This lets you define your Workflow inheritance and requirement separately. So if you want to use the same set of Workflows for a whole Site, define them once for the base folder, and set the other folders to inherit. If specific sections of the Site do not need Workflow, simply go to that folder and set Require Workflow to "No".


Workflow UI enhancements in the Edit screen

To help end-users use Workflow, we've made the Edit screen more intelligent. When the Folder and user's role requires workflow, but there are none available, the Edit screen lets you know by disabling the submit button and Workflow checkbox and giving you a helpful message.

Workflow


Workflow
Finally, if you change the parent folder of an asset, the checkbox will automatically update to reflect the Workflows available in the new parent folder. It will only be checked if there are applicable Workflows for the user. "Applicable" Workflows are ones assigned to the Folder where the user is either in the Workflow's "applicable groups" or the user's role allows them to use all Workflows. "Applicable groups" can be used to turn on/off Workflows for certain groups of users.


Simplification through preference removal

Preferences are great for flexibility but can over-complicate the user experience. Cascade Server used to have a user preference that controlled whether or not the Workflow checkbox was checked by default if the user was capable of bypassing Workflow (Wow, that's a mouthful!). It was hard to explain what it did and hard to explain why it didn't appear for users with certain roles.

We removed this preference in 6.4.1 in favor of something more deterministic and, hopefully, simpler. The basic underlying rule is: if Workflow is applicable to the user in a Folder, they should probably use it, so let's encourage that by checking the Workflow checkbox by default.

The system follows a few rules in order:

1. If there are applicable Workflows for the user in the context Folder, the Workflow checkbox in the Edit screen is checked for assets in that Folder.
2. If there are no applicable Workflows, the checkbox is disabled completely (grayed out).
3. If the Folder or the user's role do not require Workflow, the user is allowed to uncheck the checkbox (if checked) and submit without Workflow.
4. If the Folder and the user's role require Workflow and there are no applicable Workflows, the submit button is disabled and the user is warned.
5. If the Folder and the user's role require Workflow and there are applicable Workflows, they are forced to use it so the checkbox is checked and disabled.

Remember, you can always go back to your edit if you inadvertently start a Workflow, and you can save your draft if you aren't able submit your edit. We hope these changes make Workflow more flexible and easy to use.

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Velocity Webinar Video Now Available

By Uran Piedra
Tuesday, April 6th, 2010 at 1:15pm

Last Tuesday, we had 111 people join us for the free, hour-long Velocity Webinar hosted by Hannon Hill Services Trainer Brent Arrington. In this webinar, Brent covered the ins and outs of the Velocity functionality that was added to Cascade Server 5.7.  The goal was to help clients understand this easier-to-use programming language that was incorporated into the product as an alternative to XSLT.

In case you missed it, or you just want a refresher, we've made the webinar video available for viewing on our site. Stay tuned for more information on upcoming webinars by subscribing to our blog RSS feed.

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Cascade Server 6.7 Beta Released

By Chris Armistead
Monday, April 5th, 2010 at 5:00pm

We here at Hannon Hill are proud to announce the release of the first Beta for Cascade 6.7.  This release includes a Recycle Bin, cross-Site moving and copying of assets, Structured Data Blocks, Chrome support and an upgraded WYSIWYG among other things.

Just as before, the beta is available for download for those of you with an available test server and time to test against your own database. However, we are aware that not everyone can dedicate a server for beta testing so this time we're trying something else to get more of your feedback. We've set up a sandbox server, and for anyone who's interested we'll provision a user and Site to test the new features out for themselves.  Find out more by reading the Cascade Server 6.7 Beta Release Notes on the Knowledge Base and on our downloads form.

We encourage you to download or request access to the sandbox today so that you can begin testing the Cascade Server 6.7 Beta.  A feedback form is available within your Site on the sandbox server as an external link called "GIVE US FEEDBACK" or here if you're testing the beta locally.  Your feedback is invaluable to the final release, so we truly appreciate you passing it along. 

We're really excited about this release and look forward to hearing from you.

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