Hannon Hill remains committed to the development and support of Cascade Server for institutions of Higher Education; our community refers to more than just the company's employees and clients. The individuals and organizations involved with Cascade Server are passionate about the product, and passionate about creating and managing web content with ease. Sharing their knowledge and best practices through outlets such as Hannon Hill's Higher Ed listserv and user's forum has brought not only users from Higher Education together, but has also allowed this niche to interact with the larger Cascade Server and Web 2.0 communities as a whole.
As Blaine Herman, Director of Strategic Accounts with Hannon Hill, confirms, "making a commitment to a CMS system is a big decision for many organizations. Deciding to put that kind of time and energy toward any one investment takes time, patience, and trust. We believe we would do ourselves and prospective clients a terrible disservice by not being completely upfront about what the process entails; it is hard work, but we are committed to sticking with it from your start date, to your finish date, not ours."
Cascade Server proves to be Web Content Management system of choice amongst the nation's leading colleges and universities. Hannon Hill to continue making industry of Higher Education a priority in development of flagship CMS product, Cascade Server.
ATLANTA, GA – March 18, 2008 –As a leader in the Web Content Management industry, Hannon Hill is committed to excellence in providing Web Content Management solutions to organizations across a multitude of industries. With more than 65 university and college clients using Cascade Server as their CMS of choice, institutions of Higher Education have continued to be a priority for Hannon Hill.
"As more and more universities choose Cascade Server, its position as the premier CMS in the market continues to grow," says Hannon Hill Founder and CEO, David Cummings. "Cascade remains the ideal WCMS solution for universities looking to create and manage the diverse and complex web content they seek to share with the public."
"Cascade Server, our company's true commitment to the satisfaction of our clients, and our ability to adapt and change with industry trends are the fundamental forces that have kept us so successful in the industry of Higher Education."
Cummings should know, after only seven years in the business, he has taken Hannon Hill from an idea originating in his dorm room at Duke University, to a multimillion-dollar company and a leading CMS vendor in the industry. He notes, “Web Content Management is more than just software. It’s about the people and the process too. It’s about being comfortable with your vendor, and that’s where we at Hannon Hill excel.”
In light of several recent events in the WCMS industry, being comfortable with your vendor is often a task easier said, than done. On March 12, 2008, CMSWatch.com broke the story about Serena deciding to discontinue development of its content management product, Serena Collage. Prior to this decision, Serena Collage was one of only a handful of CMS systems on the market with a stake in the Higher Education industry. While Cascade Server has by and large been the CMS of choice amongst the nation's leading colleges and universities, for those operating their websites with Serena Collage, this decision has left many academic institutions with their feathers ruffled.
As Blaine Herman, Director of Strategic Accounts with Hannon Hill confirms, "making a commitment to a CMS system is a big decision for many organizations. Deciding to put that kind of time and energy toward any one investment takes time, patience, and trust. We believe we would do ourselves and prospective clients a terrible disservice by not being completely upfront about what the process entails; it is hard work, but we are committed to sticking with it from your start date, to your finish date, not ours."
California State University-Chico, a current client of Hannon Hill and Cascade Server, had originally chosen Serena Collage as its CMS of choice. However, after a difficult time with deployment, and subsequently, trouble convincing end-users at Chico that the system was as easy to use as they first suspected, Chico decided to make the switch. "Cascade dealt with our decentralized model much better than other products," notes Patrick Berry, Web Application Development Coordinator at Cal-State Chico; "this would be especially important for larger schools that are broken-up not only into many departments, but into multiple colleges as well."
Oftentimes, it is not just Cascade's ability to handle a decentralized web content structure that appeals to university and college prospects. As Berry notes, when prospecting Cascade Server, "We especially like the fact that there is an independent community in higher-education around the product. It's a passionate group that's growing and there is a lot of technical wealth there."
In fact, during Chico's product testing or "sandbox" phase as they refer to it, when it came time to finding help on LDAP configuration, Berry decided to contact the Cascade Server Higher Education email listserv instead of contacting the Hannon Hill support team. "I intentionally didn't contact support during the sandbox time, because I wanted to see how much help I could get from the community; and it went very well. I find that Higher Ed technical people are very willing to share what they have. One of the colleges on the listserv sent me their LDAP config, and that got me where I needed to be on integrating with our LDAP servers. That was something we never got working with Collage."
The Hannon Hill community is more than just a word referring to the company's body of employees and clients. The individuals and organizations involved with Hannon Hill's content management system, Cascade Server, are passionate about the product and passionate about creating and managing web content with ease. Sharing their knowledge and best practices over outlets such as Hannon Hill's Higher Ed listserv and user's forum have brought not only users from Higher Education together, but also have allowed this niche to interact with the larger Cascade Server and Web 2.0 communities as a whole.
Hannon Hill founder and CEO David Cummings recently spoke at Tallahassee’s TechExpo 1.0 on the topic of Marketing Streamlined: Using Social Media and Web 2.0 Tools for Facilitating Community Collaboration. Hannon Hill's Elizabeth Starkey spoke with David to learn more about his presentation on the collaborative benefits of Web 2.0 tools such as wikis, blogs, and RSS feeds.
Elizabeth: What social media tools do you feel are currently making the biggest impact on online collaboration and in what ways?
David: Some of the biggest ones right now are the blogs and the wikis. Blogs are great for publishing quick, informal pieces of content, opinion pieces, commentary on industry happenings, and what not. And then on the wiki side is the idea that there are these collaborative pages of content that are free-form, obviously with Wikipedia being the greatest example out there. This idea that people can collaborate and update information in real time and share that removes a lot of the overhead and structure that was typically inherent in sharing Microsoft Word documents, and having file shares, and only having one person be able to edit content at a time. A wiki really takes all those types of friction that occurred previously and makes it much more seamless for the collaboration to occur.
Elizabeth: What are some unique ways in which you have seen these innovations utilized?
David: Well, of course, on the consumer side and the public-facing side, Wikipedia is phenomenally successful. Then you also have, on the blogging side, companies like Blogger, which is now part of Google, really making it so that anybody can do a blog.....The collaboration comes in by making it really easy to publish the content, but then also having the comments section on the blogs so people can actually comment on and discuss the opinion piece or whatever was posted in that blog entry......You’ll see systems where you can rate information. Amazon.com does a really good job of this, allowing you to rate different products on their website, and then that information is shared back with the community....
Elizabeth graduated with highest honors from the Atlanta College of Art with a BFA in Digital Video Production. She also participated in the internship program at Partizan in Los Angeles, during which she had the opportunity to work with such directors as Olivier Gondry, Chris Applebaum, and Casseus. Her short films, music videos, experimental sound pieces, and mixed media art have appeared in a number of film festivals, venues, and publications, including Paper Magazine, Southeast Performer, and Spin. She continues to produce, direct, and edit independent films and music videos in Atlanta. In addition to her interests in visual arts and film, Elizabeth studies the art of improvisational comedy at Whole World Theatre and the art of excellent baked goods via her own kitchen.
A number of Elizabeth's independent productions can be found on YouTube as well as on her personal website.
Elizabeth: What social media tools do you feel are currently making the biggest impact on online collaboration and in what ways?
David: Some of the biggest ones right now are the blogs and the wikis. Blogs are great for publishing quick, informal pieces of content, opinion pieces, commentary on industry happenings, and what not. And then on the wiki side is the idea that there are these collaborative pages of content that are free-form, obviously with Wikipedia being the greatest example out there. This idea that people can collaborate and update information in real time and share that removes a lot of the overhead and structure that was typically inherent in sharing Microsoft Word documents, and having file shares, and only having one person be able to edit content at a time. A wiki really takes all those types of friction that occurred previously and makes it much more seamless for the collaboration to occur.
Elizabeth: What are some unique ways in which you have seen these innovations utilized?
David: Well, of course, on the consumer side and the public-facing side, Wikipedia is phenomenally successful. Then you also have, on the blogging side, companies like Blogger, which is now part of Google, really making it so that anybody can do a blog. If you can send email in a web browser, you have the capabilities to manage and update your online diary, which is essentially what a blog is. The collaboration comes in by making it really easy to publish the content, but then also having the comments section on the blogs so people can actually comment on and discuss the opinion piece or whatever was posted in that blog entry. And then in the next level of collaboration items in terms of comments are things like ratings. You’ll see systems where you can rate information. Amazon.com does a really good job of this, allowing you to rate different products on their website, and then that information is shared back with the community. Amazon.com has a very strong network effect of people that contribute back to it, and then when you look for a new book or a new movie, and you look at the ratings on Amazon.com and you read the comments about it, it makes for a much more compelling site to visit on a regular basis.
Elizabeth: How have you personally used these social media tools, and what results have you witnessed?
David: I’ve used Wikipedia. I’ve actually edited a few entries over the past few years. I have my own personal blog at DavidCummings.org, and it’s powered by Blogger. I really do this as an exercise to use other tools out there, and experience them, and see what I like and don’t like about them so I can have a greater awareness and understanding and use that insight to contribute back to the Hannon Hill products.
Elizabeth: How can one prevent the misuse of such tools within an organization?
David: This is a tough one. In a professional organization, I don’t think there’s too much risk for misuse. If you expose it to the public, then yes, you will definitely have to moderate the comments potentially. You’ll definitely have to add filters or double-check information that’s posted to your wiki or your blog comments and make sure that it’s appropriate for a professional setting. In our experience and in my personal experience in the professional setting, we haven’t really seen much in the way of misuse of these types of tools.
Elizabeth: In what potential direction do you see emerging social media innovations taking in the near future?
David: I think this is an interesting trend because these really came out of consumer tools like Wikipedia, again more of a consumer tool, and Blogger, TypePad, or Movable Type, again very consumer-ish. This is interesting compared to some of the historical innovations that have occurred, for example, the Blackberry and the idea of checking your email or the internet on your phone. That was really driven out of the business side of innovation, whereas on the Web 2.0 and the collaboration front, many of these are consumer tools. Using Flickr or using del.icio.us or using Blogger or Wikipedia are very much from the consumer side that are going very quickly into the business side, and they’re already on the business side for a lot of products and a lot of companies. I think that’s really interesting from a big picture point of view. I see that adoption accelerating. When more and more people use them on the consumer side, they spread. Even social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace have the business equivalents of them, like LinkedIn. I think that growth is going to continue to occur, and it’s going to be a bottom-up where people use them on the consumer side and then go into their workplaces or into their business settings and they want similar types of tools for their business collaboration.
Elizabeth: Do you have anything else you’d like to share about this topic?
David: I think it’s a very fascinating topic. It’s something that we spend a lot of time on here at Hannon Hill, working on making sure, from a content management system point of view, and really just being a part of the web ecosystem, that we understand what’s going on and we use what’s going on, and we make sure our product fits in extremely well with different initiatives that people have, both by having the functionality native in the product as well as integrating with best-of-breed systems.
Elizabeth: Thank you for speaking with us and sharing your valuable insights.
David: Great, thank you!
We're proud to announce the addition of the following new Hannon Hill clients: