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If your office is anything like Hannon Hill, you have probably already heard the word "bracket" a hundred times this morning now that the participating teams have been selected for the 2010 NCAA Men's College Basketball tournament.  Picking for and against teams takes on a "conflict of interest" feel as Hannon Hill Client Advocate, because each year more and more Cascade Server customers find themselves in the Big Dance.

As a matter of fact, all four regions contain Cascade Server customers.  The Midwest region features Michigan State University, the University of Houston, the University of Maryland which powers its College of Agriculture & Natural Resources site with Cascade Server, and Georgia Tech which uses Cascade Server for its College of Management.  The East division contains the University of New Mexico, the University of Montana, Clemson University, the University of Missouri, and the University of Texas which uses Cascade for its College of Liberal Arts.  Syracuse and Gonzaga are the Cascade Server representatives in the West division, and rounding it out in the South division are Duke University, Purdue University, and the University of Richmond.

We want to congratulate each of these institutions and wish them all the best of luck in the tournament.  With our customers being represented in each of the regions, we are rooting for an all-Cascade Server Final Four.  As Hannon Hill's numbers continue to grow in higher education, the probability for the all-Cascade Server Final Four increases every year, and I personally have a great feeling about this one.

Since our recent webinar where Services Trainer Ross Williams demonstrated a live migration from the Global Area to Sites in Cascade Server, I have had the privilege of speaking to many customers who have expressed their new-found comfort in performing such a migration themselves.  However, many of these same customers told me they needed a refresher in the benefits of migrating to Sites. 

Administrators and end-users alike will enjoy several features introduced by the Sites model.  The ability to assign Roles to users in particular Sites - for example, giving publishing abilities to a user in one Site but not in another - allows for a user's abilities to be expanded in certain areas and restricted in others.  This feature empowers end-users by expanding certain abilities, while simultaneously helping reduce administrator overhead. 

Another major benefit of Sites is the elimination of Targets, which leads to a more simplified publishing process.  In the Global Area, determining where a Page gets published means walking through the following steps: Page => Content Type => Configuration Set => Configuration => Template => Target => Destination => Transport.  After the move to Sites, determining where a Page gets published requires only these steps: Page => Site => Destination => Transport. 

Cross-Site Template sharing is yet another noteworthy feature of Sites.  Because a Template is no longer tied to a Target, a Template can be used anywhere in the system.  In short, this feature represents a true global Template that can be used across all sites. 

Additionally, migrating to Sites gives users the opportunity to take advantage of Connectors which link Cascade Server to a growing number of best-of-breed third party applications.  The first of these Connectors are the Twitter and Wordpress Connectors, which have already been the subject of much discussion amongst Cascade users. 

With the addition of copying and moving assets right around the bend in Cascade Server 6.7, we encourage you to look into the benefits of Sites once again if you have not migrated already.  The Cascade Server 6.0 Release Notes, 6.2 Release Notes, and 6.4 Release Notes are a great place to start refreshing yourself on all of the great benefits of migrating to Sites.

We've noticed a growing trend over the last couple of years-- our client communication and transparency regarding web content management project status, timelines, and training is growing. Because we ourselves have trouble keeping up with all the developments in campus WCM communication, we thought we'd create a special place to spotlight these growing resources.

Our new Cascade Server client resources page highlights some of our current Cascade Server clients and their efforts to keep stakeholders vested and up-to-date with training opportunities, end-user and developer resources, and project status changes. We will continue to add to this area of our site and spotlight those organizations that demonstrate phenomenal web content management transparency. If you'd like to suggest a training or resource site from an organization using Cascade Server, please let us know by sending us a brief email to info@hannonhill.com.

Related Content

• Client Cascade Server Resources

Mark your calendars for the 2010 Cascade Server User's Conference taking place on Monday September 13, and Tuesday, September 14. We will be hosting our 5th annual conference at the Atlanta Marriott Buckhead Hotel & Conference Center, within walking distance of the Hannon Hill offices.

For those of you who have attended past conferences, we hope you'll come back to join us at this brand-new venue for two days of learning and sharing all things Cascade Server. For those who have never attended a Cascade Server User's Conference, take a look at our previous year's session offerings, and consider coming out to join in on our fifth year of web content management collaboration and fun!

As we begin diving into the planning of this year's conference, we'll be posting periodic updates here on our blog regarding any new developments. Subscribe to our blog RSS to stay up to date on the most current information!

Hannon Hill's recent webinar demonstrating a live migration of the company's website from the Global Area to Sites in Cascade Server was a huge success, with nearly a hundred sign-ups and over eighty unique log-ins to the webinar.  We have learned since the Cascade Server 6.4 Webinar that not only are individuals signing up to view our webinars, in many cases entire offices are logging in to view and discuss the webinars together.  In addition, over 80 users have since viewed the Cascade Server 6.4 Webinar at their leisure. 

In keeping with this demand, we're happy to announce that the Global Area to Sites Webinar is now available on our company website.  Many customers expressed a renewed interest in migrating from the Global Area to Sites after watching Services Trainer Ross Williams perform the migration on Hannon Hill's own website.  Several of these same customers have told us that they'll be viewing the webinar again once the date of their own website migration has been solidified.  So for those who requested it, the webinar is now available as a resource for our users indefinitely. 

We encourage you to download the webinar today to use as a guide if you have not yet migrated from the Global Area to Sites.  In addition, please subscribe to our blog and keep an eye on our customer success community for news on other upcoming web content management webinars in the near future.

If you frequent our blog, you may have seen our recent multi-part series documenting best practices when taking on a new site implementation with the Cascade Server web content management system and the Hannon Hill Professional Services team. Kat Liendgens, Professional Services Manager outlined these practices to aid organizations working with our Services team to implement a new site.

From this blog series, you may be familiar with the scope of the work our Professional Services team produces; you may not, however, have seen it live. This week, new sites were launched for Auburn University's Samuel Ginn College of Engineering and the University of Hartford with the help of our Professional Services team. It's one thing to hear about how website implementations are conducted, it's another entirely to see the end result. Below we've highlighted these two recent Professional Services implementations.

Auburn University, Samuel Ginn College of Engineering

The Hannon Hill Professional Services team implemented a completely new website for Auburn's College of Engineering. The new site features a sophisticated news implementation, which allows various members of different divisions to submit articles to go through an approval process. Each news item can be associated with one or more categories and is displayed on the appropriate news sub-pages or the homepage, based on this categorical selection. A news item can also be tagged as "sticky news." If content is flagged as such, even if there are more current news items to display on a homepage or sub-page, the sticky item will always stay on the page (until the flag is removed). The Auburn implementation also features the development of seven new Content Types and a substantial amount of content reuse functionality.

University of Hartford

The University of Hartford worked with the Professional Services team to integrate a new aesthetic design into Cascade Server. One of the key goals of this project was to allow end-users to update web content while maintaining a consistent look and feel across the site. As part of the implementation, the Services team implemented six new Content Types, including those for news articles and events postings. Event postings are implemented so the users has the option to display events on the homepage when they become acute. The team also implemented index pages and archives for both the news and events portions of the site. This Professional Services integration also included a content approval workflow.

We look forward to continuing to spotlight the tremendous work our Services crew is producing with our web content management system, Cascade Server. If your organization is interested in consulting opportunities or working with our Services team to implement a new site, please contact our Professional Services team.

Our client case studies are a good way for existing and potential users to truly get a glimpse of the powerful ways Cascade Server can be used to manage web content. Being as flexible as it is, Cascade Server has proven to be a good fit for organizations in a variety of different industries with a variety of different goals. The most successful Cascade Server implementations we've seen, however, come from those organizations that employ a collaborative process.

From planning and researching web content management systems to developing a vendor short-list, involving representative stakeholders from across organizational departments ensures that the system chosen will be the best fit for the largest number of users.

In our most recent client case study, we explore the collaborative measures taken by the University of Saskatchewan to ensure that Cascade Server was well-adopted and received upon being unanimously chosen as the school's institutional web content management system.

As a result of their efforts, 90% of Cascade Server users across the U of S said they would recommend the system to others on campus. We encourage users new to Cascade Server to read up on stories like those from U of S and where it makes sense, to employ some of the best practices shared in our client case studies during your own implementation(s).

If you wish to be considered for a case study to share your own Cascade Server story, sign up to participate in a case study with Hannon Hill.

In Part 3 of our Keys to CMS Project Implementation Success, we discussed the importance of successful requirements gathering prior to embarking on a project. The planning stage plays a crucial role in the success  of a project because it allows you and your project stakeholders to accurately determine the appropriate direction and requirements for the project before getting started. When done correctly, this can lead to better adoption across the organization and less chance of project scope creep. Once you have clearly identified the project scope, it is important to think about the timing of your Quickstart and training.

Timing of the QuickStart
It is best to begin your QuickStart as soon as you are ready to start moving your website over to the content management system. If you are re-designing your site simultaneously, however, you should wait until you have the templates of the new design ready to go before scheduling the QuickStart.

Timing of the Training
While it may sound obvious, a major key to a successful project roll-out is user buy-in. Making sure your users are adequately trained before beginning the project will ensure that your developers are comfortable enough with the system to jump in and begin working on portions of the site right after the project. We recommend training developers and administrators, rather than end-users, because your technical staff can easily turn around and train end-users on the system. For more information about our training options, please contact our Services Team.

Stay tuned for the final part in our Keys to CMS Project Implementations Success blog series, in which we'll discuss post-project actions.

After the success of our recent Cascade Server 6.4 Webinar, our customers and prospects alike expressed an overwhelming desire for Hannon Hill to continue presenting webinars on the most timely and relevant Cascade-related topics.  In that spirit, we are proud to present our next webinar demonstrating a live migration from the Global Area to Sites in Cascade Server.

Being Client Advocate at Hannon Hill means speaking to clients on a daily basis, listening to feedback, and using that feedback to shape practices that will lead to improved client satisfaction.  Something I have heard from our customers time and again over the past year has been a mixture of excitement and apprehension about migrating to the Sites content model in Cascade Server.  While some of our customers have already taken the leap, many of them are still operating in the Global Area. To encourage our customers to migrate, we decided the best promotion would be to migrate a Site ourselves.  

As most of you know, we power our own website with the Cascade Server web content management system.  Since some of our customers have been uneasy about their own Site migration, we will demonstrate this process than by performing a Site migration on our own website.  Our next webinar will focus on exactly that-- we will migrate our own website for the first time, live. 

Space is limited, so please reserve your spot for the Global Area to Sites webinar that will take place on Tuesday February 2, 2010 at 2PM EST.  In addition to the demonstration, we will discuss reasons for migrating to the Site content model and best practices for doing so. After performing the migration, you will be given the opportunity to ask our staff questions regarding Sites and the migration process in Cascade Server.  We are very excited to present this webinar and encourage you to sign up for the webinar today.

When it comes to web content management systems, total cost of ownership (TCO) is a topic of frequent discussion. Unfortunately, the more you research, the more it becomes apparent that the definition of "total" is still up for discussion.

Especially when reading content regarding open source software (OSS), cost of ownership is rarely looked at in an aggregate way. Because OSS systems limit acquisition costs by foregoing the standard licensing fees found with proprietary systems, the initial lack of investment required by OSS solutions is marketed as one of the primary selling points.

The problem with this logic is this: rarely are license fees the only cost incurred when procuring a content management system. Especially when you're dealing with open source solutions, the lack of initial acquisition costs is more than made up for by the heavy investment made on the human side of things.

When you work with a proprietary system--and hence, the vendor that develops the product--you typically get more of a package deal than when choosing an OSS application. Product support, maintenance, and new development are all included in the up-front costs, which your potential vendor should make you aware of. With OSS systems, the burden is often placed on the user to maintain and develop the system.

Furthermore, if you're interested in dedicated product support or professional services to help you get implemented or answer questions, there typically isn't a dedicated resource provided with OSS systems. For example, the Texas state legislature notes that "the money an agency may spend for technical service, support, training, customization, and testing open-source applications may exceed its current known proprietary systems."¹

Our suggestion? When you're shopping for a web content management system, above all else, do your research. The key goal here is to easily manage web content while mitigating potential risk when choosing the solution for your organization. You may find that you are able to get what you need out of an OSS and the lack of a dedicated support or services team isn't an issue for your organization. Whatever you decide, be sure to thoroughly evaluate the real potential costs to be incurred when choosing a proprietary solution vs. an OSS solution.

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¹Interim Report 2008, House Committee on Government Reform, Texas House of Representatives