Hertfordshire University
The University of Hertfordshire is situated in Hatfield, in the south of England. With over 22,000 students Hertfordshire is one of the largest state Universities in the United Kingdom. The recent 120m pound de Havilland campus reflects the University''s commitment to developing some of the best higher education faculties in the UK. The University operates from 4 from main campuses located in the Hertfordshire countryside, all of which are easily accessible to London. Hence those studying and working at the University are able to enjoy the best of both worlds.
URL - www.herts.ac.uk
Business Challenges
Control and manage large site. Empower wide range of staff to update site.
Solution
Shado CMS Content Management System.
Business Benefits
Increased volume, quality and control of site content. Reduced site maintenance costs.
Facts and Figures
Total staff - (circa) 2000
Total revenues (mil) - (circa) £100
Challenge
Hertfordshire needed to implement a robust content management system to manage its large existing website which was proving difficult to maintain. The site comprised over 20,000 static HTML pages and all of the University's 965 staff were reliant on those few with HTML training to create and revise content. A striking example of the University's need to expand content production could be found on its core prospectus site. This site included a product catalogue of more than 500 courses which experienced over 100,000 hits from the course search page each year. Understandably this catalogue required constant revision with new courses and information.
The University's budget was limited, but its needs were similar to those of a large corporation. Of critical importance to the University was transforming their static site that only a few technically trained employees could update, into a fluid system that would empower a wide range of lecturers and administrative staff with no HTML training to contribute. Importantly, this new content would need to pass through an approval process and all of this needed to be achieved on a set budget.
Additionally, Tom Short, the University's Director of Corporate e-Business Development, had a series of very specific requirements for a content management system as outlined below:
• Independence of content, page layout and structure
• All interaction (inc content creation) through the browser
• Intelligent importing of documents
• Content check-in, QA & approval mechanism
• Version control & rollback
• Expiration & archive
• Multiple formats (WAP, iTV)
• Database driven (Oracle corporate database)
• Compatible with Sun Solaris servers
• Selective caching capability
• Integrated reporting & stats
• Personalization
• Security administration
Solution
Shado CMS Content Management System.
Tom Short had experience of Adobe Coldfusion as a development environment and had been using it some time for its intranet developments. He liked the promise that Coldfusion MX presented and therefore ideally wanted a content management system that used Coldfusion MX as its underlying technology. He selected Shado CMS from Straker Interactive.
Results
Starting The Project. An over-riding objective of the project was the seamless integration with existing legacy systems. The University used Oracle for its corporate database and Sun/Solaris for its large servers. Therefore it wanted a solution that was compatible with these standards. Additionally, while it awaited delivery of this configuration, the project manager wanted to do some initial development work with Windows 2000 and the existing SQLServer. Shado CMS, being portable across environments allowed them to do this.
"We used Fireworks MX to create the graphical elements of the site. The benefits of Shado CMS meant that these objects need only be developed once and can be used many times. Dreamweaver MX assisted the rapid development of the templates and with the use of Shado CMS Properties, fewer templates were required."
Overcoming The Problems. The University had to move quickly to load its new prospectus onto the site before new entrants began searching and applying for places. The Sun server was delivered after development work on Windows 2000 and the SQLServer was completed. Shado CMS enabled the site to be easily transferred to the Solaris and Oracle databases in a few hours.
Having completed the most important phase of the project, Hertfordshire is now able to continue adding content and completing the final phases of the work, much of which is being carried out by non-technical staff members.
The University now has a comprehensive corporate sized website built in Shado CMS, with over 800 pages.
