Hannon Hill Redefining "Best Practices" for CMS Vendors
What's New
Client Case Study
Check out the Sarah Lawrence case study about the College's CMS use and migration from Serena Collage to Cascade Server.
"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.
About the Company
Hannon Hill creates web marketing solutions that give people and organizations the freedom to manage their Internet, Intranet, Extranet and Portal content with ease. Our primary software solution, Cascade Server, is ideal for organizations in industries such education, healthcare, technology, government, and publishing. Designed for any network environment, Cascade Server is as easy as e-mail and gives IT departments much needed deployment flexibility, a zero-footprint client and fast implementation. Since 2001, Hannon Hill solutions have been utilized and trusted by organizations including Duke University, Carnegie Mellon University, MCG Health Systems, PGP Corporation, Reed College and SCOREGolf magazine. For more information about Hannon Hill and all of our products, please visit www.HannonHill.com or contact us directly at 800-407-3540.