A brand new image for a brand new university

Southampton Solent University is one of the UK's newest universities, but its vocational and professional strength is rooted deep within its 150 year history. It became a university in July 2005 and adopted its current name on 15 August of that year.

Dr. Keith Johnson, Vice Principal (External Development) summed up the importance of this change of status in the following words:

"Southampton Institute's award of university status opens up a whole new chapter in its development and offers the opportunity for the institution to build upon its recognised strengths as a key strategic actor in the region's future economic development and growth."

A time-critical implementation

One of the key challenges facing the Solent team was the fast track implementation of their website to reflect and reinforce their new branding. Timescales were short, the whole project had to be delivered within 2 months if key objectives were going to be met. Contensis R4 was chosen as the content management solution for its proven ease of use and deep out of the box functionality. Solent liked the partnership approach adopted by our professional services team and the availability of a large number of pre-built components which significantly reduce project build times. The system's inherent ability to provide completely secure integration with third party applications such as their student records system and deliver not only course specific information but also other relevant content for consideration when searching, was another important differentiator.

Ease of use would be essential

Also vital was the system's intuitive nature. Although Solent knew we would be working closely with them, their team did not have the luxury of a long learning curve. Given the scale of the project it was essential that users at all levels got to grips with the system quickly and were able to concentrate upon strategic rather than technical issues right from the start.

Sharing the workload - delivering the solution in partnership

The success of any content managed implementation isn't only about procuring the right CMS. Nor is it likely that enthusiasm alone will carry the day. It is absolutely essential that a strong partnership is forged between client and supplier and that everyone buys in to the milestoned project plan. Success is about everyone working harmoniously and this means really effective project management with each organisation playing to its strengths.
In this case, having set the objectives, roles and responsibilities for each project team at the project initiation meeting, communication and reporting methods were agreed and a full technical specification developed for sign off. This is a crucial phase in any project and even more essential here with timeframes so short. Neither team had room for misunderstandings

Learning on the job!

At the start the Solent team had their hands full with branding and content issues, so our professional services team took on the site architecture and template creation tasks to give the project a really good kick start.

It soon became clear, whether we liked it or not, that there would be little time to carry out any classroom training, at least at the early stages. Fortunately, Contensis is intuitive to use, and the Solent team had created most of their content before they attended any formal sessions. Clearly knowledge transfer in a hands-on environment proved to be very effective.

Many projects in which we are involved include the requirement to migrate substantial volumes of existing content, for which we have developed a range of automated tools, but in this case there was little to re-use. The fact that the Solent team created such a volume of fresh content in the time available, speaks volumes about their dedication and enthusiasm.

And now . . .

With a successful website launch under their belts, the Solent team are now busy on an even bigger project - their intranet.
Once again they will be taking advantage of our many pre-built components to accelerate build time, but this time they will be using more intranet specific modules. We look forward to discussing this project in the near future.