As one of the UK's foremost training grounds for the chefs, hoteliers and restaurateurs of the future, University College Birmingham expect to work with the best. Their alumni rub shoulders with many of the highest profile chefs and the college itself is no stranger to accolades with regular quality awards, Beacon status, high attainment in Ofsted reports… and a superb restaurant! The college actually covers a much wider range of courses, including leisure, tourism, sports and hair & beauty, with strong links to industry and commerce. Of the 8,300 students at the University College over 1000 students come from abroad to study there every year.
So we at Genetics Limited were especially delighted that they chose the Contensis Content Management System to run their website. With a new website due in 2008, the college were keen to find a system that they could learn quickly, one which conformed to industry standards, especially .NET, and that would deliver a genuine reduction in build times. By taking on the task of creating their new website themselves, the overall project cost has also been kept to a minimum.
University College Birmingham's IT Director, Amin Pradhan, said "After much research into different types of content management systems we chose Contensis because we feel that it will cope with the needs of our website build and be totally user friendly. It will also help us move forward quicker with the development of our new look website".
Until recently UCB was known as Birmingham College of Food, Tourism and Creative Studies. Following an extensive review by the QAA, it has been awarded the ability to grant its own degrees, and has adopted a new name to reflect the change. We'll be checking our post for an invitation to the launch party!
About the company
The Contensis Enterprise Content Management suite of products began life, as many products do, following an animated discussion between a group of software professionals back in the autumn of 1998.
They all agreed, after exhaustive evaluation, that most of the products then available fell far short of their own vision and an idea began to gel. By spring 1999 work was well advanced on the specification of a system which not only met their criteria, and that of respected industry analysts, but equally important also reflected the views of end user enterprises. Power, ease of use and cost effectiveness were the key words. The beginnings of the Contensis development team were spawned a little later and work started in earnest to turn the dream into reality.
Philosophy
Our approach is completely customer-centric. Customers are our universe and we see their problems as our problems.
From a software perspective this means that we strive to ensure that every aspect of Contensis is simple to learn and easy to use. We believe we've achieved that, certainly at everyday user level. Even newcomers to the system are normally editing and contributing within minutes.
It's all part of our 'How can we make it simpler' approach.
About Contensis Enterprise CMS
Built using the Microsoft® .Net platform Contensis ECMS features an open API that facilitates easy and rapid integration with virtually any application, and is completely intuitive to use at every level.
One of the very few CMS solutions that combines the best of dynamic and flat file publishing, it has proved itself in the most demanding of circumstances and is fully scalable.