University User Group – The next chapter - Wednesday 2nd July 2008
The latest Contensis ‘University User Group’ meeting was held at Canterbury Christ Church University, in the wonderful Garden Room at the Priory, the university’s oldest building.
The meeting was organised and chaired by Josef Lapka, Analyst Programmer from Canterbury, who, through the Contensis University Forum, arranged an excellent day for everyone, with an informative meeting and a superb lunch at Augustine’s Restaurant.
After a warm welcome with coffee, cakes and greetings, the meeting kicked-off with an introduction to both new and existing members, and although clients had travelled from all over the UK, top marks went to the European University Institute for making it all the way from Florence in Italy.
The meeting opened with the universities talking through their individual Contensis projects and highlighting their experiences, tips and tricks.
Richard Chivers, Head of Development at Contensis, then took the floor with a demonstration of the new R5 version of Contensis which is about to be released. The new features and functionality within the release delighted members and raised many a word of praise.
Richard took the meeting up to lunch with a presentation of the new Contensis Support site which will be launched alongside the new version release.
The meeting resumed after lunch with a debate on student records and personalisation within prospectuses which led into the final session on Contensis support and other business.
The next meeting will take place in six months’ time with the location to be announced shortly although, and as a delight to everyone, Gwenaelle Quivy from the EUI in Florence offered to host a meeting in the summer of 2009. Everyone departed with thoughts of Ponte Cecchio, Chianti Classico and SUN.
Representatives present were from:
Canterbury Christ Church University
London School of Economics & Political Science
Southampton Solent University
University Campus Suffolk
European University Institute
Royal Holloway, University of London
Guildford College
Apologies:
University of Cumbria
University College Birmingham
University of Bolton
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.