Portfolio Case Studies
Cornell University School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Cornell University School of Civil & Environmental Engineering (CEE) reduces operating costs by migrating to a new content management system.
CEE is a school in the college of engineering at Cornell University. The three broad areas of study offered at this school include: Civil Infrastructure, Environment, and Engineering Systems and Management.
The CEE website, serves as the main gateway of information about a school renowned for excellence in teaching, research, and service. Hence the website plays a key role in addressing the needs of all its constituents namely: current & prospective students, staff, faculty and alumni.
Business Need:
CEE used WordPress (blogging software) based application as a content management system to manage content on its website. However, this cumbersome and time-consuming system was not user-friendly. Hence, in order to improve functionality and increase efficiency of the content management system, we enabled CEE to migrate from WordPress to CommonSpot. In addition to huge savings in time, effort and money, the new system also made CEE compatible with the centrally supported content management system.
Key Challenges:
- While updating pages in the old system, the site crashed often, resulting in loss of data and duplication of effort
- The IT team at CEE could not update the home page. This could be done by the vendor alone and required at least a couple days of turnaround time. For a school that is at the cutting edge of technology, the inability to relay information in a timely fashion was a major hurdle
- The web pages took more than 10 seconds to load and this resulted in a poor end-user experience
Solution:
Our expertise and deep understanding of CommonSpot helped CEE address all major concerns and ensure the smooth migration of data from one system to another. As the task at hand was only content migration, we had to comply with the existing site design. Hence, custom designed templates were created to address this requirement. Maintaining consistency was of utmost importance when migrating from WordPress to CommonSpot. This task included migration of the entire database, which went back several years.
The new system is an easy to use and reliable content management system. Authorized CEE members were trained by us in the use of the new system. These members now control the updating and editing of content, without depending on external vendors. The new system also allows rollback of data to older versions. This helps increase the speed of change.
Our proven experience in CommonSpot implementations helped us custom build functionality into the system by using a server cache that optimizes file size. This has resulted in faster webpage loading time, which in turn has improved the end-user experience.
Mid-way through the project the scope was broadened to include faculty micro sites. These sites function as a resource for the faculty to share information about their research interests/activities. The improved functionality of this system allows each faculty member to be responsible for their own site. This distributed ownership of updating and editing content reduces bottlenecks in the system and also enables the site to maintain relevant and up-to-date information.
Result:
| Parameter | New System | Old System |
| Typical page load time (on a 256kpbs broadband connection) | 5 seconds | 10 seconds |
| Typical content update efforts (not including instances where old system crashed) | 5 minutes | 60 minutes |
| Typical content change coordination time (This includes content sourcing, staging content, approving content and publishing content) | 0.5 hours | 8 hours |
| Average number of content changes per year | 100 | |
| Total cost savings per year | 100*(540-35)minutes*50/60 = = $42,083 *Assuming staff time costs $50/hr
Not to mention the ability to update any content any time compared to limited content updating on the old system. Also empowering content owners (e.g. Faculty) to update their own site content. |
View the "Cornell University School of Civil and Environmental Engineering" website.