Northwest College Case Study
Reducing IT Dependences with dotCMS Cloud
Learn how Northwest College stays up-to-date on the latest dotCMS upgrades and security fixes without overtaxing IT resources.
Industry
Education
Country
United States
Intro
Founded in 1946, NWC is a two-year, comprehensive community college serving Park County (tax district) and Park, Big Horn and Washakie Counties (service area). In the context of our global society, the mission of Northwest College is to be student-centered; be forward-thinking; cultivate community; prepare students for transfer, career, and life; and retain and graduate students.
Challenge
Located in northwestern Wyoming, Northwest College is a small community college serving around 2,000 students from all around the United States, as well as around the globe. As an educational institution that prides itself in being student-centered and forward-thinking, their web team was looking for a way to be extremely effi cient and effective with their limited time and resources.
When looking to implement a CMS, Northwest College turned to dotCMS as a way to decentralize their web content maintenance. dotCMS met many of their higher education requirements right out of the box, making it an easy choice for the web team at Northwest College. However, because they have such a limited web team, Northwest College needed an easy way to make sure they stayed up-to-date on the latest dotCMS upgrades and security fi xes without overtaxing their resources. For this, they moved their site to dotCMS Cloud.
Being on the Cloud has been a lifesaver for me. I try to upgrade our dotCMS instance at least once a year and the support I get from dotCMS to do that is critical. I couldn’t do it on my own.
Solution
Moving to dotCMS Cloud made sense for Northwest College because they knew they needed to reduce their dependency on IT when it came to maintenance and upgrades. They have access to dotCMS support engineers to help with any issues, roadblocks, or questions that come up. On the cloud, their dotCMS installation is always up-to-date with platform enhancements, upgrades, as well as the latest dotCMS code. This means Northwest College can easily keep pace with the latest technology upgrades without taking away from the valuable time and resources of their limited web team.
Results
The flexibility of dotCMS means the web team can create structures and widgets to fit the college’s content needs in any given situation. dotCMS provides the Northwest College site admins with content tools that have an easy-to-use interface, allowing the small web team to train even the least tech savvy user how to administer pages. This means the web team is able to manage web content more efficiently and even introduce entire new site designs relatively painlessly.
By moving to dotCMS Cloud, Northwest College now has support that means their web team doesn’t need to have an extensive IT background in order to maintain the site. It gives them more time to focus on their day-to-day activities as well as future digital projects