The Challenge

The main idea behind the project was to enable CLAHRC-NDL to present its mission to the general public and allow its members to collaborate on key objectives.

CLAHCH-NDL’s mission is to undertake high quality, applied research and related education in order to change the way research is delivered and associated services are designed. To achieve this, CLAHRC-NDL needed a website that would provide collaborative facilities between its partners as well as present key information about its purpose to the general public.

CLAHRC-NDL has no internal programming or design capabilities so the requirement was for an intuitive CMS solution that required no knowledge of web development techniques. CLAHRC-NDL also needed a password protected area of the website which would enable registered users to collaborate and share documentation.

It was extremely important that CLAHRC-NDL could easily create general content for the website (e.g. News, Events, Member profiles) as well as manage a member portal for collaboration (e.g. Document sharing and Discussion Forums). Furthermore, the CMS that was required had to be flexible enough to cater to CLAHRC-NDL’s specific development requirements and allow for extended plug-in functionality.

The requirements included:

• Restricted access control for collaboration area
• User registration and approval process
• Custom document upload solution for registered / approved users
• Integrated discussion forum

The Solution

When reviewing the options available to deliver the CLAHRC-NDL website, Sitefinity ticked all the boxes.
“Our development team loves using Sitefinity as it enables them to get the core framework for a website up and running very quickly and then enables us to fully integrate bespoke functionality on top of a truly robust framework” says Gavin Beddow with the Quba team.

Sitefinity allowed us to create a wide range of user management levels that enabled us to create specific roles for all aspects of content management.  This was extremely important for the collaborative area as each section required an administrator to review and grant access to new registrants specific to that area.

The Results

Using Sitefinity we were able to deploy the website in a 2-phase development. The first phase included the creation of the core framework which enabled us to get the initial website up and running very quickly. Following successful delivery of Phase 1, we focused on the bespoke Collaboration area to provide some great features and functionality, all built on top of Sitefinity.

With both general visitor and collaboration content, Sitefinity has provided CLAHRC-NDL with a flexible and powerful solution which put them in full control of the content management process. CLAHRC-NDL’s employees often need to add and update content very quickly (e.g. Change of venue for a forthcoming event) and the CMS facilities provided by Sitefinity enable them to do this in a matter of just a few clicks.