Smarter Content Management Integration for California Education

Summary

California School Boards Association (www.csba.org) is a member-driven collaborative group of virtually all of California's school districts and county offices of education. It brings together school governing boards and their districts and county offices on behalf of California’s children. With the support of their website, CSBA provides an abundance of services for school districts, county offices of education and individual school board members. In addition to legislative representation, professional development workshops and information services, CSBA offers members fee-based services, including comprehensive policy services, financial programs, legal services, executive search services and more.

Challenge

CSBA.org is a hub for so much information for the general public of California as well as specific legislative and professional services for its members, the challenge had become keeping up with the turn around of new content, keeping the site fresh and relevant. Also, as the online services grew, maintaining a cohesive and professional brand image across the many web applications became more and more difficult. The website, if it continued on its current course, would soon become unmanageable.

Solution

Roundedcube worked with CSBA’s Web Team to hash out a redesign strategy and then on one hand consulted the Web Team on specifying the redesigned UI while the development team got to work on architecting the Sitecore CMS solution and planning the integration of several custom .NET applications. In addition, we devised a single sign-on (SSO) solution to allow CSBA members to have one login to authenticate their access in the site as well as other web applications. We integrated Sitecore 5.3.1 with CSBA’s existing legacy iMIS system, a web-based, not-for-profit business software system.

Results

California School Board Association now has a solid foundation on which to grow and enhance their Web presence while making content management and web development much more efficient. They also now have a cohesive brand guideline for all of web applications to follow.