University of Colorado

How do you consolidate over 50 Sharepoint sites spread across the entire organization and manage the content for over 30,000 pages and associated assets?

Sitefinity is a great platform that has numerous features and is incredibly flexible which means you can implement in any number of ways. This is where REDEVTION came in.

The University of Colorado sought out a local Colorado technology partner that had successfully implemented large-scale enterprise Sitefinity websites in the past. Rightfully so, they wanted to plan out as many details as possible up-front and try to avoid as many pitfalls as possible. REDEVTION was fortunate enough to be chosen as that partner. Our no-nonsense approach to architecting Sitefinity and our willingness to be brutally honest about what the product can and cannot do made us a good fit.

Leveraging the existing staff and infrastructure was critical to the success of this project. Everyone from the University Web Content Team brought tremendous experience in .NET development, content management, design, system architecture, and a key understanding of how the business needed to operate.  However, not a single person internally had any direct Sitefinity experience, so that is where we helped.

We immediately recognized the immense talent of this group.  Together we began working on a plan to start architecting the system while at the same time training the in-house group on the ins and outs of Sitefinity. As we do with most of our clients, our staff became entrenched as valued members of the team acting as experts to help answer questions and overcome obstacles on the spot.

Solution

Our approach was relatively simple. After reviewing each of the business drivers as a group,  we were able to identify a high-level technical solution to achieve that goal. This was invaluable in helping us get up to speed quickly. Then with the entire team’s help we held two, all day “developer sessions” to plan out and architect the best solution possible.

We brought on two of our solution architects so that we could address Sitefinity questions or shortcomings right on the spot. After those meetings, the entire team was confident we had the best architecture possible and our chances of successfully delivering the new portal were extremely high. We also knew we were leveraging Sitefinity to its greatest potential at that moment in time. The following is an overview of the major milestones associated with this project.

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• Project and environment setup for SiteSync and automated builds. 

  • First step was setting up the solution in Visual Studio and automating the build to defeat browser caching and simplifying deployment. This is essential in this day and age, to prevent mobile devices from caching styles and javascript which typically renders the site broken. Setting up the environment next was essential so that we had a plan in place for SiteSync. We knew we wanted to have a staging server that exactly mirrored production which is where all campuses and departments go to launch new “sites” so they can be audited and proofed before going to the live production environment. SiteSync in Sitefinity is a very useful tool, but if used incorrectly it is very easy to lose content so it had be implemented and tested early in the process.

• Prototype and build the most important, highest-risk items first. 

  • In this case, we knew that there were severe limitations with Multisite in versions 8.x and 9.0 of Sitefinty, making it not a viable option. We knew we had to implement a custom solution using page properties to allow site sync to work properly, but still give each department total control over their specific area of the site. Templates per campus cross-matrixed with 20+ departments per campus allows the University to support 60+ sites with over 30,000 pages all from one management console.

• Security. 

  • Security was essential and like most large organizations, CU Denver has a single-sign-on solution to help manage the users and permissions for the entire organization. Overriding the built-in security provider was paramount to ensure that Sitefinity leveraged its existing security infrastructure. One of the challenges we ran into was in version 10.x of Sitefinity, was that they completely changed their security provider model which broke custom implementation. The new security features in Sitefinity are better for the community at-large, because it now allows for more common security models, such as open ID, but was a tad bit frustrating, to say the least. But you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

• Work with Progress directly to address issues with the core product. 

  • This is where we must give Sitefinity high accolades. We have a wonderful relationship with the engineering team at Progress.  Some issues were deemed so important Progress addressed immediately and rolled those solutions out to the community at large. One of the issues we identified that was addressed in that version of the software is the ability to play videos stored in the Sitefinity database on iOS and Mac devices. CU Denver and CyberLancers discovered the issue early and created a custom solution that we provided back to Progress which in turn was folded back into the core product.

• Integration with third-party Content Delivery Network (CDN) for managing all larger video assets. 

  • For larger assets, it makes sense to store them in a CDN to take advantage of bandwidth and speed. However, since there are hundreds of content managers within the CU Denver organization and each one has a great deal of control over their particular department or area, we had to allow both the built-in features of Sitefinity as well as our custom components to work virtually identical. This simplifies the job of Content Managers and allows them to add new video content without worrying about where it is stored.

Business Benefit