We just launched our new website a few days before school started. After
assessing all our options over the last year we decided to go with
Finalsite as our website and portal provider. We felt they would provide
us with all the options we wanted in a suitable package with support.
We were not disappointed.
We also launched Portals for Faculty, students and parents at the same
time. We even included portal type pages on our public site pages as we
believe we can get greater flexibility with this layout design. These
pages are being fully developed this fall. We really wanted to start
the year with the new look and functionality that the website and
portals offer so we did the majority of the work during the summer
months and got everything in place in time to launch. Finalsite support
was fantastic as they responded to our team's needs and we launched
without any problem at all.
We have integrated many of the popular social networking tools, have set
up teacher class pages and athletic team pages as well. The new forms
manager is also a great feature to gather query information. We are in
the process of setting up online payments and the school store. We use
many calendars and can easily customize views or export the ical feeds
to other sites.
Parents really like news alerts from school and athletic events and can
subscribe to various news feeds as well. We are also adding the ability
for parents to send themselves SMS messages to mobile accounts. Parents
also update their own profile updates automatically rather than call the
school for changes.
A final reason we choose Finalsite is that they integrate well with many
SIS vendors and since this was part one of a two-headed project for our
school, with the website and portals fully functional I am now focusing
on final stages of selecting and preparing for integrating the SIS
solution.
Vincent Jansen
Director of Information Services
Lower Canada College
-----Original Message-----
From: A forum for independent school educators
[mailto:ISED-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU] On Behalf Of Terry Dash
Sent: Friday, October 08, 2010 9:04 AM
To: ISED-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
Subject: Web content management recommendations
Hi everyone -
We're hoping to rejuvenate our web site by adding features for:
- social networking (parents, students, alumni)
- online payment
- event management
- teacher web pages
If your school has had a successful experience within the last year
launching a new web site, could you please let me know...
[1] which web content management system you are using?
[2] which of the features above (if any) you implemented?
I'm particularly interested in web content management vendors with sales
and training staff in the New England area.
One final note: We are _not_ looking for a student information system
right now, since we are happy with our current system. However, our
student information system offers limited choices for managing web
content
outside the SIS. We're therefore looking for a web content management
system that we'll integrate with our SIS.=20
Thanks in advance -
Terry=20
. . .
Terry Dash
Director of Technology
Pike School
34 Sunset Rock Road
Andover, MA 01810
978-475-1197 x6623
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