We are very pleased to announce that Sutton Housing Partnership recently chose the Contensis CMS together with work from our professional services team to deliver their next generation of web-based systems. Sutton Housing Partnership is an “arms length management organisation” which manages a large portfolio of properties in and around Sutton in Surrey and which are still owned by Sutton Council. This is unlike the traditional housing association or registered social landlord, which own the properties they manage.
With over 7000 tenants and 1400 leaseholders to look after, the website had to serve many multi-cultural and diverse communities. Naturally, accessibility is high on the agenda. As a result, the new site fully meets WAI AA-rating and also provides enhanced functionality such as text-only and high-contrast templates as standard. The new website also provides a decisive change in the way stakeholders interact with SHP services, with every opportunity taken to enable tenants to do things for themselves online. And with so many properties to market out, the site also features links to “estate agent” functionality and property repairs management.
With backing from the board of governors, there is every reason to expect a radical change in the online perception of Sutton Housing Partnership. Head of IT, Mark Feehan says “With the website, we aimed to achieve a number of development goals in one. Residents will be able to interact with us more easily and carry out many day-to-day transactions with better navigation. We’ve also given our visitors the level of accessibility they require.”
Following the success of the main website project, Genetics Limited has recently used the Contensis CMS to create SHP’s new Intranet. And we have ensured that the project continues to operate effectively. Commenting after their new Intranet site launched, Mark Feehan said “We’ve achieved even more than we expected with Contensis. And we’re really happy with the support. Genetics are great to deal with and their support is excellent - during and after the project”.
Sutton Housing Partnership are the second housing organisation in six months to opt for Contensis, with many more housing associations currently evaluating Contensis. Together with our extensive client base of colleges, councils, universities and NHS trusts, this consolidates the Contensis CMS as a class-leading software product for the public sector.
About the company
The Contensis Enterprise Content Management suite of products began life, as many products do, following an animated discussion between a group of software professionals back in the autumn of 1998.
They all agreed, after exhaustive evaluation, that most of the products then available fell far short of their own vision and an idea began to gel. By spring 1999 work was well advanced on the specification of a system which not only met their criteria, and that of respected industry analysts, but equally important also reflected the views of end user enterprises. Power, ease of use and cost effectiveness were the key words. The beginnings of the Contensis development team were spawned a little later and work started in earnest to turn the dream into reality.
Philosophy
Our approach is completely customer-centric. Customers are our universe and we see their problems as our problems.
From a software perspective this means that we strive to ensure that every aspect of Contensis is simple to learn and easy to use. We believe we've achieved that, certainly at everyday user level. Even newcomers to the system are normally editing and contributing within minutes.
It's all part of our 'How can we make it simpler' approach.
About Contensis Enterprise CMS
Built using the Microsoft® .Net platform Contensis ECMS features an open API that facilitates easy and rapid integration with virtually any application, and is completely intuitive to use at every level.
One of the very few CMS solutions that combines the best of dynamic and flat file publishing, it has proved itself in the most demanding of circumstances and is fully scalable.