Canterbury Christ Church was the first teacher training college built by the Church of England in the 20th Century. It was founded in 1962 particularly to meet the needs of church schools at a time of teacher shortage.

In 2005 Canterbury Christ Church was awarded full university status.

The websites at Canterbury Christ Church are managed by various teams and individual web authors. As well as these teams the University had over 60 separate departments, centres and units.

Each department looked after its own pages which made up mini-sites or sub-sections of the main University site.

Canterbury required a CMS that would replace FrontPage as the primary mechanism for getting content into the website, while also operating in a mixed server environment.

Their own Web Development Unit wanted to design their own templates in-house for the CMS following appropriate training.

The information architecture for the site was reasonably set within the context of the existing site and it was envisaged that this would be replicated, at least initially, within the CMS. Flexibility of the architecture would be important to allow for future developments.

They were aware that the level of demand for interactive web elements such as forms, discussion boards, FAQs, surveys, newsletters, blogs, wikis etc, was increasing, and they expected a CMS to facilitate the development of those features.

Key to their selection process was certain criteria such as value for money, customer service, ease of use for non-technical authors, technical fit within their existing systems and skillsets.

They wanted a CMS with a proven track record, and be able to work with a team that could offer Innovation (with regard to suggested solutions to the scenarios put forward) and to hit expected timescales for implementation and migration.

The benefits of Contensis would be most apparent, by fulfilling their requirements within the management of our professional services team that would provide all their needs with a flexible solution that could also be used with other web developments such as:

Staff Intranet

Student Portal

Creation of materials for VLE / Learning Object Repository

"Genetics was one of five companies short-listed to supply Canterbury Christ Church University with an enterprise content management system. Contensis attended two selection panels, the first consisting largely of technical staff, the second made up of a cross section of potential system users. After the first selection event, Contensis was selected as one of two leading contractors, and were rated top as regards the quality of the product at that stage. Following site visits to referee organisations and the second selection panel, Contensis was recommended as the preferred supplier. This recommendation was based on the very positive feedback gathered during the site visits, a clear preference by the panels for the Contensis product itself and its functionality and the belief that Canterbury Christ Church University could form a creative development partnership with Genetics."

Catherine Gater - Web Development Unit Manager