University of East London

Summary

The University of East London (UEL) project was an ongoing support contract assisting with the support of their website and content management system. Before we joined the project the university had issues with the website going down randomly. We assisted with finding the cause of these issues and making the site more stable. Once those issues were sorted we began assisting with bug fixing, creating new functionality and much more.

The Challenge

When we originally arrived, UEL was having serious issues around publishing. When users were pushing changes from the CMS to the live site, certain changes brought down the live website. Due to this fact, it meant that CMS users had begun to lose confidence in their ability to be able to make quick changes without there being issues.

Since the site was a vital resource for the university and needed to be updated regularly (to update news, events, course pages, etc..) this was less than ideal.

Another problem that we encountered was a highly customised Sitecore Content Management System (CMS) with little to no documentation about the customisations.

The Solution

The first (and most important) task was to investigate what was the cause of the outages. When we arrived, the university was coming up to its busiest time of year for student applications so it was time-critical that we got the site into a place where changes could be made (without the fear of the site going down).

We worked closely with Sitecore Support to diagnose the issue while also gaining an understanding of the customisations to the CMS and which part was potentially making the site fall over.

Once we had resolved the publishing issues, we began making working with the university to make enhancements to the CMS. This included tasks such as:

• Creating the ability to create new course pages (using templates)
• Updating components
• Installing Security Fixes
• Restricting access to parts of the CMS that (non-admin) users shouldn’t have access to
• Adding the ability to create site-wide banners (as well as an emergency banner)