Becker Professional Education

For more than 50 years, Becker Professional Education has helped equip professionals and their companies for the challenges of tomorrow in the Accounting (CPA, CPE), Finance (CFA, Continuing Education) and Project Management (PMP, Continuing Education) professions.

Problem

Becker Professional Education, a subsidiary of DeVry Inc., was undergoing major rebranding and positioning of its offerings.  Given the amount of people they needed to communicate with daily, combined with the redesign, Becker needed an enterprise-level, effective means of communicating with prospects, students, instructors and staff via the website.

They faced several website dilemmas. The professional services education company offers exam review programs to help professionals prepare for certifications in accounting and finance, as well as providing continuing education. Each of these focused offerings was featured within one of four independent websites, BeckerCPE.com, BeckerCPA.com, BeckerPM.com and Stalla.com. The company intended to bring them all under one website, Becker.com. However, the content management system on which the BeckerCPA.com website was operating, Serena Collage, was approaching obsolescence. Although it was performing suitably, Serena had recently announced there would be no further upgrades, and support would be ending for its Collage web content management system (CMS). The prudent path for Becker, as well as all Serena Collage customers, was to replace Collage with a suitable CMS alternative.

Solution

Duo worked with Becker to create a new site information architecture, and a look and feel that reflected the new branding. The first task was to identify a content management system that could not only replace the feature set of Collage but also accommodate the unique needs of the business units being integrated into the website.  Together with Becker, Duo selected Hannon Hill’s Cascade Server CMS. Cascade Server offered two immediate benefits: the architecture and publishing model is very similar to that of Collage, and replacing Collage with Cascade Server requires only a modest amount of retraining for site administrators.

Though it does differ in some ways, overall Cascade Server is easier to navigate for making site changes. Despite the new CMS, the benefits of the old site were not ignored.  Important landing pages from the old website were mapped and redirected to similarly relevant pages of the new website.

The second major task was migrating the content from different sites with different or non-existent CMS into Cascade Server. To facilitate this migration, Duo customized Hannon Hill’s script for automating the migration of Collage’s “Contribution Types” into Cascade Server’s “Asset Factories” as well as WYSIWYG to WYSIWYG.

Results

The task of migrating old sites to the new is becoming increasingly complex, but a successful outcome is far from impossible. With Becker,  Duo demonstrated that by developing a plan of action and including the migration effort into the project's scope, a smooth process and desired end result are not only attainable, but likely.