CU Denver

Campus Portal

The University of Colorado Denver was ready for a full overhaul of their campus website...

Their goal was to improve some critical aspects of the site, such as usability, maintainability, performance, content quality and the ability to use data from other systems. The first step was to migrate from Microsoft Sharepoint to a newer content management system, Sitefinity. After the migration, CU Denver could start the customizations needed to improve the site further.

For this project, Ronin teamed up with Cyberlancers --a group of dependable Sitefinity experts. While Cyberlancers provided much of dev ops knowledge of Sitefinity, Ronin offered much of the development expertise.

The project is now humming along in a rollout phase, and our part couldn't have gone smoother. We worked closely with various teams from the University headquarters, including dev-ops, engineering and marketing. We put together a robust architecture, developed some great new features and trained the client on how to handle longer-term maintenance and development independently in the future.

Major Features

  • CMS Migration (Sharepoint to Sitefinity)

    • Provided architectural guidance related to the Sitefinity CMS, including structure & content organization, content type modelling and widget definitions.
    • Developed an automation suite to migrate content from Sharepoint to Sitefinity.
  • Custom Web Development & Training

    • Developed a number of customized pieces for Sitefinity, including custom dynamic templates, widgets and administrative utilities.
    • Helped with front-end UI efforts, such as responsive (mobile first) styling and interactivity.
    • Trained technical staff on development and deployment best practices.
  • Single-Sign-On

    • Worked with the security team to architect and develop a solution that allows users to authenticate to Sitefinity using CU Denver's home-grown Single-Sign-On service.
  • Microservices

    • Architected and developed a number of custom (RESTful) microservices to provide CMS content & functionality to 3rd party mobile & web apps.
    • Created automated documentation for these services to improve their usability.
  • Data Imports

    • Created a background process to import data into the CMS from external systems, incorporating complex business rules and custom workflows.

Technical Info

ASP.net MVCASP.net Web API (REST)Test-Driven DevelopmentAgileN-Tier architectureJavascript (React and Angular.js)Data ModellingMicrosoft SQL ServerOracleFederated Authentication (SAML-P)Responsive (Mobile-First) DesignSASS (Bootstrap 4)WebPackDeployment AutomationSitefinitySEO

Screenshots