With over 25,000 students from 100+ countries, beds.ac.uk is at the heart of communication for the University of Bedfordshire. It’s the single entity that ensures the university is a community and not a series of unconnected organizations around the globe. The university chose to work with Codiance and Umbraco to create a complex, yet simple-to-use destination for all of their faculty, students, and partner organizations. The most important thing was providing confidence to each user. Whether they’re a seasoned web editor, or a lecturer just wanting to update their profile, we needed to give everyone the confidence to create and manage all their content.
Skills used
- Architecture
- Communication
- Design
- Integrations
- Support
Sector
- Education
✅ 200+ contributors confidently using the platform ✅ Bespoke and advanced integration of 3rd party data
✅ 5 hours+ saved on manual processes weekly
About Bedfordshire University
The University of Bedfordshire is recognized as one of the best young universities in the world. They have worked with over 1,500 organizations in the past three years alone. In doing so, they have generated a 49% increase in research and knowledge exchange income since 2013. A great demonstration of its partnership focus and continued success.
How it all started
With such a vibrant global network of faculties, students, and partner organizations, beds.ac.uk is at the heart of communication for the University of Bedfordshire. It’s the single entity that ensures the university is a community and not a series of unconnected organizations around the globe. It’s also the shop window. Whether it’s the increasing demand from international markets or the frantic rush of clearing, the content available must be up-to-date and accessible, whilst positioning The University of Bedfordshire as market leaders. With this in mind, there were 3 distinct problems to solve: Give 200+ contributors the confidence to go and use the platform. With varying technical abilities, we need to build a platform that makes it safe and simple for anyone to go and create content. We also needed to make it safe and simple to maintain. Integrate several dynamic external sources of information. The site needed to pull in vital information from several sources. This was a key element in making beds.ac.uk the single resource that faculties, students and partner organizations. Secure and continuous uptime. High-intensity, resource-demanding occasions such as clearing are reliant on the continuous uptime and a stable environment.
I can’t explain how pleased we were with Codiance’s fix with workflow. Although it sounds simple, neither we nor the previous provider had addressed this problem. Codiance came to us with a solution out of the blue. It’s saved us many hours of weekly resources and the information displayed now looks much better for the end-user. With our previous platform, it was too easy for anyone to edit anything on our internal site. Not only did this keep us busy with firefighting, but it also made it difficult to get all the editors to create and manage their own pages. Codiance’s Walled Gardens meant we could be confident a contributor couldn't break a page!
How Codiance made it happen
A great-looking site that’s simple to use. For an organization with so many content contributors, it’s essential the platform is straightforward to manage and contribute to. Maintaining control and high standards whilst minimizing hands-on support was key. We leveraged Unbraco's in-depth ability to create bespoke user permissions. We called these our ‘Walled Gardens’ that catered to different types of users. These Walled Gardens provided confidence to administrators and contributors alike. There are 2 key elements that make it easier for everyone.
Permissions: For a lecturer, you may just allow editing of text and images on a page. Whereas your comms team may have rights to add tags and edit the layout. Permissions save you time and give everyone the confidence to build.
Workflows: You may wish an external partner to complete 3 steps (add picture > include text > provide external link) before submitting a page for review. Whereas the news team may be able to publish news directly without approval.
Bespoke Integrations: Umbraco’s ability to integrate 3rd party data and the flexibility we had in deciding how that data could be integrated played a major part in choosing Umbraco.
One of the key problems all universities are having is how SIT data is managed and updated. SIT is a key data resource for potential students researching the courses they’re interested in. The university team had become accustomed to pulling and displaying the data in a convoluted way. It was also accepted that some data would be shown incorrectly or with missing information.
Finally, when data was manually updated, the next automated update could overwrite the manually updated data. With Umbraco, the SIT data is now updated automatically, and - depending on when the course starts and the information available - the information dynamically changes and updates. There’s no longer a need for constant monitoring and manual updating.
Umbraco has enabled us to further devolve content on our website and create a larger network of editors across the University with over 200 colleagues trained in the CMS. This has led to an increased volume of content updated and has been driven by the simplicity of the Umbraco editor. Plugins such as Plumber have improved processes between editors and work published on site and has reduced reliance on the central marketing team to deliver content, allowing them to focus more on strategic developments. By using Umbraco we have also streamlined our process with SITS. This complex set of data required significant development which Codiance were able to smoothly deliver in turn reducing our manual process by around 5 hours a week.
Codiance has given hours back to the University team to focus on getting their information and communications out there - no more trying to simply make things work! They’re continuing to have great fun working with the team at The University of Bedfordshire. The university has more people than ever confidently making contributions and creating a richer environment for faculties, students, and partner organizations alike 💪
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