Recent Education Clients
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Founded in 1925, the University of Minnesota Press (UMP) is among the most distinctive American university presses, with an international reputation for publishing boundary-breaking and intellectually rigorous work. The University of Minnesota Press is recognized internationally for its innovative editorial program in the humanities and social sciences and as publisher of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), the most widely used objective tests of personality in the world.
UMP recognized that their aging static HTML website was no longer meeting the needs of its readers and didn't reflect their voice as a leading publisher of innovative books and journals. Jazkarta was hired to help UMP overhaul the site with more dynamic search functionality and a new design. One of the first tasks was to migrate thousands of books and journals records from a Filemaker Pro database to the Plone CMS using Transmogrifier.
With help from our design partner Forge Brands, we gave the site a fresh, colorful look-n-feel that better reflected the UMP brand and identity. We used the new Diazo theming tool to seamlessly integrate the design provided by Forge Brands into the Plone site. The explore section of the site provides a unique faceted search experience to easily browse through the thousands of book titles in the UMP catalog. This search interface is powered by the eea.facetednavigation plugin.
Industry:
Technology:
Rice University: Connexions
Houston, Texas
Connexions is a web portal platform developed by Rice University for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web. Powering the Connexions website is Rhaptos, the open source software to enable authors, instructors and students to create, select, and assemble modular educational content into collections customized to meet their teaching and learning needs.
Jazkarta was hired to assist Rice University in building a platform to quickly deploy Rhaptos to other universities wishing to use the software. Jazkarta is developing software to automate the deployment to Amazon EC2.
Industry:
Technology:
Rocky View Schools
Airdrie, Canada
Serving residents to the west of Calgary, Rocky View Schools has over 16,000 students in grades K-12. It is the sixth largest school district in Alberta, with more than 1000 teaching and 700 support staff. On the first day of school, when all those teachers log in and start editing, their web content management system takes quite a beating.
Rocky View Schools chose the open source Plone CMS because it offered them the enterprise-level security and user management features they needed, with no licensing costs attached. When their deployment grew to over 50 sites and began to experience performance issues, they turned to Jazkarta, a Boston-based open source technology consultancy. Jazkarta performed a fixed price performance assessment and then implemented many of its recommendations. More recently, we have migrated the sites to Plone 4 to get further performance benefits. The result: a successful first day of school.
Industry:
Technology:
Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Cambridge, Massachusetts
The Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) recently became an accredited school and wanted to have a more dynamic website to attract new students and promote their academic activities. They engaged Jazkarta to build not only their public-facing website in Plone, but also a separate intranet site to provide up-to-date information to staff, students and faculty.
Both sites utilize PlonePAS (Pluggable Authentication Service) to allow users to login with their Active Directory credentials. We've also employed the excellent FacultyStaffDirectory (FSD) product to provide a searchable/browseable directory of all the faculty, staff and students.
Industry:
Technology:
