"CrownPeak's CMS provides us with a powerful, quickly deployable solution that is very cost effective. CrownPeak implements the system, provides the servers and handles simple updates at no additional cost - and is training our staff. We have been able to build our new online events calendar system in record time. The system also lets us easily output custom formatted subsets of the event data the system gathers. We use this feature to do targeted promotions of specific events in various places on our web site. By increasing visibility of events of interest to specific audiences we expect the system to help us grow attendance at all our events."

Summary
USC, the oldest and largest private research university in the American West was looking for a content management system (CMS) to manage their University-wide events calendar. With hundreds of content contributors and sophisticated workflow requirements, they needed an enterprise level solution that was flexible yet affordable. After extensive research they chose CrownPeak’s Advantage CMS. CrownPeak implemented the system in four weeks, with great success.

Client
USC, founded in 1880, is the oldest and largest private research university in the American West. USC ranks as one of the top 10 private research universities in the United States and has approximately 28,000 students attending classes on the University Park Campus. As the largest private employer in Los Angeles, USC has more than 17,000 full and part-time employees on the two Los Angeles campuses and at academic centers in Orange County, Sacramento, Washington, D.C., and Santa Catalina Island.

Challenge
USC was looking for ways to increase attendance at the schools events by giving the current online calendaring system a major overhaul. Internal staff was maintaining the existing online calendaring system using custom scripts. They found it difficult to keep up with the volumes of content in the growing events calendaring system, and almost impossible to make rapid changes to the system’s output look & feel. With approximately 100 USC departments and organizations updating events on a regular basis, it was critical to get a heavy-duty system up and running fast. USC knew that acceptance and adoption at the novice user level would be critical, so the new system had to be extremely intuitive and easy-to-use. While meeting all the above requirements, the new calendaring system also needed to be more affordable than approaches that had been examined up to that point.

Solution
CrownPeak responded by working with USC staff to determine the various requirements of the basic user, the editor/approver, the department administrator, and the system administrator. By quickly prototyping the system, CrownPeak was able to deliver a visual model to work with and modify. In less than four weeks from the start of the project, CrownPeak had delivered a completed system.
Because Advantage CMS is a hosted solution, USC didn’t need to purchase new hardware or install complex software on their machines, speeding development and saving cost. Now novice and expert users alike can easily update the ever-changing USC events calendar. Subsets of the event calendar can be fluidly published to many different sections of USC’s main site or to any of the many special interest sites within the USC domain. Additionally, CrownPeak enabled submission of event content in various formats, tailored to the user type, so that PC, Mac, Unix, and other OS users could all use the system.

Innovation

• Event calendaring system with all the capabilities of a CMS:
  The flexibility of the Advantage CMS allowed CrownPeak to develop a comprehensive event calendaring system utilizing features like workflow and asset management. Events can be tied to other pieces of content and published to various areas of multiple web sites. This allows greater flexibility with publishing event information – and therefore provides greater event exposure and attendance.
• Event scheduling:
  By taking advantage of the built-in scheduling system, events can by automatically published and retired from the web site. When an event is published or retired all associated pages are updated at the same time. This eliminates broken links and "orphaned" content.
• Email & wireless event submission interface:
  CrownPeak’s Email interface allows the thousands of USC faculty and students to submit new events. Administrators can assign a security key to individuals who are using the email submission interface. An authorized individual can thereby reply to an email or enter their key into a new email to enter content into the system.
  When an email is received it is immediately brought into the Advantage CMS workflow where it can be approved, modified or rejected. Using this feature, event information can be updated via any email-enabled device, from PC’s to PDA’s.
• Sophisticated event reporting:
  The reporting system allows USC to generate custom reports for events. It allows web managers to sort & track events according to their needs. For example, a list of all events that require catering or have special parking requirements within a certain date range can be delivered as a custom report.

Return on Investment
USC will achieve return on investment on this system in two ways. First, all of USC’s events are available to the people searching for them in a much more comprehensive way. Because the system is so easy to use; adoption of online event listings is likely to increase. Thus, the time and money spent on these events is much more likely to achieve the desired result, thanks to higher visibility to event schedulers and attendees

Second, USC had a number of individuals in its IT group managing the previous system manually. Any change to the system or report that needed to be created required many hours to accomplish. Those tasks are now all automated. IT staff previously dedicated to the maintenance of the custom built system are able to focus on more important tasks.

We estimate that in terms of IT time alone, this system will save USC over 1,000 hours annually.