Jason Friesen

Web Developer, Selkirk College

Biography

Jason Friesen

Jason Friesen is Web Developer at Selkirk College, a community college in British Columbia, Canada.

He was responsible for transforming their 10,000-page website from a loose federation of Microsoft FrontPage® pages into a cohesive, branded, Standards-compliant, CMS-driven information source. He now works with a small, dedicated team of IT professionals to bring College Education in British Columbia kicking and screaming into the Century of the Anchovy.

Selkirk College

Selkirk College, founded in 1966, was the first regional community college in British Columbia. Selkirk has grown into one of the largest organizations in the West Kootenay and Boundary regions of south eastern British Columbia, with 8 campuses and learning centres across the West Kootenay and Boundary regions.

Each year, the college is responsible for over $75 million in economic activity, employing over 550 full and part-time staff and providing exceptional post-secondary learning experiences for over 2400 full-time equivalent students.

Presentation

Lessons learned from implementing a CMS in a Higher Education Environment

Case: Selkirk College

Higher education, Conference Day #1, Wednesday May 5th, 4.00 pm - 5.00 pm

Deploying a Content Management System can be a daunting task. After years of hand-built pages and custom CMS development, Canadian Selkirk College purchased and deployed a commercial CMS. In the aftermath, the Web Team discovered that the real challenge lay much deeper.

Jason Friesen is Selkirk’s principal Web Developer, intimately involved at each step of the project. During deployment, he worked closely with Irish vendors TerminalFour to migrate Selkirk’s content away from their custom-built applications into T4’s commercial-grade SiteManager. In the months following successful deployment, the Web Team discovered that the greater challenges were yet to come. Implementing a great Content Management System revealed these deeper challenges, and freed the Web Team to begin addressing the real problems: the content itself.

Join Jason as he shares his team’s strategies and surprises.

See slides online