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Web Content Management System

Web Content Management Systems allow nearly anyone to edit web pages as easily as they can edit other documents. WCMS is the next generation of tools for empowering distributed management of web site information. Unlike desktop software suites like Dreamweaver and Contribute, these systems are centrally run and provided—there is no computer setup necessary to begin using these systems and no software versions or upgrades to worry about. For the end user, they run entirely within the web browser and provide an intuitive interface for finding, editing, and publishing web pages.

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Latest Announcements:

December 4, 2011 - Cascade Server Capacity Expansion

Today we launched the new Cascade Server architecture at Northwestern University after weeks of planning and testing. The new systems were tested thoroughly by several web development teams throughout the University and are made available today to users. All users logging in to Cascade Server will now use these systems automatically. Each of the new servers acting in this cluster has approximately four times the resources as the single server that we have been using (and upgrading) for the past three years. We think you'll notice the improvement right away. If you encounter any unusual issues, especially related to login or publishing, please let your web content management support person or web developer team know.

March 3, 2011 - Happy Birthday to Cascade @ NU! Momentary outage tonight (3/3)

Happy 2nd birthday to Cascade Server @ Northwestern! It now manages 135 sites by 444 NetIDs.
Some time between 8 and 10pm, Cascade will experience a very momentary outage if maintenance on the Web SSO module goes according to plan. It should be completely un-noticeable. You do not need to log out; the maintenance will require a restart of Apache but not the Cascade process. Therefore, any active sessions will continue to remain active while Apache restarts. In the very unlikely event that something does go wrong, we hope to have it corrected within a few minutes.

April 10, 2010 - WCMS Quarter 1 2010 Project Update

Developers in Cascade Server can now access a repository of course descriptions for every course entered and maintained in SES/CAESAR. Please contact Web Communications for more information on how you can access this information and query it to build web pages.

Cascade Server adoption continues to grow. To date, 220 NetIDs have connected to the system to edit and publish pages.

April 8, 2010  - Cascade Server 6.4.4 installed

January 29, 2010 - WCMS Quarter 4 2009 Project Update

  • Cascade 6.4 has been installed to the production server after some testing 
  • The production Cascade installation manages 65 sites 
  • 185 NetIDs have connected to the system to edit pages 
  • 6,113 content pages are managed in the system 
  • The NUIT Communications team and University Relations/Web Communications have launched the NUIT site in Cascade

Read more and see all announcements »