October 8, 2020
Challenge
The Association of Legal Administrators is the premier professional association connecting leaders and managers within the legal industry. Driven by its mission to help members manage their operations more effectively, the ALA website plays a critical role in sharing best practices and expertise.
Originally, alanet.org was built on a proprietary CMS. The next iteration of the site ran Sitefinity on a web server. However, the underlying infrastructure that powers these experiences is equally important. This meant ALA needed to dedicate internal resources to support the infrastructure.
In an effort to help marketing work independently from IT, ALA switched to Progress® Sitefinity® Cloud. By offloading infrastructure management to Sitefinity Cloud, IT could focus more on mission-critical objectives instead of facilitating content changes.
Solution
Sitefinity Cloud is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) CMS, hosted by Progress in Microsoft Azure. This enables organizations across industries to develop, run and manage secure, scalable digital experiences without maintaining the infrastructure.
ALA switched to Sitefinity Cloud for three key reasons:
- Relieves the burden of managing the infrastructure.
- Simplifies upgrade to the latest Sitefinity version with the Automatic Upgrade feature.
- Gives ALA peace of mind, knowing that autoscaling can handle heavy traffic fluctuations.
With automatic upgrades, ALA can ensure they’re always running on the latest version of Sitefinity and taking advantage of the latest capabilities and performance enhancements. Being on the newest version allows the marketing team to capitalize on new personalization capabilities, delivering specific content to visitors based on their needs and inquiries.
Working with the Sitefinity support team, ALA was able to migrate to Sitefinity Cloud seamlessly. In fact, the transition was completely invisible to end users in marketing, meaning they could continue to focus on their campaigns without disruption or downtime.
Results
For years, businesses lived by the mantra, “don’t be afraid to be bold.” But in a world where digital experience has quickly become a top competitive differentiator, sentiment has shifted. Today’s businesses need to be afraid of not being bold enough — if you aren’t innovating, you aren’t competing.
Sitefinity enables ALA to focus on bringing these complex, large-scale digital projects to life. Both from a content perspective and an architecture perspective, ALA is able to iterate quickly and reinvent rapidly, utilizing CI/CD processes, to better serve site visitors and association members and deliver unique digital experiences.
- Significantly reduce the number of inquiries to IT, freeing up IT to work on critical projects.
- Improve site performance and load speed, delivering an always-on experience.
- Experiment with custom changes and integrations, without worrying about crashing the site• Enable marketing to manage content across multiple sites and deploy personalized experiences.
“Sitefinity Cloud gives us the ability to be more adventurous,” explains Bert Saper, User Interface Web Developer, ALA. “Now, we’re able to do some pretty remarkable things, with full confidence that changing one little thing won’t break the site.”
As an innovator, ALA is always looking for new ways to engage members. Sitefinity’s flexibility is a key enabler in this, helping ALA add functionality like notifications.
“It goes back to the idea of extensibility,” added Steve Kenney, Senior Director of Operations, ALA. “The flexibility of the Sitefinity architecture gives us 100% confidence we can fulfill any request, even if it’s not a core part of Sitefinity functionality.”
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To learn more, visit progress.com/sitefinity-cms/cloud.