Background

In October 2018 the University of Alberta issued an RFP for an enterprise web content management solution (CMS). Six vendors submitted proposals and the proposals were evaluated in November; Sitecore did not submit a proposal. Following the evaluations by a team comprised of 8 people from IST and UR, a shortlist of 2 vendors were invited to the University of Alberta to demonstrate their products: TerminalFour and Hannon Hill (Cascade CMS).

Both vendors specialize in providing content management solutions to post-secondary institutions. The demonstrations took place in January and were attended by more than 100 people from the University of Alberta. In addition to the live demonstrations, the RFP evaluation team obtained 60-day trial licenses of both products in order to further test each product.

Following the demonstrations, feedback was sought from current users, references were contacted and the evaluation team reviewed all information to arrive at the final decision.

Recommendation: The evaluation team recommended the RFP be awarded to Hannon Hill (Cascade CMS).

As part of the RFP decision, the evaluation team also decided to continue to self-host the entire solution within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

Implementation of the Cascade CMS commenced in May 2019 with the first set of migrations having taken place in October 2019.

All migrations from Sitecore were completed by December 2020 to coincide with the expiration of the U of A's Sitecore license.