Why Wellesley Chose Bluenog ICE
After a careful review of each of the vendor's presentations, a final selection was made in spring 2009. Wellesley chose Bluenog ICE, an integrated collaborative environment of content management, portal development, and business intelligence software. According to Micheline Jedrey, vice president for information services and Wellesley College librarian, "Bluenog was the best choice for Wellesley. We were particularly impressed with how well Bluenog ICE could readily integrate with our Sungard Banner and R25 applications. Another plus was the flexibility to leverage Bluenog ICE's integrated portal development and business intelligence features to meet our evolving needs."

"The Bluenog team's presentation and demo were clear and well done," Michelle continued. "They showed, more than any vendor, that they had heard our requirements and responded accordingly. Since we'd never had a CMS before, many of people in the audience during Bluenog's presentation were able to see and hear what a CMS could do and how they'd interact with it."

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Bluenog ICE will enable Wellesley's content owners to quickly and easily update and publish content based on their role and access privileges. This will streamline Wellesley's previously decentralized content management process and help ensure consistency and accuracy across the entire site. Bluenog ICE also excelled at other key criteria including content lifecycle management, versioning, scheduling, and workflow capabilities. Other key differentiators included 24x7 system availability, scalability, its reliability, and comprehensive training and support.

A commercial product, Bluenog ICE is built on popular open source projects including Hippo, Eclipse, and Apache. As a result, Wellesley is able to get the functionality they needed to meet their requirements at a cost that fit their budget. In addition, Bluenog provides the full complement of support, indemnification, maintenance, updates, and access to source code that open source alternatives lacked.

Getting Started
With the selection of Bluenog ICE complete, Wellesley has teamed with Bluenog Solutions Group to architect, design, and implement the new site. Together, they have successfully installed the software and begun to map out a prioritized list of integration points to be configured. "One of the wonderful aspects of working with Bluenog has been their willingness to partner with and work alongside our developers," cites Veronica Brandstrader, director, planning and communication at Wellesley's IS department. "This has strengthened our internal skills and provides growth opportunities for our staff, including one of our developers who happens to be a recent Wellesley graduate." Initial deployment is scheduled for fall 2009.

The Bluenog University portal demo highlighted how Bluenog ICE met Wellesley's RFP criteria.

Lessons Learned
In hindsight, Wellesley's comprehensive approach and methodical process enabled them to make a truly educated choice. Their diligent requirements gathering efforts gave them the confidence to choose a solution that would address not only their immediate needs but also serve the institution well into the future. Their willingness to consider a variety of commercial, open source and commercial open source options enabled them to find a solution that not only met their functional requirements, but was extremely cost-effective as well.