Last Friday I attended the Kentico Rocky Mountain User Group meeting where I had the opportunity to meet with nearly 40 other Kentico enthusiasts at National Jewish Health in Denver, CO. Samantha Reeves, Aaron Hoy, and Blue Modus’s Dave Condor discussed the experience that National Jewish Health has had with Kentico and how Kentico has streamlined and improved their content management and marketing abilities. Kentico Technical Evangelist Bryan Soltis also gave us an informative talk on how to optimize Kentico for performance and speed.
Samantha Reeves and Aaron Hoy began their talk by describing how National Jewish Health was quickly outgrowing the CMS they were using as their business evolved. After reviewing Drupal, Sitecore, and other CMSs, they decided that Kentico’s out-of-the-box features, customizability, security, powerful Lucene based search, and cost made it an easy choice. They were especially happy with the ability of Kentico EMS to provide marketing and other functionality that other CMSs don’t provide.
Next, Dave Condor of Blue Modus discussed the technical aspects of National Jewish Health’s site migration and improvements. He detailed the challenges of moving flat files to dynamic data structures, maintaining relationships between objects since IDs change, and maintaining aliases.
They also built out a super category system in order to make relationships between different pages, created a downloadable microsite that allowed National Jewish Health to quickly spin up a small custom site based on predefined templates and content tree, and took advantage of some pretty neat bootstrap layout widgets. One of the most exciting additions to the new site was the integration of Press Ganey with Kentico in order to show reviews of doctors within the website, which increased search engine rankings.
If you are in the Colorado Rocky Mountain area and want to learn more about Kentico or mingle with other kentico enthusiasts, check out the Kentico Rocky Mountain User Group page for updates on our next meeting!