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Underachievement
The under-achiever is the person who can achieve but is too wrapped up in other things to actually do it. How many times do you see gifted people who put off those things until tomorrow? Under achievers have little ambition. What they do have is gifts which to all intent and purpose stay unwrapped. It’s almost like being given the ability to walk and refusing to take that first step.

The under achiever will be known to say “I shall do that one day”, though rarely does. Often this is a sign of underlying problems or fear of failure, emanating from some experience of rejection of some kind, or can simply be laziness of character. The under achiever isn’t always to blame for their lack of achievement. Imagine an artist such as Monet being encouraged by his parents to give up art as a dream and to work in banking. Parental influence often means that children are discouraged from achieving in areas where they have natural talent, and then as they get older, choose to ignore those skills in favor of others, making them lazy at using the gifts they were given.

Avoidance of responsibility
How does this relate to laziness? What happens here is that underachievers tend to blame others for their shortcomings. They often blame lack of time, or responsibility and are seen to play the martyr and victim of circumstance. If they had more character, they can overcome this kind of laziness because what it puts their needs in life on the back burner, and hurl blame at those around them for not achieving.

In Conclusion

So I end this by saying…when we do just enough to get by…

1. Who are we really shortchanging?
2. Why do we shortchange ourselves so much all the time?

Do you hold self-limiting beliefs that are preventing you from reaching your goals? If you won’t or can’t let go of these beliefs, you’ll likely find yourself doing the same old thing for years, thinking that nothing will ever change for you. Sadly, nothing ever will, unless you can shake those self-imposed limitations.

Interestingly, even though there are millions of different people with millions of different personalities, many share the same negative beliefs. Do these sound familiar to you?

I Don’t Deserve It

Do you think that success and wealth are things other people deserve, but not you? Do you really think that you were created in some inferior manner compared to everyone else? That is not true. You were created just like everyone else and have the same right and the same potential as everyone else to achieve your goals.

It’s Not Possible

Do you feel that your goals are impossible to reach? Sailing around the world, breaking the 4 minute mile, and breaking the sound barrier were all said to be impossible. These were limiting beliefs which were eventually changed.

It’s Too Hard/Too Much Work

Too many people today are looking to make a quick buck by doing nothing. They’ve been led to believe that they will simply fall into a gold mine and achieve wealth with little or no effort. Hey, even the people who did fall into gold mines during the gold rush had to do a little digging! However, it doesn’t have to be hard and it can actually be FUN to make some changes in your life.

I’m Too Stupid

This is a common one. Everyone possesses a lack of confidence in certain areas or feels limited in their knowledge. This is natural, and there are very few people who really do know everything (you must know a few who THINK they fall into that category.) All of us, however, have an area of expertise, whether we realize it or not. In addition, we are all capable of LEARNING. Did you know that you can become an expert in anything if you study it for 5 years? Yes, YOU! An EXPERT!

I Don’t Have Time

“Five years! I don’t have that kind of time!” you say. So who says you have to become an EXPERT? Think about how much you can learn in two years or one year or even six months. The point is that you have the ability to learn. You simply have to decide on the subject and how much time you want to devote. Then, take Action.

I’ve Always Had Bad Luck/Nothing Comes Easy to Me

How many times have you used this one? It’s easy to blame your lack of success on bad luck or bad timing or bad friends or the bad economy, etc. There will always be things that happen that are beyond your control, but if you persist in your efforts, you can overcome anything. Perseverance is the key.

Are you holding on to any of these self-limiting beliefs? If so, are they a result of past programming? If so, get RID of the negative programming and eliminate those self-limiting beliefs. They are guiding your actions and creating your reality! Believe that you can do anything and have anything you want, and you will!

Once you break through a self-imposed barrier, you can sail like Columbus, you can fly like Yeager, or you can run like Bannister in the direction of your dreams!

The other night I awoke after falling asleep with the television on. As usual, there was an infomercial on and I really did not pay that much attention to it. I just found the remote to turn the tv off. As I was in the process of finding the remote and hitting the off button, I heard the host say, “With this offer, you can’t lose.” As for this specific offer, it may be true but many life lessons have taught me that is usually not the case. However, it was at this moment that my subconscious mind took over as I fell back asleep in a matter of seconds.

Throughout the rest of the night it seemed like my mind kept repeating, “If you can’t lose, you can’t win.” Over and over.

It may have been an advertising slogan or just a t-shirt slogan from a few years back, but a popular phrase was, “You can’t win if you don’t play.” The continuation of that truism is that if you play, there is a chance you are going to lose. Probably the most basic examples of this comes from the sport of baseball. On any given play, either the pitcher is going to lose or the batter is going to lose. The batter steps up to the plate and he is either going to find a way to get on base or he is going to make an out. The pitcher toes the rubber and pitches to the batter, knowing he is either going to get the batter out or the batter will get on base. Every single at bat results in one of the two players losing to the other.

But if a pitcher never takes the mound, he can never strike anyone out. If a batter never goes to bat, he will never get a hit. If a baserunner never takes a chance of getting thrown out, he will never steal a base.

It is the same thing in life. If you have ever dreamed of opening your own business, but have never done anything toward this goal, you will never know if you could have become a successful entreprenuer. If you have ever dreamed of writing the great American novel, but never put a pen to paper or tapped out a thought on the computer, you will never know if you could have been a successful writer. There are so many things that can be looked at here but I think you can understand the point I am trying to make.

Yes, there is a chance that if you try to open a business it will not succeed, but if you never tried, how will you ever know. Sure if you write a book, publishers might reject it and no one will ever read it, but again, how will you ever know? Of course, if you don’t try, you never have to worry about fear or rejection. If you can’t lose, you can’t win.

A wrong decision early in the design process can mean the difference between publishing a site in 30 minutes and publishing a site in 3 days–and since all clients want instantaneous results 3 days is never an option.  A strong site infrastructure will also allow greater flexibility in the future for adding the ever-evolving array of ‘bells and whistles’ that the web revolution presents us.

Here are a few tips we like to hand out to our clients early in our talks and others we enforce in-house with our development team:

Do not be afraid to create more than one index block
What’s the most efficient number? One, right? If I just create one index block that indexes my whole site I can use it over and over again, wherever I want without having to worry about creating multiple index blocks, right? Wrong.

An index block of your entire site has one purpose, a site map.  If you’re using a block of that type anywhere else, chances are your Cascade Server experience is unnecessarily slow and cumbersome.  Create multiple index blocks tailored to each use.  Create one for a dynamic left navigation menu, name it ‘left-nav.’ Create one for your breadcrumbs, name it ‘breadcrumbs.’  Create one for your news index page, name it ‘news-index.’ I could go on and on.  Using multiple index blocks in your system ensures that you’re not indexing your entire site two times over every time you want to view or publish a page that contains a left navigation menu and breadcrumbs. A 200 page site that uses a whole site index to render just those two regions will have to compile the XML for the entire site 400 times for every full-site publish–not to mention that you will lose any cache almost instantaneously as the index block will need to be rebuilt with every system edit.

Limit index blocks to metadata only, wherever possible
When you begin modeling your data, it’s best to put fields that you will likely want to reuse elsewhere on your site within a metadata set, adding dynamic fields to a custom Metadata Set if needed.  It’s a good idea to place your metadata ‘Title’ and ‘Display Name’ fields inline to force your content contributors to input relevant data in those fields for easy indexing and reuse elsewhere in your site.

Adopting this standard means that the majority of your index blocks can be set to return only the XML from the page’s metadata, eliminating the vast majority of the page content (most of which will be unneeded for your purposes and would cause the index block to grow rapidly and exponentially over time).

In-house we use the ‘Display Name’ field to create any navigation menu or for breadcrumbs and use the ‘Title’ field when constructing things like press release index pages.  If you’re creating a staff directory you may want to add custom metadata fields for a staff member’s first and last name and job title so that you can pull that to a centralized directory more easily.

It’s also a good idea to keep in mind certain fields that can’t be added to metadata, like file choosers for images and custom date fields, so when you’re modeling what data to reuse elsewhere in your site you can weigh the indexing implications for including that type of data.  Typically, if I can’t model the data as metadata, I try to avoid situations where I will need to index it.

Use Content Type indexing
If you just want to create a listing of all your press releases, why would you want to include anything that’s not a press release in your index block to begin with?   If you created a press release content type for all those press releases then you have an option available that will make it easy to do just that. Content Type indexing allows you to specify an index block that returns data from only a certain Content Type within Cascade Server.

Instead of using folder-based indexing, content type index blocks allow a single database query to return all your press releases (or any other specified Content Type) much more efficiently.  This will exclude ancillary data, like images and other supporting pages, from being returned in the XML as well.

Keep an eye on your folder structure
Within Cascade Server, a well-designed and logical folder structure is key to operating an optimized website.  Not only do folder paths affect site URLs (important in SEO) but logical organization of content can also keep your indexing load times down and your system’s performance up.  While Content Type indexing is a great new tool introduced by Hannon Hill, it is not applicable everywhere.  For dynamically generated navigation regions, it will still be necessary to use standard folder-based index blocks.

Making sure similar content is grouped together will mean that you can create an index of one folder, instead of twelve–an obvious savings.  Staff profiles should be grouped in one folder, i.e., /profiles. News articles can be grouped into a directory named /news.  Feel free to subdivide those folders into smaller divisions, but this method works better than having doctor profiles in /doctor/profiles and nurse profiles in /nurse/profiles which would require you to set your folder index further up the hierarchical tree.

Make the folder tree your friend
Cascade Server index blocks aren’t always designed to cascade down your folder tree from top to bottom.  In certain situations you’ll want to start indexing down the tree and work your way back up, especially for breadcrumb-type functionality.

Working your way back up the tree, by selecting a rendering option that starts at the current page, allows you to eliminate indexing of any content below your current location in the folder structure and also will reduce the XML of many unnecessary sibling assets from bogging down the index.

Don’t forget about block choosers
It’s good to have a very flexible application like Cascade Server as it allows you the freedom to accomplish almost anything you could want to do in the web environment, but it may also lead you into situations where you realize you’ll need to perform some voodoo to keep your users whizzing along in the system.

Maybe you’ve worked yourself into a position where you want to aggregate content from a number of places within your site’s folder structure.  You’re thinking, ‘well I don’t want to do it, but it looks like a full site index block is the only way to get the information I need.’ Wrong, again.  Luckily.

If you’re faced with a page that needs to pull content from disparate corners of your website, create a data definition with a few block choosers.  Create individual index blocks that index each of the folders you need, then link them to your data definition and use a ‘current page’ index block to return all that XML that you need, and none of it that you don’t.  You can even restrict those block chooser fields to certain groups in Cascade Server so that an overzealous content contributor doesn’t undo all your genius design.

Remember as you start out on your site construction that it is never too early to think about future scalability.  Always think about how a decision you make now will affect your site and your users two to three years in the future.  It’s the same principle as compounding interest in your 401(k), though not as sexy.  Decisions you make today wil have lasting ripple effects years from now.  Making sure you’ve thought through your indexing needs and picked the correct strategies will mean less headaches, and more kudos, as long as your website is out there informing the world.  Who knows, your server administrator may even buy you lunch in appreciation.

- HighEdWeb Professionals Association

The HighEdWeb conference, which took place October 4-7, 2009, is a gathering created just for higher education web professionals. This conference is the perfect place to mingle with web developers, marketers, designers, writers, managers and all those team members in-between who are exploring the unique web issues facing colleges and universities.  It was important for Cascade Experts to take part in this event because the value gained by the exchange of ideas, stories, and experiences within our community is immeasurable.  By attending as a participant and not a vendor, it is our goal to translate the information and knowledge gained with these interactions into increased value in our consulting services.  Most importantly, it is our daily integration of best practices, well-designed processes, and advancements in modern web practices discovered at events like these that increase the value our clients can obtain by using our consulting team and Cascade Server CMS.  This adds to our excitement in attending and what we are able to bring back our clients.

Hannon Hill: “A CMS Experience You Can Trust”
Cascade Experts was very proud and excited to see our friends at Hannon Hill participating as a vendor at the HiEdWeb Conference.  Their organization recently hosted a great conference of their own, so putting forth the effort to participate in this event is just another great example of their dedication to the industry and most importantly their clients.  It has always been our opinion that the team at Hannon Hill employs some of the most ambitious, intelligent, and hardworking young professionals in the CMS industry today.  During our time in Milwaukee, we had the opportunity to discuss many of the exciting features that are being added in Cascade Server.  This makes us even more excited about the coming release of Cascade Server 6.4 and we look forward to incorporating these tools soon.  We must say, the dedication and effort put forth by the Hannon Hill team shows a continuous commitment to product improvement, development and reaffirms their commitment to provide a positive client experience.

New Friends:  Online Communities in Higher Education
Innersync is an interactive studio that understands the importance of social networking and online communities in the higher education arena.  In a series of very inspiring developments, Innersync has established that an approach combining progressive internet technologies with compelling design is needed for an organization to build rewarding relationships with their audiences.  Innersync accomplishes this by offering a service that supports a profile driven interface similar to what you might find with Facebook, LinkedIn, or Ning.  What sets their offering apart from the “freemiums” is an understanding that these communities provide tremendous value and the platform used to tap that value must be owned by the organization in order to effectively define, measure, and tailor the experience for the intented audience. We applaud Innersync for bringing this approach to the college and university setting and are proud to use their products for the management of our own site.

In Conclusion…
Cascade Experts had a great time, learned a wealth of knowledge, and forged new and valuable relationships.  In our opinion, it is one of the most valuable web conferences one can attend and we hope to extend our experience gained to the services we provide to you.  We would definitely recommend you consider attending this conference in 2010 and many thanks to all those who have helped make Cascade Experts a success.

The Cascade Experts team is proud to say we have long realized that our strength as an organization comes from creating a culture where the client comes first and we proactively listen to your needs.  It is important for us to create an atmosphere where we think of ourselves as a partner rather than a vendor. With this philosophy, your challenges during these tough economic times are our challenges and it is our responsibility to deliver successfully.

With Cascade Server projects in mind, we are taking the management of projects to a new level by extending our current project philosophies to include Six Sigma concepts and methodologies.   These methods are used by America’s most recognizable organizations such as Textron, GE, Motorola, Amazon, and Dell, and Cascade Experts believes that Six Sigma is a project methodology that strives for perfection.

So what exactly is Six Sigma?

Six Sigma is a rigorous and disciplined methodology that uses data and statistical analysis to measure and improve  operational performance by identifying and eliminating “defects” in manufacturing and service-related processes. Commonly defined as 3.4 defects per million opportunities, Six Sigma can be defined and understood at three distinct levels: metric, methodology and philosophy.  The word Sigma is a statistical term that measures how far a given process deviates from perfection. The basic idea behind Six Sigma is that if you can measure the number of “defects” in a process, you can systematically figure out how to eliminate them. This will help you get as close to “zero defects” as possible, thus insuring a project thats completed on time, on budget, and with a high level of quality.

At its core, Six Sigma revolves around a few key concepts….

• Critical to Quality: Attributes most important to the customer
• Defect: Failing to deliver what the customer wants
• Process Capability: What your process can deliver
• Variation: What the customer sees and feels
• Stable Operations: Ensuring consistent, predictable processes to improve what the customer sees and feels
• Design for Six Sigma: Designing to meet customer needs and process capability

What this means for your project…

• Each engagement will begin with the definition or initiation of the project.  With this, the project team will be defined and their various roles will be assigned.
• We define the project plan and scope of the effort in Cascade Server terms. This includes defining the requirements of the effort you manage. Explore the priority of each requirement and assign a cost and time estimate to each.
• We will determine how each task within the project will be measured for success. Establish checkpoints throughout the project to ensure the project is on track and meeting the quality levels you’ve established.
• The project will be executed with a defect identification and resolution process in place. Identify potential risks that could occur and how you’ll mitigate those risks should they occur.
• We will provide continuous reporting to the project owner and team on the progress of the project including the points of risk. We will also monitor how your project is doing compared with the plan including finances and resources.
• A review at the end of the project will be conducted to see how your project did in comparison with the plan and what could be done better in the future.

In conclusion…

If you are one who thought that Six Sigma was only for large corporations, you’re not alone. Many people believe that Six Sigma process improvement results can only be achieved by huge organizations. What they don’t realize is that any organizaion can benefit from having their projects managed with Six Sigma methodologies.  As your partner, your success is our success and we believe this is another tool that will create additional value for your organizaion.

So, we ask…Who would you trust?

• Extend the functionality and increase ease of use for the end user
• Increase the functionality of a site without increasing the work load for the administrative user
• Bring excitement back into the Cascade Server community

With this in mind, we are pleased to announce the completion of the the Cascade Server Photo Gallery Extension.
 

What this Means for You

Historically, organizations wishing to implement a typical photo gallery had to step outside the realm of Cascade Server to accomplish this task. This meant that time and money would be expended on either researching, developing, or acquiring additional functionality that is typically found in most content management systems. Additionally, when an organization is forced to abandon their content management system to achieve such goals, they must also abandon the core benefits and usability that centralized content management provides, negating the benefits that their CMS provided originally. As we look back on the definition of content management, we will realize quickly the we have lost the ability to establish processes and workflows associated with creating, organizing, and structuring information so that it can be stored, published, and re-purposed to multiple formats or locations. By introducing the Cascade Server Photo Gallery Extension into your organization, these desired attributes can be upheld.
 

Introducing the Cascade Server Photo Gallery Extension

The Cascade Server Photo Gallery Extension is a powerful yet simple utility for displaying a collection of photos. This solution can be placed within any existing Cascade Server template and has been packaged with a custom asset factory plugin that allows any user to easily upload a zip file of their images and have them automatically extracted within Cascade Server. Additionally, thumbnails of all objects are created as they are added. The Cascade Server Photo Gallery Extension is a utility that can be set up in minutes rather than days. This is a great tool for any organization that maintains its web presence with Cascade Server.
 

Additional Value

• Can be used across your CMS implementation
• The Cascade Server Photo Gallery Extension can be easily skinned for use in multiple templates
• The included Asset Factory Plugin for uploading images can be reused beyond the scope of creating photo galleries, thus allowing you to control access to the zip archive functionality at the Asset Factory level
• Cascade Experts provides free installation support
• Any future updates to the photo gallery extension are available without further cost to you
• The Cascade Server Photo Gallery Extension has an affordable cost of $5,000

From inception, we realized our strength as an organization would come from creating a culture where the client comes first and we proactively listen to your needs.  It is important for us to create the atmosphere where we think of ourselves as a partner rather than a vendor.  With this concept applied to our strategic goals, the end result will be a solution that not only meets your needs but evolves with your business.

As we continue to develop the Cascade Server Expansion Kit, our intent is two fold….

• Extend the functionality and increase ease of use for the end user
• Increase the functionality of a site without increasing the work load for the administrative user

As indicated by client feedback, we feel developing with these goals in mind will allow our customers to realize a greater amount of success and a renewed appreciation for their CMS product. 

I would like to thank you again for your participation and support, and please keep watch for more details to come!

Sincerely,

Brock A Brown M.S.
Executive Director
brock.brown@secondvue.com

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