Growing Venture Solutions - GVS - Training

San Jose Public Library

evelyn — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 21:27:20 +0000

The San Jose Library manages a variety of websites for San José Public Libraries and San José State University Library. After evaluating several systems, the web team decided to use Drupal for their projects and began working to learn to use Drupal. In order to speed their trip up the Drupal learning curve, they decided to engage Growing Venture Solutions for training.

About the training, team lead Sarah Houghton-Jan said:

"Greg's training was well-organized, starting with the basic and progressing to the more advanced topics. Greg is extremely knowledgable about every aspect of Drupal. As one of the community's most active members, he has an incredible range of information immediately at his disposal about the system's capabilities and processes. The training was extremely flexible - Greg let us stop and ask questions whenever we wanted, pause for hands-on work, and breeze through issues of less interest to us. Greg is a very friendly trainer, approachable, easy to work with, and amazingly knowledgable. I would recommend him for any institution seeking training on any aspect of Drupal. Though we had three days of training, I wish we had five instead so that we could have gone more in depth into each topic and access Greg's wealth of knowledge!"

The Library training was a blend of our standard training curriculum and some customization to fit their needs.

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Pikes Peak Library District

evelyn — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:56:58 +0000

In 2008, Pikes Peak Library District (PPLD) formed a team to completely replace its existing site with an ambitious Drupal-based implementation. The site is served in-house by PPLD and receives over one million visits per year. PPLD brought in Growing Venture solutions to provide high-level Drupal support and training.

At the outset of its involvement, GVS has squashed configuration bugs, developed strategies to implement the site design, optimized PPLD's webserver, and worked on Drupal Core issues affecting the site (including this bug fix in the Aggregator module). The site will include book recommendation features, advanced search, links to numerous online catalogs, and a complex editorial workflow.

As our participation in the project launched, PPLD Web Developer Virginia Franklyn had this to say on her blog:

"Steve and Greg helped us optimize our server, double checked our set-up, and gave suggestions on how to handle some of the more complicated tasks we are are trying to accomplish. I highly recommend them as consultants for anyone attempting to launch a Drupal website.

We look forward to continuing to support the Pikes Peak Library District.

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Arapahoe Community College

evelyn — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:40:46 +0000

Arapahoe Community College (ACC) website had been designed and maintained in Dreamweaver for years before undergoing a major redesign and redevelopment in 2009. The new design created a consistent look-and-feel throughout the site and integrated more imagery on key pages.

ACC and the designers determined that using a CMS would be the best way to maintain the site in the future for the sake of better aesthetic consistency and delegation of content authoring. Growing Venture Solutions was hired to help build the new website in Drupal and provide training and support for the College staff.

GVS worked closely with ACC's staff to carefully develop content moderation practices that would allow many different authors to participate with migrating content from the old site and easily integrate images into the specific page templates. In a matter of a few weeks, the staff added over 1000 pages of content.

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University Corporation for Atmospheric Research

evelyn — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:23:31 +0000

The University Center for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) in Boulder has adopted Drupal as an organization-wide standard for deploying websites. One of the intranet sites UCAR needed was a system for managing the tutorials and FAQs that help administrative employees navigate through the center's guidelines, processes and procedures.

Growing Venture Solutions worked with stakeholders from across the organization to design a knowledge management system to reduce the work for administrators and to improve access to relevant information. GVS also trained in-house web developers and designed an efficient workflow for transferring existing content into the new Drupal site.

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