The brief
The university had been operating a public marketing site (proprietary CMS) and a student information system (a long-tenured higher-ed vendor) for over a decade. The integration layer between them, a custom middleware shipped in 2014, maintained by a permanent half-FTE plus an external contractor on every renewal cycle, had been flagged by internal audit as both a financial line item and a regulatory risk. The brief was to remove the seam, not to add a third vendor.
What we did
We took on both halves of the stack as a single product. The public-site rebuild was led first because the institution's annual recruitment cycle did not allow a slip on the prospectus surface. The management-spine migration ran in parallel, batched by school, with each school's registrar joining a structured walkthrough of the new data model two weeks before their cutover.
- › A bespoke information architecture pulled from the existing SIS taxonomy, audited against the recruitment funnel.
- › Programme pages built once and rendered into 14 destinations (school sites, recruitment campaigns, open-day microsites).
- › eduGAIN-backed SSO for the management surface; the institution's SAML 2.0 IdP unchanged.
- › A read-only bridge to the legacy SIS for the first three months of overlap, retired on a published schedule.
"Two procurement cycles became one. Two on-call rotas became one. The savings paid for the migration before it shipped."
IT Director, client university
Outcome
The public site went live for the spring recruitment cycle. The management spine cut over by school across the next two academic terms, with zero impact on admissions or enrolment. The dedicated integration role was retired at the end of year one. Fee-data errors, measured by the number of corrections issued by the central registry to programme pages, fell forty-seven percent in the first full academic year.
What is next
In year two we extended the platform to the institution's alumni portal and replaced a separate CRM-led prospectus generation pipeline. The same team that built the public site is the team that operates it; the on-call rota is shared with our other UK institutional customers.