Over the weekend, Jan 16-18 2009, Microsoft held a great event, "We are Microsoft Charity Chellenge Weekend" to help charities. The event paired teams of developers with charity organizations to produce web solutions to better meet the needs of the charity organizations. The challenge was that the time available to produce the solution was limited to the weekend, everything from gathering requirements to final delivery had to be completed in that time frame.

I was very honored when one of the teams chose to use mojoPortal.

Todd Stone, Tim Mitchell, Nathan Woodward, Jay Smith, Andrew Dalgleish

You can read the full details and see before an after screenshots in this blog post by Microsoft MVP Jay Smith "We Are Microsoft: Developers Rally Around Charities"

"After checking out Telerick’s SiteFinity and Telligent’s Graffiti CMS, both very powerful and capable Content Management Systems, we elected to go with mojoPortal."

These guys really did an impressive job accomplishing so much in a very limited time frame. I congratulate them and thank them for their good work for a good cause and for giving mojoPortal the oportunity to participate in this exciting event.

Universites need a lot of web sites. They have many departments, divisions, research projects, events, etc., and they need web sites for all these things to disseminate information and to enable collaboration and communication between members of these various communities. With so many sites to manage, Webmasters at Universities need a good web infrastructure that allows them to easily deploy new sites and extend them as needed. Its only natural that Universites need content management systems and several Universites have selected mojoPortal for their content management needs.

Shaun Geisert, Webmaster, Division of Student Affairs, Colorado State University, recently let me know about a number of their sites already using mojoPortal as well as plans to use mojoPortal in another 20+ sites going forward.

• http://www.studentaffairs.colostate.edu/
• http://www.ascsu.colostate.edu/
  
• http://csugreeks.colostate.edu/
  
• http://wellness.colostate.edu/

Quoting Shaun: "Before discovering Mojo (I used CMS Matrix, btw), I had researched and/or used a number of other open source .NET CMSs in order to find one whose core framework best meets the needs of our numerous departments.  Since then, I’ve found it to be above and beyond anything else I’ve seen in the open source .NET realm."

When I look at all these sites I'm very impressed with the design work Shaun and his team did with all the different skins, they all look really great and it makes me proud to point them out as mojoPortal sites. They also produced a nice user guide document for their users that looks very professional and helpful and they've offered this document back to us as a contribution to the project. I probably need to de-brand it before sharing it so I'm not making it available right away, but will use it as a basis for producing a more generic user guide. To me, willingness to share is a clear sign that these guys "get" open source, and I'm really glad to have them in the mojoPortal community.

Another example of mojoPortal in use at Universities is the School of Health and Social Care at University of West England, Bristol.
http://hsc.uwe.ac.uk/school/
They supported our efforts last year to implement multiple sites on a single installation using folder names, so anyone using that feature today can thank them for their good participation in the community. Quoting Matt Cownie: "we've had a tremendous amount of utility from mojo and its saved us an awful lot of donkey work." Matt is a great guy, I really enjoyed working with him on the multi sites feature last year.

A third example is the site for the Glasgow Clinical Trials Unit.
http://www.glasgowctu.org/

Its really great to see mojoPortal catching on in Universities and other large organizations. We've got a lot of plans for continued improvements in mojoPortal and we hope to see more and more adoption.