The Dana Foundation is a private philanthropic foundation with principal interests in brain science, immunology, and arts education. Charles A. Dana, a New York State legislator, industrialist, and philanthropist, founded what is today the Dana Corporation. He was president of the Dana Foundation from 1950 to 1966 and actively shaped its programs and principles until his death in 1975. His abiding beliefs were in the capacity and responsibility of individuals to shape and advance their lives and in the singular role of philanthropy in helping them to do so.

Enforme Interactive, an award-winning developer of interactive media, is best known for making dynamic scientific and medical content accessible through websites and CD ROM applications. The company, founded in 1997 by Eric and Carrie Delente, comprises a diverse team of talented graphic designers, interface designers, programmers, network and software engineers, and project managers. Enforme's offices in historic Frederick, Maryland's Glass Factory reflect the eclectic and original nature of the staff and their work. The company's clients include numerous national and international medical and scientific associations, major scientific publishing companies, government agencies and bio-technology companies.

The purpose of the The Dana Foundation site is to provide news, articles, webcasts, and grant information about Arts Education, The Brain, and Immunology.  The Dana Foundation hired Enforme Interactive to help them redesign their site, and incorporate content management.

Enforme Interactive chose CMS400.NET. Michael Robinson, Enforme Interactive, says, "We made extensive use of the Ektron API to extend the standard listing pages to include content from multiple folders. The result allowed us to have multiple content templates contained within a single item listing. We also had to adapt eWebEditPro to allow for paging, and the result was multipage articles that look and read great."

We added a "new page" button to eWebEditPro to allow the content author to expand an article beyond a single page. We created our own listings using the content API, and so were able to link to multiple items and sources per item, all while dynamically generating the list. 

According to Robinson, one of the biggest achievements with the new site is the exposure of Dana content to search engines. Previously all content was stored as PDFs, which limited the amount of hits and links the site was receiving. Now that the content can be added as HTML, it gets picked up a lot more by the search engine spiders. Also, the workflow system automated a lot of tasks that previously required multiple email exchanges.

"The site is incredibly easy to add new updates to, and the organized folder structure allows the different departments to add content without stepping on each others toes," says Robinson. "Also the smart forms made it easy for us to sell the clients employees on the advantages and simple intuitiveness of the Ektron system."

He continues, "Our Ektron implementation has resulted in a site that's easy to modify and fast to update. The users love the smart forms, and the centralization of tasks has solved a lot of communication problems."