Chicago, IL – September 20, 2011 – AlphaZeta Interactive today announced its partnership with TCS Education System (TCS ES) in the launch of five new websites for the nonprofit organization. TCS ES is an innovative network of institutions that prepare socially responsible, culturally competent professionals in applied fields such as psychology, law, and education.

In order to develop the websites, AlphaZeta Interactive utilized Seamless CMS, an enterprise web content management platform designed specifically for deploying and managing multiple large sites. AlphaZeta is the first firm in the U.S. to use the innovative and flexible Seamless CMS.

“Though Seamless is relatively new to the U.S. market, we believe it to be a robust and uncommonly flexible content management system and framework that allows us to offer clients exceptional usability, support and extensibility,” said AlphaZeta Interactive VP of Technology Roscoe Rush.

“AlphaZeta’s expertise with Seamless and their close collaboration with us were critical to success of this project.  AZ was a true partner, not just a consultant, who contributed a superior level of value, technical vision and dedication.” said Mark Griesbaum, SVP Business Operations, TCS Education System.

“In addition, the flexibility of the Seamless CMS enables our interactive web team to make ongoing changes to our Web sites directly rather than requiring custom development by the IT Department.  A less flexible CMS would not allow such timely and cost-effective changes,” said Griesbaum.

TCS ES brought AlphaZeta and marketing communications firm Lipman Hearne on board to assist the organization in developing new websites for its affiliated colleges, including The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, Santa Barbara and Ventura Colleges of Law, and Pacific Oaks College, as well as the TCS Foundation, which cultivates charitable donations, grants, and scholarships to support student-learning opportunities at affiliate institutions. Linking those entities is the new TCS Education System website.

TCSES’s Marketing Department collaborated with Lipman Hearne and the college leadership to develop the creative strategy and content, while AlphaZeta was responsible for technology vendor selection, as well as developing and implementing the Seamless CMS.

Before developing any of the websites, AlphaZeta conducted a rigorous CMS evaluation for TCS ES. The non-profit group was looking to distribute content management both geographically and organizationally, and they were concerned about ease of use, maintainability, scalability and support.

AlphaZeta reviewed hundreds of different providers and developed a list of 32 to evaluate based on client needs. This scoring process included everything from hands on, demos, review of production documentation to discussions with the vendor. Real world scenarios were created, tested and scored on each of the final 5, highest-scored product, and ultimately the Seamless CMS was chosen.

AlphaZeta went on to develop the five TCS ES sites in Seamless, and was impressed with several key factors.

“The cascading templates within the systems are flexible and can be implemented in any way you think about your website building blocks. Perhaps most importantly, with the strong system API, we were able to create a crucial front-side custom control for the site with no database development required. This allowed us to extend several key features to one single password- protected page and still leverage existing workflow,” said Rush.

About AlphaZeta Interactive

AlphaZeta Interactive is an award-winning interactive agency and digital consulting firm. We match digital know-how with marketing savvy to bridge the worlds of brand and business. We live by results, leading clients from Aon to Motorola in the evolution from transactional to transformational relationships. Leveraging ideas into actionable experiences — for commerce AND conversation. Beyond professional. Beyond personal. Human. Visit us online at www.alphazeta.com