Saskatchewan Watershed Authority Implements EPiServer

The Challenge

The Saskatchewan Watershed Authority is responsible for leading the management of Saskatchewan’s water resources to ensure safe drinking water sources and reliable water supplies.

The Watershed Authority manages two internal intranets and two public-facing websites which requires maintaining hundreds of pages of content with more pages being frequently developed. The existing system required updates including urgent alerts to be sent to the IT department to be updated by programming staff. The Watershed Authority wanted a more immediate method to update information on their intranets and public-facing websites.

The Solution

The Saskatchewan Watershed Authority selected EPiServer Content Management System (CMS) as the technology to enable more than 300 non-IT personnel to quickly update content. Oshyn was selected as the EPiServer Partner to integrate the CMS solution for the intranets and public facing websites. Oshyn’s team of EPiServer developers used their extensive experience in CMS implementations to assess the websites and the Watershed Authority’s needs. The project required site configuration for EPiServer installation, the user of external libraries to implement templates, custom controls and attributes, multisite design and architecture, and custom extension methods to access data. One of the biggest challenges was that the programming language required by the Watershed Authority was VB.NET and EPiServer is built in C#.

The Results




The Saskatchewan Watershed Authority has successfully implemented development versions of EPiServer and is in process of rolling out EPiServer into production to be able to quickly update the intranets and external websites with important information and quickly issue water advisories and other alerts. Oshyn created EPiServer integrations with the Watershed Authority’s Active Directory Server in order to manage intranet permissions and authorizations. Oshyn’s programmers translated the EPiServer demo project into Visual Basic to insure it met the client’s requirements before translating the actual Watershed Authority implementation of EPiServer CMS. Oshyn prepared a detailed training for the non-IT personnel to ensure that they can carry out day-to-day updates to the website without IT assistance.
An added benefit to the project is that Oshyn was able to provide detailed instructions on implementing EPiServer in VB.NET to the EPiServer community.

“We have a small IT staff that is responsible for a great deal of web content. Our self-maintained intranet, for example, houses close to 500 pages of content, and we are adding new information daily. We evaluated other web content management platforms and EPiServer was the clear winner in terms of capabilities, ease of use and management, and price point. It allows us to put the publishing and editing power into the hands of end-users, regardless of their IT knowledge, which is exactly what we need to ensure our community members are getting the information they need when they need it.”

Jan Franken, Director of Information Systems for the Saskatchewan Watershed Authority.


About Saskatchewan Watershed Authority

The Saskatchewan Watershed Authority leads management of the province's water resources to ensure safe drinking water sources and reliable water supplies for economic, environmental and social benefits for Saskatchewan people.

The Technology

• EPiServer CMS
• C# translated to VB.NET